Urban planners baffled by how climate change makes their IQ drop and destroys their planning skills
It's an unexpected correlation: a municipal planner's IQ and environmental disaster hitting in their area. Emerging consensus is the causation & correlation have been confused for longer than we thought in the climate protection community. Let's find out!
"Well everyone agreed wind turbines in Tornado Alley made perfect sense, we even broke the kWh record with the very first F2 tornado that passed through. So I won't accept any lip from climate sceptics moaning we couldn't replicate after the project was destroyed, which was 100% the tornado's fault", explains the Kansas based municipal planner. Agitated, he continues "Arizona builds solar farms in their desert. We use the asset we have, wind. Yay wind!"
The discipline of urban planning goes back to the dawn of civilisation, when early engineers learned to control powerful natural phenomena with the amazing civil engineering structures they were building. Dealing with climate change was obviously always center to their decision making, like the geothermal heating systems of Pompeii to reduce carbon emissions. No one was ever cold near the Vesuvius.
Equally impressive was the Dutch network of windmills built from the 1300's onwards to drain the marshes into arable lands below sea level, sometimes more than 7 meters below the waterline. Of course this didn't deter the brave Dutch city planners to take on the challenge of filling all this new space with densely populated residential areas. Even when a catastrophic flood killed thousands in 1953, the submerged municipalities did exactly the right thing: they blamed the weather and doubled down. A few miles north they chose to collate most of The Netherlands' chemical, natural gas and petroleum infrastructure in a submerged area around the largest populated zone in the country, Rotterdam. This is even smarter than the Japanese Datsuzoku design brilliance of building a nuclear reactor in the ocean on a tectonic fault line, and nothing can possibly go wrong.
But how do these planners come to their amazing ideas? They follow the science. Hence we dial in for a midnight Zoom call with the with the SoCal professor of Forest Kindling Preservation to discuss new insights in his field. "Sorry I hadn't realized Europe is on a different timezone from California. But yes, our particular niche in the scientific community is experiencing some upheaval right now. Hey, mea culpa! Who knew that funding only postgrads confirming the ecological beauty of dead wood and kindling in our national parks would skew decisions in forestry management? I mean, would you have predicted that decades of such research would end up shaping new generations of urban planners?"
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We ask about the rise of forest fires along the entire West Coast, and the fact people now live in areas known for frequent fires. He refutes, "Look, I still stand by my thesis that vast fields of dry kindling are the perfect base for building the new residential areas our growing communities need. Just do the numbers; with the majority of our residents switching from smoking highly combustible tobacco to environmentally safer solutions like Fentanyl, the chances of forest fires are reduced dramatically."
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