Jessica McKenzie
Mr. President:
Where to begin? As soon as you regained the highest political office in the United States, you began the process to withdraw the country from the Paris Agreement, joining the exalted ranks of Iran, Libya, and Yemen—the only other countries not party to the agreement.
You proclaimed Alaska “open for business” for all kinds of resource extraction, from mining to timber, with special attention paid to liquified natural gas and other energy projects.
You declared a national energy emergency, even though the United States currently produces more oil and gas than any other country. You commanded federal agencies to “exercise any lawful emergency authorities available to them” to facilitate the production of domestic energy resources—but not wind! “We aren’t going to do the wind thing,” you said.
The editorial brief for this memo was “advice for the incoming president that he might actually take.” Does such a thing exist within the climate arena, Mr. President? I polled some Bulletin contributors to see what they would suggest.
Consider the real estate. “My $0.02 for the incoming president would be that if left unchecked, climate change will certainly impact golf courses and real estate values in Florida,” writes Toby Ault, the director of Graduate Studies for Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University. Researchers have estimated that US real estate is overvalued by $121 to $237 billion because of flood risk alone—and that figure doesn’t even take into account the risks from wildfire or other climate-related disasters. This creates a giant property bubble that could spell disaster for the US financial system, if and when it pops.
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