Hey folks, it's Quinn. Since we recorded this conversation, we've renamed the podcast. It used to be called Important Non-Port, which is what you'll hear in the episode and is still the name of the company. But now the podcast is called The Most Important Question.
That is, what can I do? It's the question we get the most from all of you, and it turns out it's the question I've really been asking guests for almost 200 episodes now. So here we are, the most important question. Please enjoy this old conversation.
Thanks for listening and thanks for giving us shit. Welcome to Important Not Important. My name is Quinn Emmett. And I'm Brian Colbert Kennedy.
And Teddy is not here with us today because I abandoned him. Yep, you're welcome. Yeah, he is totally fine. Teddy is fine.
Probably better without me. I spend a half the year on the East Coast. And Teddy stays with good friends, stepfather, stepmother, that he definitely loves more than he loves me. For good reason.
Yes, and not only did you leave Teddy, you left me. Well, yes, yes. We are on different coasts. You had to put your gear back together for the first time in six months.
Here's hoping it works. Who knows? Today we're asking the question, when will San Francisco be underwater, Brian? Oh, it is.
Yeah, apparently. Good news. They're fucked. Anyways, here to help us answer that and tell us exactly what to do all the time, because she should be in charge, is the Intrepid Molly Peterson, a renowned reporter focusing on the environment and climate change.
She's worked at Southern California Public Radio, IC Change, which is funded by NASA. She traveled to and reported from Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a fellow for the International Women's Media Foundation. And is now at Pacteo, a super cool new organization supporting independent journalists. And we will dig into that more.
Yeah, she's done a lot. Yeah, boy, she's done a lot. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Really, really raised us up a little bit. Quality levels. Well, as all of our guests have.
Yeah, no, for sure, for sure. She's just a special one. And the length that she went to to get a good recording, I mean, well, yeah, very impressive. Yeah, she built a fort for better than she recorded from a fort that she built.
Just a hero. Speaking of putting our gear back together, I gave you shit about putting yours back together. I'm like death leader over here. I feel like I faked it pretty well.
You sounded great. But in putting together my gear, I opened the box from California. There's a power cord. Doesn't seem to go to anything, but I'm also not sure what it goes to.
I want to see it. I want to know what it is. You were there when I packed stuff up. I just took the things that were necessary and I genuinely don't understand what this goes to.
Well, make sure you bring it back when you come home then because you're going to need it for something at the office. I guess I don't know. You have a thing with power cords. Remember when you gave me those speakers and left out the power cord?
You've either got a power cord or you don't. And your speakers have the power cord down? Because what is this? No, yes, now they do.
Everything's fine. All right. And thank you for the speakers. Yeah, you're welcome.
You're welcome. Well, this worked out. I don't have our home pod here. So we don't have anybody talking to us.
It's been weird. We haven't done this in a way. Man, it's been a different sort of day. And I only only got a couple more months of it.
You said you were talking to your mom before this. How's she? I was. Yeah, she gave me a call.
I think my phone rings. My favorite person for it to be is my mom. I would hope so. Like who else would be in the running?
The only other one that I really like is when my agent calls. Because if she calls me, I usually need to book something. Who calls more? You know, it's up and down.
Right now, I'm for sure. Is it? Mostly mom right now. It's been a little dry in the commercial department.
Does the agent call with bad news or is that just a no-call? That's just a no-call, yeah. So you're just left to wonder what happened? Right, exactly.
Which is just a good feeling. Yeah, but no, mom called. I was so happy to see her on the caller ID. And she's doing great.
She's a little under the weather, actually, like you. So that part sucks. Yeah. But otherwise, living her up, getting back into yoga in a big way, which I love.
It's so good. My mom teaches yoga. So that's right. Yeah, it's crazy.
Crazy. Specifically the children? Yeah. Yeah.
Try to get them to calm their little bodies and minds sounds very impressive. I mean considering who I was the kid who got on my report card growing up for like not getting like 12 years straight in the same school system. You know, they had like, there's a little legend where they could print like pre-selected comments to really get down to how specific a child is. It was just pre-selected comments.
And my mind was always, every time, socializes at the inappropriate time. Which is amazing for a couple of reasons. One, I've become more of an introvert these days. I think it's also just being tired.
All that's everyday of my life. But you have a lot of energy to be an introvert. But getting that a couple times is one thing. But eventually like an anomaly becomes a statistic.
Right. Interesting. Wow. I wonder if it would have been buddies.
In like middle school, I think so. You think so? What were you in? Think so.
Well, well, maybe not buddies. But I would make you laugh in class. I'd make you laugh in class. And then I would never see you otherwise.
Because you were always swimming and being an athlete. And I was just like just being a fucking around all the time. But what did you do? Anything?
Did you do anything? I rode my bike, rode my bike around, started a lot of trouble. Cool. And I worked a lot too.
I guess that's more high school than junior high. But you're painting a very specific picture of your life. Listen, everything was good. I was responsible when I needed to be.
And then I was a clown all the other times. Do you think you would have gotten socialized as the inappropriate time? Absolutely. My comment was always like, we know Brian's smart and normal.
Like, why does he have to be such an asshole? Was that the pre-printed comments that they got paid for? I think it was a stamp. They already had it ready.
And so they just stamped that every time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, you know, something's don't change. Wait a minute. Yeah. Well, I do hope your mom feels better.
Do you think she's feeling under the weather because you haven't given her a grandchild yet? No, I don't. OK. I think we, my brother and I talked about this with her before.
We were like, oh, I'm on. We're so sorry. We can't believe we haven't given you a grandchild yet. And I was like, no, don't, like, if it's going to happen, fine.
But don't like have a grandchild because you think, or don't have a child because you think I want a grandchild. Like, that's not the reason that I had a kid. I mean, I got that makes sense. Which is fair.
But at the same time, that's like kind of when you ask your significant other everything. OK. And they go, it's fine. And they go, it's fine.
Yeah, it's never fine. That is the answer. Get on that, get on that train, Brian. It's the best.
Thank you. I'm down. All right. I'll keep you posted.
Let's go. Let's go find Molly Peterson in her fort. We should talk to Molly. All right.
Our guest today is Molly Peterson. And together, we're going to answer the question, hopefully. When will San Francisco be underwater? Molly, welcome.
Thank you. Very happy to have you here. If you don't mind, I'll tell us real quick just who you are and what you do. I am a local, mostly public radio reporter.
And I've been covering climate change as long as I've been a reporter. So look more than a dozen years. And right now I'm working for KQED, the local station in the Bay Area, as well as for this startup that supports local independent journalism called Patia. Ooh, tell us a little more about that.
Patia is kind of like, the idea is that local news is incredibly valuable, but we're all facing towards national news at this moment in time. Even local news organizations have a hard time really staying focused on what's a big deal. So the idea is to sort of support local independent journalism in a kind of patreon kickstarter way. Nice.
Super cool. And it doesn't matter. And it's not, you know, it's inevitable that they have to turn towards national things because we are getting pounded every day by these things that have ramifications for everyone. Yeah, I just really believe deeply in local journalism.
And one of the reasons why is because I cover climate change. And there became this point of view. I mean, I am amazed and impressed by people who do research all over the world, but there's this way that people I've talked to in California, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, other states are looking at ice flows and polar bears and thinking, that's not me. That's not my problem.
Right. So there's climate change that's happening in your backyard right now that you should notice. It can take so many different shapes and forms, and it's so regional, and even it can even be hyper-local. And you know, a lot of what we've talked about is trying to get folks, again, we always try to urge action, specific actionists and sort of.
You can make the most impact, slash raise the most hell on a hyper-local level. And there will be some frustrations along the way, but you're certainly going to feel and literally see your impact. You're much more likely to feel and see that impact than you are than pastoring your representatives who don't really listen to you anymore, your federal representatives, you know, going to your city council meeting and asking about the local water quality and air quality and things like that. And who are the biggest polluters and what are we doing about those, if anything?
It's something that you can measure and you can see and your kids can breathe that air. Yeah, and even just noticing things. So before I work for these guys, I worked for something called IC Change, which is a NASA funded, well, it was NASA funded citizen climate observation project. I was thinking about that.
And it was, yeah, it's really cool. So it basically takes qualitative observations from local people and pivots them to quantitative observations of carbon in the atmosphere from NASA's orbiting carbon observatory. And so that meant was, yeah, so we were in contact with scientists to truth-swadd what people saw and give people context for what they saw. And we got observations from Kenya and Rwanda, and one of our observers in Kenya last year was amazing.
Let's get some actions that we can make our listeners realize that they can take, and we'll ask all the questions to get there. Yeah, before that, Molly, your listener and friend of the pod, when you have time not saved in the world. So you might already know this, but instead of asking what your life story, we like to ask Molly, Peterson, why are you vital to the survival of the species? Because I'm a journalist.
And I actually think high quality journalists are incredibly crucial to paying attention to climate change and to connecting something that's science-based, to your relationship to your community, be it in policy or in your economy and how you're sending choices all of it. So more information is good. Tom Stoppard said, what was the Tom Stoppard quote? Information is light.
Light about anything is good. I love that. I love that. Do you feel like your job has, or your perspective on your job has changed in the last two years?
My perspective on my job has been changing nonstop for the last four or five years. And some of it has changed since Trump got elected. And some of it in the ways exactly that you think. But it's always, always hard and has been something I've been thinking about for the last five, six, seven years to figure out how to connect people, not just, look, I work for a local public radio station.
It's a fantastic station. We do great work. But we also cover these meetings that happen in Sacramento about policies that it's like, well, who cares? There's a policy about a low carbon fuel standard.
If you are one of our friends in the kitchen trying to figure out whether to recycle something, that's not what you're thinking about. And so the idea of making a closer connection to between things is really a big deal. So at the same time, yeah, there's in the last couple of years, the other thing besides Trump getting elected and the policies that are coming out of Washington is that there's this sense that the truth is malleable. That's huge and growing and it's scary.
Yeah, it is scary. It really is a whole new world on that front. And the efforts that are being made to both make it seem and to make it malleable, to manipulate folks, that's pretty out of control. All right, let's get into it here.
So let's establish some context for today's question, which means it's time for context one with Professor Brian. It's kind of like every student's favorite entry level class that you schedule at 3PM on a Friday and never really go to. It's often oversimplified. Here's off course, never intentionally wrong.
What Brian's doing is best. It's a really great book report. We've got Molly here to correct us. So Brian, talk to us about sea level rise.
Thank you in advance for all corrections, Molly. All right, so this might be news to you guys, but the sea levels are rising. And more interestingly, sea levels have kind of ebbed and flowed over the millennia. Malenia, big word.
Yeah, thank you. And a little bit confusing, actually, it sounds like it would be a million, but it's a thousand. Why would you do that? Yes.
OK, anyway, all right. So you've got nice temperate poles and then ice ages and then melting and then ice ages. And the poles actually used to be these really lovely temperate places. And because they were, the oceans were way higher.
And basically everything you know was underwater. That's why there were shark teeth in Arizona. I literally was talking with my children about that this week because obviously they're into blue planet and planet Earth and all this stuff. I think the North American one is called the Western Interior Seaway.
It's crazy. These aren't just sharks everywhere. Anyway, we'll put it in the show notes. Yeah.
And throughout all this, the oceans absorb like 90% of the atmosphere key associated with emissions. But there's a few things that are different this time. What's different this time? Well, we're here.
Right. What does it mean by we're here? Well, like more humans are here. And that means that more humans will die when the islands and the coast are underwater.
But also all of us humans are causing the melting to happen way, way, way faster. By the way, didn't Dr. the Marvel's Dr. Kate Marvel tell us that her data says this was a real clinter.
If we hadn't been influencing warming, the Earth would actually be in a cooling period. Yeah. Like an ice age. But like, you know, most things are not a most things are on fire age.
Yes, she did. And everybody's like the Earth is always changing temperature. And that's true. But the point is we're not supposed to be right now.
And here's the kicker. The rate of rise has it like has been rising. Good. Nice.
And people, and like when I say people, I mean, like, ignorant assholes love to say that like that's leveled off or it's dipping even. But that's what we call cherry picking data. Like, of course, there's going to be fluctuations. You know, if there's more snow and the water piles up on land instead of the oceans, for example, but the point is when water warms, it expands and the water is warming.
So like so much that not only are guys kept melting and massive chunks of ice are falling off of Antarctica, but the underwater currents that power our entire climate are out of whack. Right. Sure to be fine. How much faster is faster?
What are we talking about here since we're getting so technical with things? Super technical. Yeah, we've always and still talk about steel rise, like an inches per year. And at some point, and definitely sooner than we thought, we're talking feet and good.
Some folks think we're underestimating that. Yeah, we're pretty good at that. But like, OK, so it's risen about eight inches since 1880 as far as we go. Oh, right.
The ocean. Fucking ocean. And that's 140 years almost, right? And then the current projections are saying that by 2100, so 80 years, we're talking anywhere from one foot.
We're in that's about half the time. Yeah, right. And it was half the time from one foot to eight feet. OK.
So all right, I'll ask the question. And again, we don't try to like dumb things down, but we too try to operate from the lowest common denominator. So people really get what we're talking about. It's more important to be properly and fully informed than to pretend you are.
Why does the ocean going up eight feet matter? Great question. I mean, if you're out there in a boat, you don't notice it, right? Theoretically, but but you know, what if your house or the local naval base or an airport or subway system or a power plant?
What if they're built at sea level or like your close to it? Right. And an extra foot of water, even one foot feels over an airport feels bad. Yeah, yes it does.
And we built cities on water, mostly rivers and oceans for trade. And like, you know, guess what? Eight of eight of the 10 largest cities are on the coast or very near the coast. They're American cities who are like seriously, like unbelievably in some shit over the next 50 years.
Yeah, New York, Miami, actually, most of Florida, Norfolk, Boston, Charleston, Atlantic City, New Orleans is mega fucked. The New York Times did a partnership with the Times Pekingon covering New Orleans, increasing water issues. That was pretty, pretty tremendous. We'll put that back in the show notes.
And of course, San Francisco. Right. OK. Brian, that was amazing.
Thank you for that. So let's focus on our question. Sounds a little ridiculous when we'll San Francisco be underwater. But Molly, you wrote an article recently titled like it or not, the water is coming.
Will the Bay Area defend against rising seas or embrace them? And again, we put that in your letter when you publish it. We'll put in the show notes here too. Can you give us the sort of one minute breakdown so we can then more fully dig in?
Yeah. Well, first of all, I don't need to correct Brian. So this is all very exciting because we're all on the same page. We're all on the same page about this.
Except the only thing I'd also say is that in San Francisco, you know, you were asking me when is San Francisco going to be underwater? And the answer is there are already underwater sometimes right now. You know, the best guidance for the San Francisco Bay area about sea level rises to expect between two and 10 feet of sea level rise alone by the end of the century that doesn't count storm surges that doesn't count high tides, which are two other factors. That's from the state ocean protection councils science advisory team, which is based on this 2012 National Research Council report that you got that information from, I think that you were talking about earlier.
So and then you mentioned eight inches since 1880. Well, the San Francisco has the longest continually serving tide gauge, basically, you know, under the Golden Gate Bridge, right by Chrissy Field by the Marina is now operated by NOAA when it started, there was no NOAA. So and at that gauge, it's got eight inches in the last century. The story that I gave just kind of fascinating and amazing thing.
But the point is that, you know, we have measurable sea level rise in San Francisco already and in the Bay area, they're planning for by mid century. Well, this is actually an interesting sticking point because they're not, they don't have to plan to limit there. So what I mean is in the Bay area, there's no while you are required. If you make changes, there's something called the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which is a state commission, it's kind of an unusual creation.
And I can tell you the story about that if you want, but what they do have authority over is a hundred feet around the edge of the bay. And if you pull a construction permit or make any changes around the edge of San Francisco Bay, you have to consider sea level rise. But it doesn't say how you have to consider sea level rise. There's a growing body of like complex work about what that means.
But there is a day you definitely have to plan for two feet or you definitely have to plan for four or six or eight feet. And that's kind of a problem that you can look at in a lot of these communities. Because I don't believe yet that there is a rule in South Florida, for example, that you have to plan for a specific amount of sea level rise. You have to consider it.
But it's hard to get when the rubber meets the road about spending money, making regulations, it's hard for people to rely on emerging science. They aren't entirely comfortable with it. And so we're slow to adapt to that sort of emerging science. And this new information, we've had huge developments in sea level rise science in the last five years.
But getting people to agree on one number that can be used as a barometer for these sort of development projects would seem to be a pretty contentious battle. Oh, for sure. And yet probably why? Oh, totally.
And yet there's I mean, the thing that I found when I was talking to people in the Bay and there's a researcher there, Mark Sacy at UC Berkeley, who's been modeling what would happen if sea level rise happened in the Bay? There's and it's a really complex dynamic thing. So what happens in one community affects another decisions that you make in one community to put up a wall are going to affect another community where there's no wall yet. And so one community's decision affects another's because it makes sense for them to sort of plan together.
Right. That was such a part of that article that I didn't really, you know, think to think about before that, is that these walls that are, you know, redirecting the ties or reversing them and go somewhere, it might be your neighbor. Yeah, I didn't think of that either. And I grew up in the Bay Area.
And so Foster City was this magical, fascinating land to me that my parents weren't super into, but we would drive by. And, you know, the fact that they had a lagoon, I thought my pirates were involved. You know, like I thought it was. Yeah.
And the lagoon, by the way, has died with, you know, it's really interesting. They died a darker kind of blue green, which helps cut down on photosynthesis and keeps them from getting too many weeds that would affect their electric deathy boats. So, which is what it gets this kind of Disney-esque color in that lagoon they've got there. But it's this planned community that's sticking out onto the Bay, whose creation wasn't partially responsible for the idea that there even is a local commission that tries to look at the edge of the Bay.
But Foster City makes a decision and that's going to affect Belmont and Bratwood City and these other cities in Silicon Valley. Damn. Right. All right.
So I guess, yeah, let's, let's ask this pretty practical question is like, what is, what does San Francisco and Oakland already done to prepare for the sea level rise that is already happening? There are planning processes going on in San Francisco on the Embarcadero and the store, the Embarcadero itself, the construction of it is this fascinating thing because it took them a really long time to build it. And at the time they were building it, it was in the squishy, sticky mud, you know, this kind of old, old Bay mud. And so they didn't, you know, have the technology in the mid 19th century to dry anything out.
So they just piled rocks in a big triangle. They dug a little hole and they piled some rocks up to try to build. And that's a solid engineering principle. But it's also, we now know so much more about, you know, geotechnical information.
That's sure. There's ways we would not do that. So there's seismic problems for the sea wall that is allowed San Francisco to have more land, the kind of adjacent to the downtown area. And there are sea level rise problems that are associated with that.
And there's things that you wouldn't think about with a port like that. For example, there's infrastructure when you have those kind of finger ports, those finger peers rather that stick out off the end of the Embarcadero in front of the sea wall. Those are the peers where people put the Americas cupboards and the theories and the, and because sea levels rising, there's less time to maintain the equipment on the underside of those peers because there's higher tides. So because the sea level is higher, that means there's slightly less time and there's less and less time as time goes on for them to maintain this equipment.
And so we're talking about in the Bay Area, I think the stat is that this is a Pacific Institute, which is a local and based institute. They've estimated that about 4.6 feet of sea level rise would cost the Bay Area at $62 billion in property damage and endager a quarter of a million people plus. And actually, I think that number is low because San Francisco believes that there's even more behind it when you get into the financial industry, the tech industry that's in downtown San Francisco, that number is probably even a low estimate. Wow.
All right. So, so what, what, you know, again, the inability to agree on the number, which, you know, humanity wise would seem to be accepting defeat, which, you know, we can dig into the philosophy of why these arguments are still happening. But they have accepted that obviously sea level rise is coming because they're already dealing with it and it's going to be exponentially worse. So what is sort of the planning and I'm thinking about sort of New York and Miami here too, which are still holding on to the idea that they're going to be able to hold these tides off and are undertaking similar sort of planning efforts and a little less action.
What have they done to prepare for this sort of exponential growth that's coming? So there's kind of two paths that they, two very broad paths that they can take. And, and one is to continue to manage a relationship with water the way we have in the Bay Area in San Francisco over the last century. And the other is to reconsider what our relationship can be with the shoreline and in San Francisco, in the Bay Area and as well as in New York, the Rockefeller Foundation has held design competitions to try to promote very ambitious, very blue sky thinking about what to do, what you could possibly do to deal with sea level rise.
And that's something that's been going on in the San Francisco Bay Area, specifically not just with the Rockefeller Foundation. I think nine years ago, the Bay Conservation Development Commission was part of, there's a discussion, there was this idea for this kind of amazing carbon fiber mesh, if you can imagine like a big, huge mesh scoop hooked on to either side of the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge. And the idea behind building something like that, which is completely science fiction, like this amazing, huge thought is to slow down the wave energy and to sort of control the flow of water throughout the entire Bay. Wow.
Yeah. And it never got anywhere, but it's an amazing idea. At least people are thinking. Yeah.
Right. I love that. Yeah. No, I mean, you think about what, um, oh my God, I'm, I'm brain dead today, the Italian city with all the, uh, all the canals.
Thank you. I'm doing the same with all the James Bond movies. Boy, brain dead today. You know what they've done with the incredible, like doors underwater that they've built.
Have you seen this? It's incredible because I mean, Jesus, if anybody's facing sea level rises, those guys, it's pretty wild, the things that they've done and the Dutch are similar developing things like this, because as the Dutch say, you know, we've been doing this for forever, but the question becomes like, is that enough? You know, side question, it's, uh, it's, it's election time almost. Has the San Francisco, uh, Oakland, may or race discuss this at all?
Or is it like the 2016 national election where nobody talked about climate change the entire time? Well, so they are going to have in November, it appears that that's the case, the reports, um, taking has been taking the steps towards a big, huge vote where people would have to be willing to tax themselves to fix the Embarked Arrow Sea Wall and they, and they're selling people on the idea of fixing it for seismic and sea level rise reasons. And I don't believe anyone is opposed to fixing this sea wall in San Francisco. It's just not something that at this point, anyone could reasonably consider and be elected mayor, even with that goofy ranked choice voting, which is, you know, still emerging a candidate at this at the time of the staping.
Uh, do they have any idea what the damage would be like to do that, both on, uh, the individual tax devoting for in the total bill to do that? I guess maybe the time to do that. Like how much it would cost? Yeah.
Um, so they're talking about fixing it in stages. I mean, overall, they believe that it would cost three to five billion dollars just to fix the San Francisco Sea Wall in San Francisco Sea Wall. The emergency wall is only part of San Francisco's overall short line. And the initial amount of money that they're talking about asking people to vote on in the fall is somewhere between $400 and $500 million total.
And they haven't decided or released a plan for how they would ask people to contribute to it, for what it's where they're also trying to get money from the state of California. Um, and of course, San Francisco and Oakland are, you know, suing oil companies. Yeah. To hold them responsible for sea level rise.
And that case is still alive and has not yet been dismissed. Um, and there's a lot of cases with different legal theories that are moving. Uh, so it may be the case, even if that case gets dismissed, that a case under a different legal theory and a different court may help hold oil companies responsible for that. Sure.
That would be so. Yeah. We'll see where that goes. Sorry.
So there's a lot of clearly a lot in, uh, planning and being voted on. Sorry guys. I'm always making that stuff more complicated. No, no, no, no, no, it's, it's good.
We like to get nerdy here. Um, we just like to back it up sometimes. So everybody totally gets it. I mean, we've, we've, yeah, we've gotten there.
Don't worry. Brian, you'll hear a deep sigh from Brian if he's totally lost. Um, I forgot what Venice was. So don't worry.
Um, no, yes, there is a lot in planning, like I was saying, and being voted on. Um, but what is going to happen in the next 20 or 50 years, no matter what actions they take. Right. What's coming down the pipe, uh, sea level rise wise?
Oh, kill me. Uh, no matter what they do. Well, I mean, here are things we definitely know are happening that are combining to create more risky flooding circumstances around the bay. The predictions are for around two feet of sea level rise by mid century.
So that's within 32 years. Um, in addition, we know that, um, sea level rise, of course is, is rising. Uh, we have to pull the quin. That's where we're talking now on pulling a quin.
I know sea level rise is rising. Um, we know that sea level, we know that sea levels are rising. We know that there are more in California, we've got more intense storms and more extreme precipitation. And so managing water on the landscape becomes a big deal.
Um, in one of the places I went, you know, we put creeks into, and we do this all around the country. We put creeks into concrete channels and we try to speed the water away from us. And when you do that, um, and that's why, like in Los Angeles, you'll have swift, you have a lot of swift water rescues in the wintertime of homeless people in Los Angeles River, because we, that water can be 35 miles an hour if it's less than a foot deep. It's crazy.
So, so our relationship with water and our relationship with our shorelines has been a relationship with water has been to push it away from where we live and to keep it away from places we want to build housing and buildings and our relationship with the shoreline in San Francisco used to be that there were dumps all around the edge of the bay. I mean, people, there are pictures of people just backing up and dumping trash right at the edge of the bay. So, and there's, I mean, we obviously spread out, um, you know, the places where the water comes from, like San Bruno Mountain or mountains around San Francisco, um, and where the water falls into the bay and we, you know, kind of widen these areas. And when we did that, we rethought our whole hydrology and that's going to affect the risk to everybody around the bay in terms of the cost of flooding and the cost to potentially people and buildings.
Hey guys, it's Quinn. If you're listening to this, you obviously like podcasts and you probably like music too. On Spotify, you can listen to all of that in one place for free. You don't even need a premium account.
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Spotify is the world's leading music streaming service. And now it can be your go to for podcasts too. So for our San Francisco listeners and Oakland listeners and Greater Bay Area and everybody else who's never been to San Francisco, but has only seen the Golden Gate Bridge on the map, can you tell us two feet in the next 35 years, happen no matter what? What's within that danger zone?
Let me think of ways that we can do that. Right. From what I understand, the two airports are in pretty deep shit. Is that correct?
Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say I was going to try to count stuff up. So we're talking about, I mean, the two airports, we already have nuisance flooding. They call it, which is kind of time related.
Yeah, what a work it is. News and flooding in Bart stations in downtown San Francisco and in Oakland. So Bart might be affected and Bart, of course, already has to slow down trains for seismic events. So Bart now is planning for multiple disaster threats that are dynamic and changing and getting worse.
And then completely unsexy. Like I was completely uninterested in this when I got when I started doing the reporting, but wastewater treatment plants. And the reason why wastewater treatment plants are at sea level is because it's cheaper to use gravity to send waste from like the hills. So if you live in the Berkeley Hills or in Hillsboro or, you know, any place up a hill and you're like, oh, sea level rises and going to affect me because I'm sitting up on this hill.
It's totally possible that your wastewater treatment plant gets swamped. They get swamped by high tides. Now there's a lot of planning in the wastewater treatment industry and they all wanted to make sure I knew that on Twitter when I did the story. But it is also true that a UC Berkeley scientist figured out that five times as many people are going to be affected by flooding of infrastructures around the edge of the bay than by direct flooding on their own.
Oh, traffic jams too, of course. There's another reason you can get into a traffic jam because of there's already flooding on Highway 37 in Napa, which is a key part of the North Bay commute. And the thing about San Francisco traffic that I relearned is there's no way to get around a mess. Like I find that in Los Angeles, if I need to go someplace, there's usually two or three different choices I can make.
I make a bad one sometimes. In the Bay area, you've got, you've usually got one route. You know, you have to go this one way. Well, that way.
People don't totally realize is me again. We're talking about the whole Bay Area, but how small geographically is San Francisco really is there not a ton options? Yeah, it's not that big. But there's, you know, they've banked a lot on it and Oakland is similar.
So, so areas like that, wastewater treatment plants in the airports, those are essential pieces of infrastructure. What planning is being done? What actions beyond planning are being done because 35 years is not a long time. No, it's not.
So there are things you can do. And I will say that this is also a problem for people who aren't in the Bay or maybe only visit the Bay Area or our Dodgers fans. You know, there's an entire coastline of California that's got critical plants. And we talked about wastewater treatment plants, but there could also be peaker plants, natural gas plants or other power plants.
And you have those along the California coastline. This is why my name is Nuclear Power Plant is like on the ocean. Yep. And this thing about the wastewater treatment plants is actually true in any city.
Like you think about like, here's what engineers try to do when they build infrastructure, they want to build infrastructure that can last, but they also want to build infrastructure that is cost effective. And so this isn't just like some dumb idea that somebody had in the Bay Area that caught on. This is a kind of logic that people have in a lot of US coastal cities. So it's worth familiarizing yourself about that if you live someplace else.
But the kind of money that goes on is you can take interim steps like moving critical machine equipment to higher levels. I used to live in Louisiana after Katrina for a few years and it was a big deal that the hospitals flooded. People knew that there was going to be eight to 10 feet of flooding in places. But what they ended up doing was moving critical generators and pumps, you know, that much higher to a second floor, if possible, if it was a health care facility and health care facilities are at risk in a lot of cities, not just the Bay Area, not just New Orleans, all around the US.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, New York's all of that with Sandy. And again, kind of tithing together.
I mean, New York's, you know, and the New Jersey, the shore, like all the rebuilding that's happened, it's great. But it's kind of like Puerto Rico and then you go, yes, but the hurricane season just started again. And this is like, this is all season old cyclical. So, you know, they're, they're forward-looking planning efforts.
Post Sandy have been, you know, fairly criticized. What's, what's interesting is, you know, San Francisco gets a ton of rain, right? But they don't really face hurricane type threats like that. So there's not as much of a, it's not, there's not as much of a huge opportunity, if we can call it that for a come to Jesus moment, where you go like, Oh, shit, we have to figure this out.
But like you said, in San Francisco, and this is where I'm really curious, like, you know, you said in New Orleans, it'd either be eight to 10 feet of rise and of flooding and you're moving generators to second floors. The folks in the Bay Area saying it's going to be two to 10 feet on a normal day. So, yeah, you know, moving generators to the second floor is not a long-term solution. What do you do with an entire airport or waste treatment plant or things like that, knowing that that's, you know, again, it's not going to be 10 feet and 35 years, but we keep finding that we're underestimating this every time we look at it and go back and measure.
I just, I'm fascinated and horrified to kind of see like what these places are going to do. I mean, I'm, you know, my best friends of some year, and I'm an hour here from from the Norfolk Naval Base and they're fucked. Yeah. And I would say the government, in a particularly the defense department, has a history of thinking about how climate change is going to affect their operations.
But here's another essential truth about planning for sea level rise that makes it really complicated and challenging. And the Bay Area is kind of this microcosm of the problem nationally. There are nine counties around the Bay Area. There are 101 cities and something like 43 or 44 that touch water, that touch Bay water.
What that means is that they would have to have clearer authority to decide what to do. They would have, you know, there's not, we have not created dedicated funding streams in a lot of the cases. It's a lot easier to go to the public and say, Hey, you want to have an airport? Here's what it takes to have an airport.
But it's a little more complicated to do that in a bunch of these communities that are built on landfill that may or may not have a population that's willing to tax themselves. They had, and by the way, they had very low voter turnout for this too, just like around the rest of the Bay. Foster City is that community built entirely on landfill. It was a developers vision.
The foster family made that whole thing up in the mid 60s to the 1970s when it was finally incorporated and started being foster city and they taxed themselves. I mean, basically between like, it's on the best value of the property, but, you know, between 270 and $440 for like the average house, something like that, a year to raise an earth and levy around that community. That's not, I mean, that's a strategy that if you continue to do that, is going to look like New Orleans in the long run. Yeah.
Wow. So it's, I understand, particularly in California, where we have this tradition of local rule, right? We have very strong cities and the state has tried to take leadership positions on climate change in the last decade or so, but it's complicated. Everybody's got their power base and there's, you have to sort of create new piles of money to build a piles of things to protect you from the ocean.
Mm hmm. Okay. And, you know, talk about it. Sorry, Brian.
I mean, again, you come back to something like Norfolk and multiple stakeholders. I mean, you know, aside from the people who are employed there or the Newport News Shipbuilding, where we literally produce everything that we put out into the water, the people who work there, the people who live there and, you know, the taxes that are involved in the folks that are living there in the real estate and the federal government. I mean, there couldn't be more stakeholders for something like that. You know, even removing just the military threat of how do you move the world's biggest naval base?
Yeah. And I also, it's got to be so hard. I don't, I'm glad you bring that Norfolk perspective. I think about South Louisiana too, and how you have a variety of risk factors for a bunch of people in South Louisiana and they'll have different levels of economic interest and strength to bring to this.
So when they talk about building a leaky, levy or building protection for South Louisiana and some communities are going to get left out, you know, in some ways, the phrase they use that's you might have heard, I don't know whether you've heard this. It's called managed retreat. They talked about it in New York after Sandy. And in fact, New York actually bought out entire streets and entire neighborhoods because they financially doesn't make sense to keep being in some of these places.
Well, and that is the big thing. And it seems so hard to fathom, but it is true. And I think New Orleans is probably, you know, for a variety of reasons facing that more quickly than those folks, which is, yeah, when is it not worth it to keep occupying these lands? Yeah.
But I mean, like in San Francisco, where people spend so much money for, I mean, there was like a tear down shack that was on the market for 900,000 the other day. Right. I'm not. That could be any day of the week here.
Right. So people aren't going to give up that shoreline in the Bay Area without at the very least enormous amounts of discussion. Sure. Sure.
Which is an action, which is the opposite of what you're interested in here. Yeah. So speaking of what is the action going forward? What should citizens be aware of?
San Francisco citizens and elsewhere? I come back to how important local news and local action is. I continue to be this huge, huge advocate for and supporter of people informing themselves and arming themselves with information locally. Quinn, you obviously are a citizen in multiple places and spend a lot of time, you know, being passionate about the local communities that you're in.
And I think that that's a huge deal to inform yourself about if you live in a shoreline or a coastal area, to be familiar with the kind of planning decisions that are made and to ask people what they're doing about it. Because if somebody's putting up a huge business complex near you, the decisions that business complex makes might affect your property. Right. I frequently, when I was going around the bay, you know, you talk to people, I met this guy who I had a lot of empathy with who grew up in South San Francisco.
He went to a Catholic high school that was a rival of my Catholic high school. He had been in flooding so bad that he couldn't get to school one day, but he had never thought about sea level rise. He had never connected coast of flooding and nuisance, letting it to sea level rise. So if you have an expansive understanding of what the impacts are of sea level rise, and you think about it like that on a local basis and pay attention to local decisions and follow local news, you're going to be a stronger and better advocate for the things you care about.
And it is, you know, you know, there's been a lot of talk about how local newspapers have suffered so much in the past 10 years with all the Facebook and the national more than national players coming online in the national news. But it is it's not just what is your local paper saying about the national news. There are specific issues that you have to tune yourself into, even in somewhere like New York or San Francisco or Norfolk or, you know, gosh, we vacation sometimes in the other banks in North Carolina. And like Miami, again, we've talked a lot today about not just storm flooding, but on a normal day, those streets are already getting flooded.
And you have to at some point reckon with the fact that they always say we're 30 to 40 years behind the emissions, right? So if we stopped everything right now, we're still in it for a long time. And these places are going to suffer big time. But if you don't tune in locally, you're not going to be aware of why and what's being done or something that you can do to help, you know, prompt hopefully discussion that doesn't just a discussion that comes to action.
Well, and if you're a property owner of any kind, and this goes not just for sea level rise, but for flooding that could come from extreme rain, it could mudslides. This isn't just a California thing, even though I'm describing all these California circumstances, your property risk is changing. And I think homeowners can be really smart about asking questions of their insurance agencies and getting informed about how the insurance, their insurance agent, or their insurance policy sees their risk because that's going to hit you in the pocketbook. Sure.
I mean, we talked a little bit about it. I don't have to go back and find the specifics of it, but how many Americans live within the flooding ranges that's sort of newly rectified flooding ranges of America's river systems, which are going to get it real bad too. Again, it's not just California and the coasts, which are going to get it worse, but this is happening everywhere. And on the other hand, it's also, I haven't read it.
Bounce around. There's also the problem of running out of water. If you live in the Southwest, these things are happening and you need to start asking questions of your city council and your local representative of going, you know, what is our plan when the Colorado River can't give us our water anymore? Because we have gotten not complacent, but I don't think most people in general know where their water comes from, but knowing that where it comes from and how that might be threatened, it's going to be pretty important going forward.
And obviously it's more important in some places than others. And it's not flooding, but these are all the repercussions that again are coming down the pipe. Yeah. Yeah.
I know. I really appreciate that you guys want to encourage people to take actions and give people a specific concrete action. And my only worry about our conversation is that the things that I think people can do are these small things every day as opposed to here as an organization you can become involved with. I don't have a recommendation like that.
I have more of a, I believe deeply that when people observe changes in their environment and then incorporate that into how they think. And I hear that with our friends all the time in California, we talk about how to be prepared for disasters in a way we didn't talk about 10 years ago. Sure. And not just because we're older and like, you know, getting to be old farts, but also because the risk is so tired, but also because the risk is changing.
And we're not wrong to notice it. And you can see it in all kinds of different ways. So I just believe in noticing things. No one will pay attention for you.
Absolutely. And it's really easy and really understandable while you put your head in the sand. Not be negligent, but to think, well, this isn't going to affect me in my lifetime or whatever. But it already is.
And it's going to keep coming. And like you said, if you're a property owner of any sort, personally or a business, yeah, anything, like you said, it's worth noticing. It's worth asking the questions on your local level. You don't have to join some big organization.
You know, again, we really try to dilate down to what people can do with their voice and their dollar. And sometimes that's, oh, you know, don't buy from these companies. It produces much plastic or whatever it might be. But in this case, it is.
It's really looking around and going, hey, are these beaches, these very local beaches that aren't fancy to bring in some of our economic dollars? Or are they threatened? You know, what's the situation there? I think about farmers markets.
We all didn't. Nobody used to shop at farmers markets. There weren't a lot of farmers markets and other proliferating. And people are in more of a dialogue about where did my vegetables come from?
Where did my food come from? I have a fishmonger. You know, or I know my butcher and I know where my meat comes from. And you can do that with news in a way too.
And I think if you apply that same logic to news, you can actually be as a local journalist, we want to be in a conversation with people locally to find out what they're seeing and what they're observing. So I had somebody ask me a question about trees in Los Angeles the other day. I'm checking it out for this Pacdio thing that I'm working on. I mean, I'm literally at the point where I'm answering people's individual questions and it helps me be a stronger journalist.
So people paying attention makes the journalism better. Let me ask a side question that's a little unrelated, but I do think it's important. Let's say you're a young person listening to this, Molly, and you're pretty young. You might still be involved in your community or you might still live in your original community where you grew up or go to college in the area, something like this.
Somebody wants to get into local journalism right now. How would you and where would you point them? That's a really good question. I think that we're moving into a land where there's a lot of project based, largely online outlets and public radio outlets that are contributing to this.
And because public radio is doing a better job of paying interns than when I was starting out and seeking diverse applicants and people who have local knowledge, there's a lot more opportunity even at small local stations there because there've been, and particularly since President Trump was elected, there've been more investments, even in small communities, to put local journalists boots on the ground to represent those communities and to report for them. So there's a lot of money that's, I mean, I can think of two or three names of like foundations that have pumped money into local news outlets. So if you are a local person in a community that's got a local news outlet, there may be more opportunities than there used to be already for project based work, particularly around elections, project based work around climate change even, and project based work with a local radio or an online outlet. That is so good to hear.
And I mean, how do you recommend that they take up this passion turning into a vocation? Did they just go out there and start asking questions and reporting back? Did they try to get a job at a proper public radio station or local newspaper or something like that? I'm always a big advocate for people, and I've been doing a lot of work for WNO in New Orleans in recent years.
So I don't just work for huge public radio stations on the west coast. I've also worked at a small station in Louisiana where the funding is complex and different. And what I would say about all the places that I've worked, I worked in local journalism in like four places now. And the continuing factor that I've seen for people who want to break in to any of those outlets and stations is the skills are going to benefit you as a journalist, that you might already natively have asking questions and being persistent will serve you incredibly well when you're trying to do these things.
In other words, yes, I believe that if you show up at a local station and present yourself as somebody who wants to get in the door and you are eager to learn and you're willing to be paid a relatively small amount of money to start, some money though, but a small amount. Sure. Then you can get into these stations. I've seen it time and time again.
That's awesome. Yeah. Inspiring. We need more of that more boots on the ground.
And there are old people like us who always I never turned out a conversation with somebody. I know I always don't be pretty my favorite conversation list. But I okay. Thank you.
And I also mean that I never took like if some young journalist approaches me and asks for advice about something or wants to get into a conversation, I've always done it because I had a more complex and not always positive experience when I was coming up and I wanted to do something else differently. So there are journalists like me out there. I love it. Not many though.
I mean, you're pretty special. Keep talking. Keep talking. Yeah, right.
You're welcome. Yeah. We are we're getting close here. So we'll get to wrap it up.
First of all, just thank you so very much for talking with us today, Molly. And for building your fort. We really appreciate it. And for it.
It was my pleasure. And is there anything that you feel like we I mean, I really tried to let you drive and I hope I didn't try to take us in any wrong directions. Is there anything that I needed to do differently or that you want to do pickups on or anything like that? No, by the way, you should answer.