With the federal government straitjacketed by neurotic political tribalism and stalemated at every turn, the challenge of preparing for extreme climate change events in our country has been left largely to cities. I’m sure many think they are doing a good job, and some actually are, like Denver, Seattle, Minneapolis and Raleigh.
There is, however, a lurking problem, even for such progressive metro areas. Though they may have taken courageous steps in fending off phalanxes of climate change deniers, and bought into international calls for reducing greenhouse gases, embracing “sustainability” through renewable sources of energy, many have chosen to put off indefinitely directly dealing with their own particular climate issues.
Just as all politics is local, all environmental conditions are, too. Climate change science and our own experience tells us that what used to be rare, or intermittent, climate extremes in our vicinity are already being intensified and almost normalized by current climate-change conditions that seem to be getting worse every season. As world governments continue to procrastinate over reducing greenhouse gas emissions, chronic emergency climate conditions will only get more destructive and expensive in Albuquerque and localities around the world.
I fear we are growing more vulnerable than ever to health dangers from rising temperatures, urban wildfires, severe monsoonal flooding, imperiled local agriculture, wind damage, the vicissitudes of prolonged drought, and the epidemic of noncontagious childhood diseases linked to polluted ground water.
Still, Mayor Tim Keller’s Climate Action Plan has given Albuquerque some problem-solving momentum, even though the plan is not focused on preparing the city to cope with increasingly destructive weather events. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) not only ranked Albuquerque 40th in 100 major U.S. cities on its 2020 Clean Energy Scorecard, but also the 5th most improved city when it comes to renewable energy. That’s admirable, indeed, but not enough. The same is true for the successful Bear Canyon pilot project to recharge Albuquerque’s aquifer that awaits new money for more ambitious efforts. The Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control Authority (AMAFCA) teaming up with the City to expand Hubble Dam in the South Valley and with the Army Corps of Engineers to shore up the Amole Dam as part of the Southwest Valley Flood Reduction Project, seem to be good signs too.
Mitigating the impact of extreme climate change events, however, will take every drop of ingenuity and brainpower our city can muster to essentially pioneer innovative ways to survive superstorms, rains and winds, and oven heat.
How prepared are we for massive flooding in our city? It’s one of the principal climate patterns that have plagued us for centuries. It’s hard to tell because there is still no vigorous public discussion about managing extreme events and the taxes that might be involved. Most of us are in the dark, as if there was nothing to worry about. It seems that local government is more interested in maintaining PR illusions of an urban utopia along the Rio Grande than it is in spending the political capital it would take to wake people up and start to prepare for what’s coming our way from the chaos of climate disruption.
And there’s no doubt that it’s coming. Even though we are a desert city, flooding, for instance, has always been a menace here. The famous flood of 1941 reached far past Fourth Street and turned enormous parts of the North and South Valleys into a lake. And lesser but dangerous floods occurred during many a monsoon season for decades afterward. What would we do with water from a storm that was a two-hundred year event, and then another storm two years later that was even more severe? I hear no public officials even mentioning such a possibility.
What might happen if we had a summer fire in the tinder-dry Bosque and a climate-change-intensified wind storm blowing east that pushed it into neighborhoods up and down the river? We might have an urban wildfire of monstrous proportions. How ready are we to combat such a thing? Wind is an Albuquerque reality. It, too, could be strongly intensified by climate change. What do we do if our aquifer gets so polluted we can’t use it as our major water source, which we’ve done since the beginning with a tiny reprieve starting in 2008 with intermittent and undependable infusions of Colorado river water? Contaminated groundwater, even record-setting pollution like that at Kirtland Air Force Base, is not a part of our political discussion. It’s a taboo subject, like being honest about nuclear waste. No politician will touch it. And that makes us vulnerable.
We need a city-wide discussion on what seems now to be inevitable climate extremes that will trouble our future. The question is, are we too cynical, too distracted and too worn out to even start one?
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Photo by Desert LCC)
Thank you, V. B., for yet again giving us real scenarios to think about and real data to consider. All climate conditions are local and global at the same time. We need to be courageous in dealing with their local face while understanding that we inhabit a world in which “the flutter of a distant butterfly’s wing” may cause dramatic weather at home. We think of desert terrain as dry, even when we have a history of slot-canyon floods that have taken hundreds of lives. But wind, dust storms, and fire also threaten Albuquerque. As with all the dangers we face–the growing distance between rich and poor, the evils of gender and racial inequality, immigration, homelessness, increased violence, widespread plagues, and war–climate change is an issue that will become unmanageable if we can’t fight it before it’s too late.
Great column. I was at a local women’s career development conference of state government once in the 1980’s. The presenter read a series of headlines about flooding in the Albuquerque area occurring from Bear Canyon, around the bosque by the Rio Grande, down on 2nd and 4th Streets, and in the heights. Then he read about how City leaders and citizens were so worried by the flooding. Then he pointed out that these were all headlines from the 1880s. This was the biggest problem of the day.
That the present-day storm channels that look excessively large and a waste of concrete came out of this Hysteria. That flooding is basically a thing of the past. So Albuquerque might be prepared for such flooding by its infrastructure. But for a desert community it still will be witnessing more climate change and flooding.