[國際新聞] Pete McMartin: Keeping back the sea suburban, marches, called, middle, paying

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Pete McMartin: Keeping back the sea and paying for climate change

On one hand we encourage global warming and on the other deal with its effects
I lived for a time on the middle arm of the Fraser River, in a Richmond neighbourhood called Terra Nova.
It was idyllic delta farm land when I lived there in the 1980s. It’s now an overbuilt suburban development of depressing, sterile affluence. Progress marches on.
We lived right near the mouth of the Fraser where it let out into the Strait of Georgia. We lived behind a dike, and if not for it all of our first floor would have been underwater at high tide. During the year’s highest tides, the swollen river would lap at the dike’s top. It never did flood, but during those times, we paid close attention to the wind and weather, and hoped against a storm surge.
I saw the after-effects of a coastal storm surge this fall on a trip to New York City. The destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy was still evident a year later. Battery Park at the seaward foot of Manhattan Island was a shambles and roped off, its big trees uprooted and lying on the ground. The Brooklyn waterfront, ruined by the storm, was being rebuilt, though this time with an eye to rising sea levels. The shoreline was being raised up and buildings reinforced.
Sandy did an estimated $68 billion in damage — $19 billion of that in New York City alone — and the city was moving quickly to protect itself against the sea that, up until then, had made its fortune. The sea was now threatening its future. In June of this year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a $20-billion plan to begin construction on flood walls and levees along the city’s coastline, while reinforcing infrastructure like the power grid and renovating buildings to withstand hurricane-force winds. That $20 billion, Bloomberg said, would be just for the first decade.
“This is urgent work,” Bloomberg said, “and it must begin now.”
Tragedy shocked New York into action: the same cannot be said to be happening here. Our benign climate — at least, relative to New York’s — hasn’t inspired a sense of urgency in us.
There are plans afoot, though they’re a ways down the road. The provincial and metropolitan governments are taking a long-term strategy in terms of flood prevention, and planning for a sea-level rise of 1.2 metres by the year 2100. The cost? According to a provincial government report, diking and other mitigation efforts would add up to an estimated $9.5 billion. For local governments, that’s an onerous tax burden.
“Who’s going to pay for that,” asked Simon Fraser University geoscientist John Clague. “Municipalities don’t have that kind of money.”
In Richmond, which already has a system of dikes, pumping stations and ditches, some of the city’s newer developments have been built up already in anticipation of possible flooding. Plans to raise dike levels around Richmond — with the first phase to be built in Steveston — have been estimated in today’s dollars to cost as much as $300 million.
John Irving, Richmond’s director of engineering, has said it won’t be a problem to do so, that financing climate-change mitigation efforts over so long a period would be a “no-brainer.”
Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie, however, had a different view.

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“I believe we won’t be able to accomplish it all without significant grants from the federal and provincial governments. (Which, to some extent, municipalities receive now.) But, yes, the lion’s share will be borne by local taxpayers. We would want two-thirds to three-quarters funded by central governments.”

Brodie, at this point in his tenure, finds himself and his city at a real turning point in its development. The problem is, he has little control or say in much of that development.

It is the rapid industrialization of the lower Fraser River that concerns Brodie. Richmond, like all the municipalities along the lower Fraser, find themselves faced with what seems like a well-choreographed sequence of events, seemingly decided years ago and without their significant input, that will utterly change the nature of their municipalities:

The construction of South Fraser Perimeter Road. The expansion of Deltaport and Westshore Terminal. The plans for U.S. thermal coal export from Fraser Surrey Docks. Port Metro Vancouver’s acquisition and amassing of former agricultural land for industrial use along the south shore of Lulu Island. The plans for a jet fuel tanker farm and shipping terminal just upstream from the Massey Tunnel in Richmond. The accelerated timetable for construction of a new bridge to replace the tunnel that would allow, for the first time, Panamax-sized tankers to come up the Fraser.

In Richmond’s case, Brodie has made clear his opposition to the jet fuel farm and the Port’s acquisition of agricultural land, but there is little he can do about it. The Port, under federal jurisdiction, can do what it wants.

“I believe the major motivation and motivator behind the replacement of the Massey Tunnel,” Brodie said, “is the Port and not (the provincial) highways ministry.”

The irony in this? (And this is a global irony not necessarily unique to Richmond.)

All these new developments, which business leaders would argue benefit a municipality like Richmond through job creation, also, in the long term, threaten its existence. They are all resource-based and they are all designed for the manufacture and transport of greenhouse-gas-producing products — coal, oil, highway and rail infrastructure for trains, trucks and airplanes. They produce wealth, but also produce the need for mitigating the disastrous effects of climate change.

Should they help pay for that?

“Yes,” Brodie said, “I think it’s only fair that the environmental costs are borne, at least in part, by the polluters.”

More Thursday.

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A view of the dike in Richmond and the Fraser River near #2 Road bridge. In 2011 B.C. announced new provincial standards to protect dikes from earthquakes and sea-level rise