Foreword

• Author: Michael Curley
• Pages: 9-10

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Foreword

For the last 50 years, we have been spending huge sums of money on urban

sewage to clea n up our waterways and we have been imposing strict regula-

tions on polluting businesses to keep our air clean. We still have to throw

money at urban sewa ge but now agricultural runo and stormwater are our

#1 water problems, both of which we now need to pay for as well.

Who’s going to pay for agricultura l runo? Farmers? Who’s going to pay

for an urban church to replace its parking lot with “green infrastruct ure? e

pastor and the congregation? Do you know of any governor who’s going to

make either a farmer or the pastor of a church pay for these projects?

As jobs become more of a political issue, we can’t keep putting stricter air

pollution controls on businesses, which ca n just take their jobs a nd move to

another state. We’re going to have to start creating nancial incentives for

those businesses to stay.

So the rst question is: who wil l pay for these new environmental chal-

lenges? Will t hey be aordable for the average citizen? Will there be sub-

sidies? e next question is how will they pay for them? Can they nance

them? What’s the most cost-eective way to pay for them?

In addition to our old familiar problems with clean water and clean air,

there are several new issues that we’re just getting acqua inted with. e rst

of these is global warming. We will need to pay to reduce the amount of

greenhouse gases that we humans are pumping into the atmosphere each

year. But in addition, we will have to pay to live with some of the inev itable

consequences of global warming like rising sea levels a nd extreme weather

events. Resilience, Adaptation, and Mitigation are the three new buzzwords

for some of the strategies that we must embrace to survive global warming.

We’re not used to thinking of rebuilding coastal cities after destructive

hurricanes as a quality of life issue. But indeed it is. Just as much as dealing

with asthma is when someone lives downwind of a huge chimney.

Another new quality of life issue is cybersecurity. What happens when the

power goes out—for a long time? Will you have water? Will the toilets work?

Will you be mobile? e U.S. power grid is highly vulnerable to vandals and

terrorists. It is vulnerable to the weapons of foreign governments that are our

enemies? And it is vulnerable to hackers of all sorts who can bring the cyber

networks that we now all rely on to a complete halt.