- Doing nothing is what the billionaire press demands.
- Their dams, especially when there is a long series in the course of the river, appear to be highly effective at holding back floodwaters and reducing flood peaks.
- It requires constant reinforcement and upgrading.
- As so often in the UK, the idea of making the problem smaller, rather than simply pouring more money, rocks and concrete into making the defences higher, doesn’t seem to occur.
By doing nothing, the administration is attempting to wish away problems such as flooding. It’s deliberate incompetence as reported by The Guardian.
Averting disaster
We’ve coined the phrase “learning to live with” to describe doing nothing. To learn to live with Covid, you must give up testing, seclusion, and wearing masks in public. What’s the difference between living with it and dying from it? The same may be said for climate change. It’s not simply that countries like the United Kingdom have failed to play a role in averting this disaster. They haven’t even attempted to prepare for it.
While our primary effort should still be to decarbonise our economies, to prevent even worse impacts, we also need to brace ourselves for the heating that’s now unavoidable.
But, as the government’s climate change committee points out, adaptation in the UK is “under-resourced, underfunded and often ignored”.
Doubtless, many of them have also been built on flood plains.
This government is incompetent by design.
Doing nothing is what Tory donors pay for.
General failure
But this failure to act is not confined to the government: it’s a general failure.
On Sunday, the Cambrian railway line that runs from Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth reopened after six weeks of emergency engineering.
Last summer, at a cost of £3.6m, Network Rail raised it by a metre.
As climate chaos brings more intense rain, this is likely to become even worse.
This involves, for example, increasing their “hydraulic roughness”, allowing them to braid and meander and form islands and other obstacles that slow the flow; improving infiltration, so that water soaks into the ground rather than flashing off the surface; and reconnecting rivers to their floodplains, so that wetlands and fields are flooded (with compensation for farmers), rather than homes and infrastructure.
Reinforcement and upgrading
Fascinatingly, a new tranche of evidence suggests that among the most effective interventions is reintroducing beavers.
The beaver could be the rail traveller’s best friend.
The result is that water rushes down them much faster than it would otherwise have done.
It requires constant reinforcement and upgrading.
But when I asked the company what works it had undertaken to slow the flow and reduce the flood peaks of the rivers that affect the line, it told me: “Network Rail is not carrying out any work of the nature you listed.
In 2020, the US conservative commentator Ben Shapiro claimed that 10 feet of sea-level rise wouldn’t be a problem, because people could just “sell their homes and move”.
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Source: The Guardian
