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September 5, 2023
Welcome to Season 6 of The Climate Conversation podcast! To kick off the season, we are discussing a book, The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience. Since its publication earlier this year, The Octopus in the Parking Garage has helped non-expert readers understand climate resilience in a way that is not only accessible, but also empowering. Author Rob Verchick—a renowned climate law scholar and professor at Loyola University New Orleans—sits down with Dan and Alison to talk about the major themes and findings from his book, including public perception of climate and resilience, modern forms of casteism, and planning for an uncertain future.
Show notes:
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Episode Transcript:
Dan Bresette: Hello, and welcome to Season Six of The Climate Conversation. I'm Dan Bresette, president of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Whether you're a new or returning listener, we're thrilled to have you tuning in today to the conversation to kick off the new season. And today I'm joined by my co-host, Alison Davis. Hi, Alison. How's it going?
Alison Davis: Hi, Dan. I'm excited to be back on the podcast and I've especially been looking forward to today. For this episode, we'll be discussing a book, The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience, with the author, Robert Verchick. The titular octopus is both a symbol of resilience and an example of the unexpected things that can happen as a result of the climate crisis. This book explores the history of human resilience to climate change and provides case studies of how communities are adapting to different climate impacts.
Dan: Rob Verchick is one of the leading climate law scholars in the nation and a professor of environmental law at Loyola University New Orleans, where he holds an endowed chair. He's also a fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. During the Obama-Biden Administration, Rob served as Deputy Associate Administrator for Policy at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). And it was there while working at EPA, he developed climate adaptation policy, and served on the Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force. He hosts his own podcast called Connect the Dots with the Center for Progressive Reform, where he also serves as Board President. Rob, congratulations on your book, and welcome to the podcast!
Rob Verchick: Thanks a lot for having me!
Dan: Rob, in the opening chapter of The Octopus in the Parking Garage, you mentioned that calls for resilience were at one point unpopular, as opposed to popular support for mitigation. This was something we covered a little bit back during our Congressional Climate Camp briefing series where we had the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Pew, and others talk about how trends have changed over time. In your mind, what are the key events that catalyzed a shift in public opinion about the importance of resilience? For example, would your experience and the experience of others with Hurricane Katrina potentially fall into that category?
Rob: I think it might, yeah. I definitely think that there's a greater awareness now because people in the United States and elsewhere are experiencing climate impacts—things that are almost unambiguously connected to climate change. Hurricane Katrina was an early example, I'd say Hurricane Sandy did a lot, I think, to mobilize politics at the federal level, simply because it affected so many people kind of in the seats of power, you know, in the United States. But other things were happening too as a result. I mean, so you had the insurance industry was—because of disasters like Katrina and Sandy—the insurance industry was getting very concerned about these things and raising rates, which was affecting sort of normal, ordinary people. Industries, including the oil and gas industry, were starting to spend a lot of money armoring facilities and assets that they had in harm's way. And a lot of city planners around the country were being concerned about it too. One thing I would just say is one of the things that happened after Hurricane Katrina is there was a big interest in disaster recovery and disaster risk reduction. And as that happened, many disaster-risk planners started to look at climate change. And so it kind of came from that direction.
Alison: According to your book, resilience is not only about recognizing and preparing for climate impacts, but also the capacity to manage and recover from a climate impact in a way that preserves a community's central character, the parts of its history, culture and economy that nourish the soul. So my question is, how can we promote resilience of such depth for communities that will likely have to relocate due to climate change in the years to come?
Rob: Well, the topic of relocation and migration is really complicated. And I think it's important maybe to try to unwrap it a little bit. All right. So on one level, we might be talking about what you might think of as displacement, which is when people are involuntarily pushed to move immediately from somewhere because it's underwater. Right? That's the people who left after Hurricane Katrina, for instance. Then you might think about relocation, which is where a community, in total, might actually want to move because it's in a place that no longer works, right? And so that could be a neighborhood in a community that's undergoing a voluntary buyout, getting money from the federal government to do that. It could be an Indigenous community. There are a few that are actually right now in Alaska and Washington state, and in Louisiana, there are some that want to move in total and get federal funds to do that. And then there's what you might think of as migration, which is just this gradual trickle of people moving to other places, for a variety of mixed reasons, some of which might have to do with insurance premiums, or where the jobs are, or where the businesses are relocating, and things like that. One point that I always try to make—and when you talk to people who are deep into studying and helping communities migrate or relocate, one thing that they always mention—is that human migration, as disruptive as it is, is something human beings have been doing literally for millions of years. It's not new that people move for all kinds of reasons, whether it's disaster, economic disruption, changes in technology, COVID, whatever it is. So in some ways, it's not the most unusual thing in the world. But it is really different, and it affects a lot of people. And sometimes people want to move and can't, and sometimes people don't want to move and have to. And I think that the way, you know, to understand how to work this through as a country is that we have to have some kind of national program and state programs for planning moving, right? Whether it's a relocation of the community or whether it's helping individual people move. We have to fund it, we can't just say people are going to stay if they can't afford to move and people who can't afford to move get to. And then the most important thing really, is that we have to involve people in the decision making process. I mean, ideally—we're doing this in Louisiana, we're going in and we're talking to individual communities that are in harm's way that are outside of levee systems and in the coastal parishes, and we're saying, “Look, you know, how important is it for you to stay? What are the things that are most important for you to stay?” If it's fishing and the economy, could that be done somewhere else within the state? Maybe it can, maybe it can't. But everybody should get their say and feel seen in this process. And it should be something where there is money made available and also resources made available so people can do it in a roughly fair way.
Dan: Rob, you live in Louisiana, your book spends a lot of time in Louisiana, you take your readers on a trip through cancer alley, and you talk a lot about environmental justice and fenceline communities. And your book uses casteism as a lens to talk about a lot of these issues, specifically borrowing the words of a journalist, Isabel Wilkerson's definition of a caste system as one that “seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category.” How might this framing influence our strategy for equitable climate resilience, especially coming at it from a policy perspective?
Rob: Well, I think it's a really important issue, this issue of fairness. And, you know, in fact, I actually have lived in India twice and have always been, as most people are struck by the caste system, which—although is illegal—is something that continues in a variety of ways, just as racism in the United States continues in a variety of ways. And one of the things that I think is most important is to understand and pay attention to the default assumptions that our climate action practices reinforce, in the ways that they reinforce social disadvantage, in ways that we might not view. So let me just give you one quick example, right, which is in the news right now. It involves heat waves. Heat waves are the most lethal form of quote-unquote “natural disaster” in the United States. Seven hundred people a year on average die in heat waves, thousands of people are injured. Okay, by far, that's bigger than floods, for instance. All right. Now, heat waves in the United States, as in elsewhere, they disproportionately affect older adults, outdoor workers—many of whom are lower income—and people of color in the United States, specifically blacks and Latinos. All right? So, here's the thing. Under our federal law—there's a federal law called the Stafford Act (P.L. 100-707)—under federal law, an event that would qualify as a major disaster that a president could declare, there's a list of those things in the law. And the list does not contain “heat wave.” Right? It contains drought, flood, fire, and so on and so forth. And so there's actually quite a legal controversy, right, over whether a heat wave could ever be considered a major disaster. And that's important because once something is declared a major disaster, FEMA and other federal agencies can then send lots of money to a place and the municipality can respond, and the state can respond, and help people. So all right, let's sit with that, and now ask, “Why isn't heatwave on that list?” And the reason is that heat waves in general don't harm property, and they don't harm people who own property. They're more likely to harm human beings, and human beings that tend to be under the radar screen. Right. Now, and that doesn't mean that when people wrote the Stafford Act, that's what they were intending, but it means that's basically how it was set up, as a way of protecting property. When the Army Corps of Engineers designs a levee, and then costs things out and decides whether it is cost-effective, right, whether the benefits outweigh the cost to build a levee, what they look at in their formula is the economic value of the property that they are protecting. They don't include the lives that they're saving, or that are at stake. Right? So it's all about property again. And so that's why it would be easier for the Army Corps of Engineers to justify a project that would protect Lower Manhattan, but would be harder for them to develop a project that would protect the coastal parishes in Louisiana, where a lot of poorer people live. And so you know, there may be reasons for that and so on, but again it's, you know, there are a number of things that are just built into the structure of how we protect against disaster that actually reinforce social disadvantage.
Alison: A recurring issue throughout The Octopus in the Parking Garage is the dilemma of conflicting values or objectives in planning and implementing resilience efforts. For example, you mention Louisiana's flood protection measures posing a threat to cultural heritage. Some resilience projects meant to protect people, like the aggressive wildfire prevention actions in California, have disrupted the proper functioning of natural systems. How often do you find such tensions come up? And how should decision makers prioritize conflicting goals in the effort to make communities more resilient?
Rob: Well, these tensions actually come up quite a bit. Right? And one of the reasons is that there really isn't anything natural anymore, if what you mean by natural is unaffected by human activity. And so just to give you this quick example, which you mentioned, we have a really large coastal restoration project that's going on in Louisiana, probably the largest in the world, to try to restore many of the coastal wetlands. And one of the ways that we're going to do that is we're going to divert freshwater from the Mississippi River into areas so that they will bring sediment and then also nourishment to grow more marshland and swamps and these sorts of things. And doing that is necessarily going to have an impact on some communities in a negative way. Because people who have oyster leases in those areas, the water makeup is going to change and it's going to be harder to raise oysters. Or the fishery is going to move, literally the fish that swim in an area are going to move to another area because the content of the water has changed. It's impossible not to have those kinds of effects. And so then the question is, okay, so who's going to be harmed? And then how do we help people, you know, adapt to this new situation? Or do we not do it at all so they don't have to adapt? And I think there are at least a few things. Well, one thing I can say is there's no perfect answer to any of it, right? But there are, I think, some values that we can have as we approach that. So one value would be that you really want to base this on science, that you want to use the best science you can, however imperfect, to try to inform the decision about what kind of course of action to take. A second value is that you need to have meaningful participation from the communities that are affected, the communities that might benefit and the communities that are going to be harmed. No one is going to get completely what they want, but you need to have a system where people have access to the information and the science and then have access to the decision-making process. There also, I think, has to be an emphasis on fairness, which means that even if people are going to lose or be harmed as a result of some kind of action, there need to be forms of compensation, or there need to be forms of some kind of recompense or help so that people can change jobs, change locations, build in a way that allows them to live in a place, even though we're changing the landscape. And the only way I know to do that in a fair way is in a roughly democratic way, where we have lots of people informed by science and reason coming together and doing the best they can in a fair process.
Dan: Yeah, that's such a critical point. And the ability for that kind of process, you know, even if someone doesn't get everything they're looking for, at least, you know, they had involvement, they had information, they understand the process, it's transparent. Something we try to always communicate to policymakers. Rob, your book is a really good read, and one of the ways you make it engaging is you tell lots of stories about people, and you tell a lot of stories about sort of particular moments that you've seen catalyze groups or individuals to focus on climate resilience and adaptation. And in one example, you tell a story of a pair of hunters, two Iñupiat hunters in Alaska, who become lost and eventually arrested by game wardens. They were out hunting and they're glad that they're arrested and they eventually things get sorted out. And there was someone who also heard that story and they relayed that story to their dad, who doesn't really care about climate change at all and wasn't really interested in it, but as you say, it was a hunting story and my dad likes to hunt. It was something he could relate to. You also talk about recreational scuba diving and how that inspires people to look to ocean stewardship. What does it take to convince people, in your experience, especially climate skeptics who haven't sat down with your book yet, about the importance of adaptation and resilience? How do you approach those people as you come across them sort of in daily life?
Rob: Yeah, I’ve thought a lot about this and, as I say in the book, I grew up in Las Vegas. I'm third-generation Las Vegas, you know, from Nevada. A lot of my relatives are in rural parts of the state of Nevada. So you know, I've grown up my whole life around all kinds of interesting people. And part of it always is trying to figure out, kind of, what you might have in common, right? So here in Louisiana, as it turns out, duck hunters and fisherfolk are great stewards—or great advocates let's say—of the wetlands because they care about it, for maybe different reasons that somebody else would, but there it is. One of the things I noticed—because I did interview, as you say, a number of folks who were doing meaningful things—and one of the things I realized is that for the most part, they don't start out saying, “I have this dying passion to save the environment, and so I'm going to get involved in climate action.” It doesn't start that way. It starts by, you know, let's say a 13-year-old girl who says, “I'm really interested in scuba diving because I've seen Finding Nemo.” And then when she gets involved in scuba diving, she ends up learning a lot about coral. And then she realizes that the coral, in this case off the coast of Florida, is in peril. And then she wants to do scientific research about that. And then she learns about the cruise ship industry and how that's disturbing coral, too. And then she gets involved in projects to slow that down. And she still doesn't think—in this case, her name is Kara Norman—she doesn't even think of herself as political, she just thinks of herself as somebody who really cares a lot about coral, you know. Whatever it is, you might be really interested in wine, and be very interested in what varietal wines are doing in various places in the United States or elsewhere. And you don't even have to find a new group, because you might already belong to a group that shares wine or whatever it is. So all you’ve got to do is go to the group you already have, and say, “How is climate change going to affect the thing I care about?” And you go in through that side door. And I think it makes all the difference, because then you already care about something.
Dan: I want to stay on this issue of using individual examples or case studies. We did a series of coastal resilience briefings in 2019 and 2020, and we wrote a big report in late 2020 about coastal resilience issues, and everything was really sort of supported by the case studies that came out in the course of our briefings. I think we learned, not just that it's an effective way to learn—because you can take sort of a specific example and sort of draw conclusions from it—but it's also a great way to teach, because you have sort of a specific example, and you have much of what you were just talking about with these individual examples. But curious what your thoughts are, sort of, as the climate changes, new challenges are affecting new regions, like there are places in the U.S. that are growing good red wine that didn't previously grow red wine because the climate is changing. You know, wildfires, another great example—well, a bad example—something you cover a lot in your book as well. How can regional and local decision makers learn from one another as climate changes over time? And from a federal policymaking perspective, what could federal policymakers be doing to sort of address local but also more localized climate adaptation and resilience challenges?
Rob: It's a really important question. And I started to address it myself back in the beginning of the Obama Administration. As you mentioned, I was in the administration for the first two years working at the EPA, and one of the things that I was doing was serving on the President's Interagency Task Force on Climate Change Adaptation. And that was a task force—I think it was something like 14 federal agencies, including the EPA—and we're looking at them and we're saying, “Okay, how do these agencies need to change in order to maximize their mission in the shadow of climate change?” And that really brought us to asking ourselves, what is it that the federal government is good at? And what is it that states maybe or local governments are better at? And a lot of climate resilience is local, because we're really we're talking about, you know, the elevation of a bridge, about the building codes for roofs, about land use planning in forested areas that are prone to wildfire, all of that kind of stuff, right? And it's good that locals are in charge of those kinds of things, because they have access to what the local values are, what the local knowledge is of the landscape, what it is that people need, what they can afford, and so on, and so forth. What the federal government is good at, first of all, it's a big source of money. It's a source of technological resources and science. You know, you don't want every state to be developing its own measures of atmospheric physics, you know, the federal government can come up with that, and then make that information available, make money available, make certain kinds of technology available. And the other thing that the federal government is really good at, which links into just what you asked, is it's really good at convening actors and distributing information. So for instance, the EPA actually has a website, it's called ARC-X and it is designed to make good news stories available to other communities. So in theory, you could go onto this website and say, “Hey, I'm a town of this size. I'm interested in new ways, more effective ways of controlling stormwater in the shadow of climate change. What towns in the United States have done something that's been successful?” And then it will give you information and it'll tell you: here's what they did, here are the people you can contact, and here are the funding streams from the federal government that they used. And sharing these stories is really important because a lot of these things don't have to be reinvented. They just have to be, you know, kind of borrowed from and tweaked a little bit.
Alison: Another recurring theme in the book is the level of uncertainty involved with predicting climate impacts. As you describe, it's difficult to determine the places most likely to sustain Joshua trees in the long term, for example, or the severity of future storms that may threaten electricity generation on the East Coast, like Hurricane Sandy. How can we plan climate resilience efforts beyond the short term with so much uncertainty?
Rob: Well, that's a really hard question. And you mentioned the power grid after Hurricane Sandy, which was a good example because Hurricane Sandy as you know wiped out a lot of the power grid in New York City. And then everybody was immediately asking questions like, “Okay, how does it have to be rebuilt? We don't think we just want to rebuild it the way it was. So we want to make it stronger, more resilient.What does that mean, you know, what, what are we designing it for?” And the answer is, we don't know. Right? Because you know, people are saying, “Oh, now we're seeing the new normal.” But we're not seeing the new normal, we don't even know what the new normal is gonna look like. And that makes it really hard. So I think that, again, the way you approach this is through a set of values. And so one value would be flexibility. However it is you approach a problem, try to pick a way of responding that allows you to be flexible in the future, and try to avoid, if you can, try to avoid permanent solutions that are super costly in situations where you don't know what the future holds yet. So let me give you an example. So some communities are investing in desalination facilities, right, very expensive facilities, very energy-intensive, that would take seawater or saltwater from aquifers, and then take the salt out so you can drink it. That sounds like an adaptation effort in certain areas, right? The problem with that, not that you shouldn't ever do it, but the problem is that if you invest that amount of money in a desal plant, you've got to use it, you know, for the 20-30 years, whatever it is, and it might not have been enough, and you're still stuck with it because you put all that money into it. So maybe it would be better to find a solution that would be more about conserving water, or using water in ways not for landscaping anymore. Another value is being forward-looking, and by that I mean, taking seriously climate projections. And I tell a story in the book about the redevelopment of the electric grid in New York City by Con Edison. In the beginning, Con Edison wanted to just raise rates and just build everything a little bit tougher, you know, or maybe a little more elevated, and call it a day and say, “We're climate resilient!” And what happened is a lot of community members—who didn't want their rates raised if they weren't going to see a benefit—what they eventually did is they convinced, in a series of hearings, they convinced the state regulators to require Con Ed to bring in real climate scientists to develop real climate projections so they could say: all right, in the next 50 years, whatever it is, here's what we think sea level is going to look like, here's how hot we think it's going to be, 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter, you know, at the end of the term that we're planning for, we think the wind patterns are going to be x or y, and this is what we're going to build it for. That might seem like common sense, but almost no other utility is doing that in terms of climate resilience. Here in Louisiana, we have a utility Entergy, which is proposing a climate resilience plan, and they're using historic data to develop their models. And they shouldn't be planning for yesterday's storm, they should be planning for tomorrow's storm, even though it's hard to know exactly what tomorrow's storm is going to look like. So I think keeping those things in mind, and always trying to be fair about it, trying to say, “Who are the people who are least protected in this system?” And we should emphasize those concerns.
Alison: In the chapter about Louisiana's Coastal Master Plan, you say, “What is probably the largest, most sophisticated, ecosystem-based climate change resilience project in the world has been going on for years, and most people outside the region know almost nothing about it.” Why aren't these types of stories shared as widely as they deserve? And how can we draw more attention to climate resilience efforts like what they're doing down in Louisiana?
Rob: Well, there are a lot of reasons, I think, for this. Okay, so as somebody like me, who teaches courses in climate resilience and who writes about climate resilience, one of the things that's really hard for me still is to identify what a climate resilience project actually is. Because you know, what climate resilience is about is trying to build robustness in a system for future problems. But those future problems, some of them are related to climate, and some of them are related to other things, too. And so we are the fastest—I say “we,” here I am in southern Louisiana—we are the fastest-sinking spot of land in North America. All right. Part of that has to do with climate change, but most of it, frankly, has to do with the oil and gas industry’s destruction of the wetlands, it has to do with issues involving the levee control of the rivers, it has to do with the type of soil, and then by the way, there’s sea level rise. Right? And so everybody wants to fix this wetland situation, but not everybody sees it as a climate change story. Right? I think it's a climate change story, because I think climate change—hey, if we don't correct for sea level rise, nothing we do even matters, right? So that's one thing. Sometimes it's hard to see. You have a big migration, and you can say, “Oh, is this a climate migration? All of the people coming, you know, from a certain country to another country. Or is that because of war? Or because of economics?” Or whatever it is. So sometimes it's hard to see the climate story when you're in the middle of it. That's one point. The second point, I think, is that it's in some people's interest not to see these things as climate stories. The coastal restoration project was developed under a Republican administration in Louisiana, Bobby Jindal. His name was on the cover of the very first edition, right, of our coastal restoration program. It had climate change all over the index and all over the science, but the words “climate change,” you know, maybe appeared once or twice in the first version. And it was done on purpose. The purpose was to help, you know, restore the wetlands without talking very much about climate, at least publicly. And so as long as it's going to be hard for some politicians to talk about climate, it's going to be harder to tell those stories. And one of the things I say in the book is I do think it's important to call these things out and to say, “This is a climate change story, this is climate resilience.” But if we have to go slowly, and kind of ease into a climate conversation, I'm okay with that. Honestly. I mean if keeping “climate” out of the headline of that project was what it took to get it started, I'm okay with that. It's not ideal, but it's better than not doing it at all.
Dan: Well, Rob, that is a very great point to end on, and I'd like to thank you for joining Alison and me today to talk about your book, The Octopus in the Parking Garage. Congratulations, again! I hope our listeners will find their way to it one way or the other, and learn all about the stories, but also learn a lot about the science and the electric grid and wildlife and forest management, all the issues that you cover. So thanks so much. It's been really, really great to talk with you today.
Rob: Oh, thanks so much. I've really enjoyed it.
Dan: Well, Alison, I thought that was a really fun conversation. It was great to talk with Rob about his book. And I have to say it was a real pleasure to read his book. I'm actually not the world's biggest reader, it's the first book in a while I started and finished. But it was really good. I encourage everyone to take a look at it. And he raises a lot of really great points, makes a lot of really compelling cases based on those case studies that we talked about. You know, one thing that I was thinking a lot about, you kind of asked in your last question, which is, you know, how do we get more people sort of aware of these activities? And, you know, I think for our policy-making audience, one thing that I thought about a lot as I was reading the book, is that he made a lot of points that some of our panelists have also made. And I think this book potentially, you know, brings those together in a very neat, accessible package that's, you know, like I said, not a dry read, it's a good read. And I think in our policy-making audience, we have to devote more resources—you know, time resources and other resources—to bringing these case studies to policymakers and filling briefing rooms on Capitol Hill and telling people about these stories. We've done a lot of resilience briefings in the past, and I think we need to do more. And I also was thinking about the climate impacts. Last year, we did Living with Climate Change, and we talked about wildfires and extreme heat and sea level rise and drought. You know, those are all things that Rob also talked about in his book. You know, I think it encourages me to think a little bit about, you know, how we get those stories up on Capitol Hill, talk about them in an honest but in a positive light, because there is a lot of really great stuff happening. And it's really, really important that these projects are underway.
Alison: I agree, this book was an absolute pleasure to read. You can definitely tell that Rob's a teacher, because he's very good at breaking down complex topics in a way that's much easier for people to understand. But actually the first thing that I appreciated about the book was the title, The Octopus in the Parking Garage, because it sounds like “the elephant in the room.” And that's exactly what climate adaptation and resilience was for the longest time. Nobody really wanted to be the first to say that the climate crisis is already here. But just because the climate is already breaking down, that does not mean that it's too late for people to do anything. And that's the other thing that I really liked about Rob's book. I think he strikes a really nice balance between the tone of urgency and a ton of optimism. So there are some pieces of our world that have already been destroyed or damaged beyond repair. But there are a million other things that we can still save if we act now. And I think Rob lays out a lot of the things that we can still do really well in this book. If you want to learn more about EESI’s work on climate adaptation, head to our website at eesi.org. Also follow us on social media @eesionline for all of our recent updates. The Climate Conversation is published as a supplement to our bi weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Go to eesi.org/signup to subscribe. Thanks for joining us and see you next time!
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