One of the tragedies of our modern governance system is that we spend more time talking about problems than solving them. We’re great at predicting future threats, but terrible at being ready when the threat actually manifests. This problem is not unique to Hawaii, but has become, in recent decades, symptomatic of a greater malaise of inaction and indifference in Western democracies.
For example, when the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) broke out in the early 2000s, national and state authorities knew it was only a matter of time before another coronavirus hit. threatens global health.
Billions of dollars have been spent collaborating, researching and planning for the next virus in the nearly two decades since, but when Covid-19 emerged onto the world stage, it was as if we were all caught off guard. , with only theories, novelty products, and no resources available to immediately address the problem.
We see a similar pattern in our response to future disasters that may result from climate change. While much effort has gone into trying to prevent climate change, actual preparation and hardening for its inevitable arrival has been rare.
As a 2012 US Department of Homeland Security report warned, “Climate change could directly affect the nation’s critical infrastructure. In coastal regions of the United States, rising sea levels, increased storm surges, and increased erosion could damage or destroy critical infrastructure. We all say that, but we certainly don’t act like it when it comes to our actual prior work.
Hawaii today may not be able to stop climate change on its own, but it can take immediate action to ensure that in the future we are prepared for known threats like such as sea level rise, destruction of natural or cultural resources and impacts on populations.
A bill scheduled for hearing Tuesday, Senate Bill 2035, seeks to change the state’s visitor policy to “minimize negative economic, environmental, and social impacts… Hawaii residents in decisions that affect their lives and life changes” and “make positive contributions”. conservation of natural and cultural heritage to maintain Hawaii’s diversity.
These proposed changes are laudable as they underscore that the visitor industry should be responsible for maintaining our local infrastructure and potentially serve to help Hawaii prepare for future environmental challenges.
Caught with bills like Senate Bill 2067, which seeks to combat coastal erosion, the Legislature has no shortage of well-meaning bills that will add offices, task forces or even funds to paying for climate change mitigation, but as admirable as these may be on paper, we are still not ready for the worst-case scenario.
The problem is that our local approach to planning is to create expensive task forces that write expensive strategic plans that no one follows, and then when the thing we wanted to stop happens, Hawaii ends up – pardon the pun –” underwater” and faced with an insoluble situation.
Anyone can write a bill, be on a task force, come up with ideas, print them out in a glossy book, and tell state and county agencies, “That’s the plan, now do it”. Anyone can be a prophet and predict a crisis and post it in an ignored note. The oldest trick in the bureaucracy playbook is to deflect failure by saying, “We came up with a good plan, but no one implemented it.” Well, that’s not enough when lives are at stake.
In short, we are moving too slowly where it matters most. We must act now. If sea levels rise or severe storms become more frequent, we’ll find out in the worst possible way which areas will be flooded before we have time to move things around.
If temperatures rise, we will experience this gradual, slow-moving problem in the sudden, inopportune future when many older people die in power outages or heatstroke ravages the population. (And let me guess, on that day our local leaders will say, “That’s what it is, just deal with it.”)
We have to assume that climate change will happen no matter what we do. This means we have to bite the bullet now and start building, moving and deploying mitigation technologies as if the worst is already here. We have talked about this enough, and we have the funding; if the threat is real, then act as if it were real.
Do we need to move government and commercial buildings? Do we need to move cultural artifacts? Do we need to build a different Honolulu with cooling technologies to avoid future heat issues? Why is there a disconnect between what we plan and what we actually do in the present to prepare for it?
Stop the endless interagency task forces, stop the conferences, stop the forecasting, and give us something tangible to prepare Hawaii for the future. Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned: “No one on Earth has any other way but upwards”. And in Hawaii, I really believe it.
