On the Climate Resilience Front, USG is Mainly Still in the Planning Phase
Andrew Bochman
Not an AI. INLer & Atlantic Council Global Energy Center Non Resident Senior Fellow | Speaker, Author, Advisor
At the beginning of his Administration, President Biden tasked federal agencies with leading whole-of-government efforts to address climate change through Executive Order 14008, Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad. Now nearing the end of his term and possibly his time as POTUS, climate action plans were posted last week from 30 US government departments and agencies, including the 3 I track most closely, DOE, DHS & the DoD. As it is relentlessly mission driven, the latter has always been by far the most forward leaning on the climate adaptation and resilience front.
Still, the number of buildings and some very specialized infrastructure elements on which these three departments depend is staggering. In just CONUS alone, it may top one million. And I may be off, but the number of actual hardening projects started, let alone completed, is vanishingly small. This from the "Adaptation in Action" section in DOE's CAP speaks to a lack of action amidst current constraints:
DOE also found that 78 percent of solutions were not planned for implementation at the time of VARP completion, due to several reasons including lack of cost-effective resilience solutions.
Instead of using AIs to do the work for me, the way I review documents like these from USG, as well as those I've assessed from electric utilities, is tried and true keyword search. Some of the ones I'm looking for, (and hoping to find in past tense), are: "fireproofed," "elevated," "hardened," "strengthened," "protected," "mitigated," "winterized," "undergrounded," "adapted [a function or process], etc. Also indications that projects like "flood walls" and "protective barriers" have been completed. Were you to do the same in these documents, I believe you'd be hard pressed to find many of these.
Much more common by far are indications of intent to take unspecified actions in the future. You'll see plenty of: "will [do something]," "planning to [do something]," "will evaluate [something]," "are assessing," "are considering," etc.
A few examples of completed actions can be found at at Norfolk Naval Shipyard / Hampton Roads where rising sea levels have been threatening core mission assets, including dry docks. A 2023 article noted:
... a nearly $50 million project that built 1.5 miles of protective barrier. It includes a roughly five-foot-high wall around dry dock four and a three to four-foot-high wall that surrounds the shipyard’s industrial area.
And then there's Tyndall AFB in Florida that was utterly devastated by a major hurricane in 2018. Its hand was forced when the Air Force determined that its mission set couldn't be moved or replicated elsewhere. Most of the descriptions of the rebuild there (still underway) signify they are not merely replacing what was destroyed, but building now with designs fully informed by the present and looming physical threats from extreme weather coupled with sea level rise.
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These are examples that must be replicated across DoD, and USG, and the private sector for that matter. Just need the determination to be proactive, even if it means delaying or halting outright other projects.
p.s. If you have info that significant resilience and adaptation actions have already been taken, and they either weren't captured in the reports cited or my methods missed them, please let me know and I'll be quite glad to update accordingly.
Thought Leadership Director of Energy & Engineering, Tuba Group
3moThe best Climate Change Action is to radically change our behavior so that whatever we do, we do it in harmony with nature, in consideration of the limitations of our natural resources and the benefit of other living species, our posterity, in unison with all other nations leaving no room for greed, overambition, power, and competitive rivalries in the best interest of our continued survival in this planet.
Sustainability, Climate Change, Resilience
3moAndy - good analysis as always. Yes if you look across all the budgets of all agencies the level of investment has not kept pace with either the level of ambition or of need. When it comes to climate resilience we need to start thinking in terms of the “costs of inaction”.
But now we also have the chevron ruling….
Ask me about the social context of energy transition
4moRegarding the infrastructure money, I have been telling people every chance I get: Don’t come up here [to Alaska] without a shovel and a bucket. I feel many rural communities are in an analogous situation to a characterization I heard about women in engineering: over-mentored and under-resourced. In other words, even well-intended assistance can be a hindrance, and may not be worth the paternalism associated with it. At the end of the day, someone needs to “earn their money” by leaving behind results we can hold in our hands, or that makes numbers go up and down. We want a tool or a system we can use *that day*… something operational, not notional. No more reports in binders.