Disaster Plans: Cities Persist With Pointless Climate ‘Action’

Fear not, carbon warriors. The federal government has surrendered, but America’s cities fight on.

Municipal entities small (South Lake Tahoe, Calif., Bozeman, Mont., Las Cruces, N.M.), medium (Sacramento, Anchorage, Salt Lake City) and large (San Diego, Phoenix, Denver) are increasingly adopting “climate action plans.” The documents, per the C40 Knowledge Hub (“a resource for cities wanting to act on climate change”), lay out “a framework for measuring, tracking and reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” as well as what “adaptation measures” will be adopted.

Predictably, climate action plans are heavy on catastrophism. San Francisco’s claims that residents “now experience heat waves, drought and wildfires that blanket the city in smoke,” with “impacts … compounded for people by racial, social and economic inequalities.” Portland’s thunders that to “prevent irreversible damage to the planet, we must keep average global temperatures from increasing 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels.” Boise’s lectures: “Our days are getting hotter, our water resources are threatened, forests are burning and air quality is worsening. As individuals, as a city, as a country and as a global community—we must take bold action to address climate change.”

As usual, such worst-case-scenarios garner plenty of media attention. But it’s egregiously inaccurate. Cities’ climate crusaders, it appears, have learned nothing from the voluminous eco-end-times predictions of the past. Shoreline urban-dwellers should be particularly doubtful. In 1995, The New York Times wrote that at “the most likely rate of [sea-level] rise, some experts say, most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years.”