KLA Perspectives

We do not really know what to expect from incoming President Trump as it relates to... well almost anything. But one thing we do know is that he has repeatedly professed not to believe in manmade climate change -- despite the clear science and the potentially dire consequences to his sprawling Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach from sea-level rise (my hometown paper The Boston Globe just did a great dive into that issue).

His Cabinet is shaping up to reflect those views, or worse. If confirmed, his head of the Department of Energy once famously forgot the name of the department and said he wanted to abolish it; his Secretary of State will have just stepped down after 4 decades at climate-change-denier ExxonMobil; and at the helm of the Environmental Protection Agency would be a man who, in his capacity as Oklahoma’s Attorney General, has sued that very agency more than a dozen times.

Who lives in your city and what do they think about going “green”?

Spring break time is upon us! Ah, the sun, the fun… and whether you are a college student looking to party on the beach or a family with kids heading to Disney, about 25 million of us will be heading to the Sunshine State of Florida during the months of March and April. Florida’s warm weather is a welcome change from the winter weather in much of the rest of the country and for $1,000 per plane ticket (gulp) or a scenic drive down I-95 there really is no better time to go. Maybe money doesn’t matter if this is a family tradition, right? You’ve been doing this since the kids were in elementary school and before you know it they will head off on their college spring break to Florida. In another 25 years, they will take their families to Florida for spring break and keep the tradition alive.

Climate adaptation is just one piece in the complicated resilience puzzle that cities face, and it’s directly and indirectly related to a host of challenges from flooding to infrastructure to public health. Resilience touches many city departments and budgets and outside stakeholders.