Letters

To Broadsheet Editor;

re: BroadsheetDAILY “The BPCA Gets a Credit Limit Increase” July 16, 2019

It is interesting to see that the Battery Park City Authority will be getting half a billion dollars to protect the community from climate change, which it will mostly spend on building flood barriers that will exacerbate climate change. Relatively little will be spent on actually stopping climate change.

If this were only happening in Battery Park City, it might not be a major issue. But this is not the case. The same is occurring in the Financial District, in the Lower East Side, elsewhere in the city, and nationwide. Almost all of the hundreds of billions of dollars of public funding that is being allocated to address climate change in the US is being used to buy a lot of concrete and steel, which will emit a lot of greenhouse gases, and provide short-term protection at best.

Arguably, this is what happens when one tries to address a global problem at the local level. Everybody has an incentive to protect their little patch, and not to worry about the larger whole. But if we were to instead spend the same many billions of dollars on actually stopping climate change, we could probably do it.

It is a bit like going to the moon. All it takes is some people in power with a vision and a will. The money is there, and if given the chance the American people can solve almost any technical problem.