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Plus, one big opportunity for climate change.
Endurance Energy hoped its generator would run for a full year, but the team isn’t afraid of the “error” in “trial and error.”
On The Nuclear Company, Venture Global’s power dreams, and super pollutants
Rob talks with Peter Erickson, an affiliated researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute
This past weekend’s storms caused flooding and property damage up and down the coast — and it’s going to get worse.
California has around 3,400 miles of shoreline, ranging from the wild, foggy beaches of the North Coast to the sunbather-studded sands of Orange and San Diego counties. That’s a whole lot of border to share with the Pacific Ocean, especially when the water is as hot and tempestuous a neighbor as it is right now.
Just ask the city of Long Beach, which this weekend was on the receiving end of some Super El Niño mischief. Swells from the storm briefly dubbed Hurricane Rachel “annihilated” beachfront mansions and flooded city streets, causing pieces of the local boardwalk to “shred away.” “It’s never happened like this before,” one resident of 64 years told the New York Post.
But while things might look bad in California at the moment, they can still get much worse. One disaster modeler recently estimated the state could see as much as $3 billion in flooding and mudslide-related losses alone this winter — not to mention coastal erosion, king tides, and storm swell. Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency at the end of September, while many cities, including San Diego, have declared their own local emergencies.
El Niño will likely peak in December, meaning that towns and cities across the state have just a few remaining weeks to finalize projects, whether that means improving drainage in landslide-prone environments such as Rancho Palos Verdes or distributing NOAA weather radios in areas likely to lose power, as emergency managers are in Santa Cruz. The approaching winter storms, combined with El Niño, represent “a humbling reminder of the ongoing effects of climate change and the importance of emergency preparedness,” Laath Martin, the public affairs lead for the city of Long Beach, wrote to me in an email.
El Niño is a cyclical phenomenon, occurring when temperatures in a particular stretch of the Pacific Ocean rise half-a-degree Celsius above the average of the preceding 30 years. But there are signs these natural variations are happening less predictably because of climate change, and we know for sure that a warmer atmosphere makes the baseline for its impacts worse: king tides, Kelvin waves, and storm surge piggyback on top of rising sea levels to result in more severe coastal flooding and erosion. A warmer atmosphere also holds more water, which means more rain — perhaps 200% above normal — which, in turn, results in flooding and mudslides further inland, as well.
“Based on what I am seeing now, I am officially concerned,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, said last week after reviewing the latest outlook. There’s a reason this year’s El Niño is being called a Godzilla.
In general, the weather pattern causes the jet stream to shift south in the winter, bringing wetter and snowier conditions to the lower U.S. while the northern part of the country stays drier and mild. (It’s also responsible for a weaker Atlantic hurricane season, as we’ve already seen this year.) In addition to El Niño-driven Kelvin waves, warm bulges of water that raise the sea level on the coast by as much as 18 inches, the state of California — and particularly southern California — sits directly in a storm track that will deliver “atmospheric rivers” of heavy rain to a region prone to landslides and flash floods.
In many parts of the state, that rain will test the best-made plans in addition to plans deferred. In Los Angeles, the Department of Sanitation and Environment, or LASAN, has told the City Council it has concerns about the ability of the aging wastewater pipes and plants to handle heavy rainfall associated with a supercharged El Niño. In San Diego, which requires some $3.3 billion to upgrade what is in some places a century-old wastewater system, emergency managers are preparing to work with what they have by clearing debris and brush that could back up in the drains, CalMatters reports. In both cases, the time required for systemwide repairs far exceeds the time remaining before the winter’s supercharged atmospheric rivers are due to arrive. (Rezende told me inland flooding affects more businesses and residents in San Diego than coastal flooding, since the population in the city is set further back from the coastline.)
The city of Roseville, northeast of Sacramento, by contrast, is leaning on decades of flood planning to get through the season. After a series of back-to-back storms in 1986 that killed 13 people and caused $400 million in damage, the city and FEMA invested $39 million to upgrade Roseville’s infrastructure, including widening streams and adding levees and stormwater bypass channels. With more accurate floodplain modeling that has “helped keep new construction at higher elevations,” Helen Dyda, the city manager’s public information officer told me that “less than 7% of the city is within a floodplain” today. Dyda added that the city prepares for winter storms every year — it has some 160 miles of creek shoreline, after all — but that the El Niño-specific preparations are, as a result, more similar to routine maintenance: “clearing more dense vegetation and fallen trees from key creek areas.”
Long Beach is caught somewhere in the middle. After swells from Hurricanes Marie and Polo hammered the city in September, Long Beach hastily developed a seven-point plan to strengthen its peninsula in the near and long term. It will also begin a $11.4 million dredging project this fall that will place 415,000 cubic yards of sand on the beach as a buffer zone. “While this effort will achieve a much-desired result, it will not stop the ocean from pulling sand from the peninsula with every wave, especially during the significant weather systems Long Beach continues to experience,” Martin, the city’s public affairs lead, wrote to me. “Back-passing will need to continue to return sand back to the peninsula each day until more permanent, long-term man-made and environmental solutions can be identified, permitted and implemented.”
In certain cities, preparations for the peak of El Niño overlap with ongoing repairs from the last bad storm season. In Santa Cruz County, the 2016 El Niño caused an estimated $9 million in damage, while many in the community of Pajaro are still recovering from the flood damage caused by a series of severe atmospheric rivers in 2023. “We have a list of hazards that the city is vulnerable to, and we plan for all of them not individually, but all together,” Meredith Albert, Santa Cruz’s emergency management manager, told me. She added that many of the city’s preparedness activities and El Niño initiatives, like urging the community to be prepared to spend 72 hours unsupported, overlap with other disasters it works year-round to prepare for, like earthquakes, landslides, and wildfires.
“El Niño turns up the volume a little bit, but it doesn’t necessarily change our hazard landscape,” is how Albert put it to me.
Santa Cruz has not declared a local state of emergency, and Albert told me they won’t until they “run out of resources.” Other cities, like San Diego, have declared one preemptively. “In the past, you’d have to go through a longer review if you wanted to make some headway on projects, and sometimes that would take many weeks or many months of permitting,” Rezende said. “With a state of emergency, we streamline that process and get projects in the queue.”
Both Rezende and Albert told me the governor's statewide emergency declaration mostly helps state agencies position themselves for a faster response or has implications for higher-level permitting processes. (In Carlsbad, for example, which has seven miles of badly eroding beach, just one mile is controlled by the city; the other six are managed by the State Parks.) The state has also teamed up with ICEYE, a satellite imaging company, to receive information about flooding even in the dark or through rain clouds.
No state of emergency, though, can make it so a city can replace a century-old sewer system by Christmas or reengineer a beach by the time January’s storms begin to make landfall. But if a Godzilla analogy fits the onslaught of a super El Niño, it also offers a classic disaster-movie lesson on how to survive it.
Albert’s advice for how to prepare? Ask a neighbor for a cup of sugar. Take their dog for a walk. Build a relationship that could prevent a tragedy. “We know that our city will be cut off for at least a couple of days,” she told me of a hypothetical major disaster, referring back to Santa Cruz’s experience after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which cut off the city’s power, communication, and supply lines. “And we also know that we can’t build those relationships during the disaster. We’re trying to build them before.”
The city is doing a lot to prepare for the storm, she said. “But the question is also, what are all of us doing?” Albert went on. “You know better than I do, at the city level, who’s not going to receive that alert,” whether that be an elderly or unhoused neighbor or a nonnative English speaker who might not receive or understand emergency communications.
“Check in on a neighbor” is easier said than done — active engagement and connection to one’s community is trending downward in most parts of the U.S. But the people and places that bounce back from disaster and tragedy are almost uniformly the ones that look after each other. Borrowing a cup of sugar, to this introvert, sounds like a nightmare. But there’s never been a better time than a Godzilla El Niño to bake a poorly resourced cake.
The former vice president of the United States joined us at Heatmap House for New York Climate Week.
Former Vice President Al Gore needs no introduction. He is, in a way, the original climate influencer. His film An Inconvenient Truth gave rise to a new wave of climate activism in the 2000s. It was one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time upon its release, and it won an Oscar, a Grammy, and — for Vice President Gore — a Nobel Peace Prize.
He’s remained active in climate policy since then and leads the Climate Reality Project. He is also an investor and was a longtime director at Apple.
For this episode of Shift Key, Vice President Gore joined Rob for a live conversation at our Heatmap House event, part of New York Climate Week. He reflected on the 20th anniversary of An Inconvenient Truth, the existential risk of artificial intelligence, and what has surprised him most about the evolution of climate politics.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from their conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Let’s start by talking about 20 years ago, because 20 years ago, An Inconvenient Truth came out. I recently had cause to revisit the film, and I actually have to confess something. I was very excited when the movie came out, but I don’t think I’ve ever admitted this, and maybe this is the wrong audience to do it to: I was too stressed about climate change to actually watch it. Not that it was a daily anxiety, but I was like, “I can’t. There’s so many other things.” And so I actually watched it for the first time only recently.
I had the book, let’s be clear. I had the book.
Al Gore: A limited confession.
Meyer: Yeah, yeah. It was so fascinating watching it 20 years on, because there are some sections of it that I think you could give today. Not that little has changed — the science hasn’t, of course — but the way people think about it, the way people move from denial to doom, hasn’t changed in some ways. I wondered what surprised you most about the intervening 20 years since the film came out. It received a response that, I don’t know what you were anticipating, but it was certainly on a scale beyond what was expected at the time. And then there’s where we are today.
Gore: Well, when Laurie David first made the suggestion, here in this city, I gave an early version of my slideshow when we were promoting that movie. What was it, The Day After —
Meyer: The Day After Tomorrow?
Gore: The Day After Tomorrow. Was that it? Yeah. And they said, “Well, that’s fiction, isn’t it?” And I said, “Well, it’s not as fictional as the then-current administration was about climate.” But when she said, “This needs to be made into a movie,” I said, “You’re crazy.” As one of the early reviewers said, “Al Gore giving a slideshow — what part of that doesn’t scream hit?” So I was a skeptic about the enterprise, and I was surprised at the reception it got.
Really, the credit belongs to the scientists I was just channeling. The fact that everything they predicted has proven to be basically spot on is a credit to them. For the rest of us, the fact that they were so right then should cause us to pay more attention to what they’re warning us about now.
As for what has surprised me, it’s the ferocity and durability and massive continued financing of climate denial by the fossil fuel industry. There was a time during these last 20 years when they said they were going to be part of the solution, and a couple of them made some good-faith efforts in that direction. But then, like Steve Martin on the old SNL, they went, “Nah.” They decided just to give up the ghost and go full speed ahead on more and more fossil fuels. I think they’re losing as we are winning, but they’re hanging in there.
You can find a full transcript of the episode here.
Mentioned:
Previously on Shift Key: Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Trump’s Pro-Nuclear, Pro-Fossil Fuel Agenda
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...
RE+ 26 is the largest clean energy event in North America, happening November 16th through 19th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Register at re-plus.com and use code SHIFTKEY20 to save 20% off a Full Conference pass.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
