The Keynote Address to Georgia State University College of Law's 28th Annual Law Review Symposium

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal
• Citation: Vol. 39 No. 4
• Publication year: 2023
• topic: Environmental Law,Energy & Natural Resources

The Keynote Address to Georgia State University College of Law's 28th Annual Law Review Symposium

Robert Verchick

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THE KEYNOTE ADDRESS TO GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF LAW'S 28^TH ANNUAL LAW REVIEW SYMPOSIUM RENEWABLE ENERGY: 2023 AND BEYOND

Robert Verchick^*

This is such an important topic, so, we are going to get to talking about the power grid and, specifically, climate resilience. But the first thing I want to do is answer the question that I know that you are already asking. And that question is: Was the octopus real?¹ And the answer is yes. There really was an octopus in a parking garage. And I'm going to tell you about why there was one, why you should care about that, and why it's related to the power grid.

So, here's the first part: yes, there was an octopus in the parking garage. The setting is a luxury condominium complex that sits on Miami Beach, right on Biscayne Bay, and it's got a nice, elevated parking structure. One morning, right after a supermoon, an extreme tide, and a series of other things—and as you know, there's been about a foot of sea level rise since the Industrial Revolution. We've had some changes. So, a guy named Richard Conlin shows up to get into his car in the garage and he steps in this huge pool of green water shimmering beneath the overhead fluorescent lighting. And he thinks, "Oh, I'm going to have to wade to my car." Then he hears a "gurgle, gurgle, gurgle," and he looks over by his car and he sees a few rubbery limbs flopping up and down. It's an octopus, absolutely alive.

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So, he does what anybody would do, what you would do, what I would do. He pulls out his phone and starts taking pictures. Then he puts them on the internet, the picture goes viral, and of course, I see it. And friends of mine who are law professors and so on see it. And we start sort of digging around. It was a friend of mine, Dan Farber, who's at Berkeley Law, he sent me this picture. I said, "What's this about?" He says, "It's a climate story."

And he was right—it's a climate story because there was a drainage pipe that came out of that garage, and it went right down to Biscayne Bay. When they first built that pipe, it was above the waterline, and now it is almost always below the waterline. So, when things drip through that pipeline, the octopuses congregate around the opening to eat. So, something switched in the tide and boom, the water goes the wrong way and up pops this cephalopod out of there. They eventually did get security guards to come out with little plastic buckets and they retrieved the octopus, and they brought it home. And I am told it lived a complete, normal, happy life.

But what I was wondering—and I was talking to my friend Dan about—was, if we can't keep octopuses out of parking garages, what else can't we do? We thought, well, what we're going to do is write an op-ed. That's what people like us do. So, we wrote an op-ed for the Miami Times called The Octopus in the Parking Garage. And that's basically what we said. We said, "Look, what can't we do that we're not already thinking about?" We said that "the octopus in the parking garage is an eight-armed alarm bell, an urgent call for recognizing and preparing for climate change."

Now, I had already been, at this time, in the Obama Administration working on climate resilience and trying to adapt fourteen federal agencies to climate change. So, this was already sort of wheeling through my mind. I eventually thought, "Well, I'm going to write a book about the octopus in the parking garage, about climate resilience." Just to cut to the chase and to be sort of extra simple about it: climate resilience, basically, for me, is a way of managing climate impacts in a way that helps societies learn, adapt, and thrive. It's about bouncing back better. You know something already about resilience,

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because we talk about it all the time in terms of emotional resilience, in terms of physical resilience. Even if you go through some sort of bad event in your life, what you don't want to do is just power through it and get out on the other side like a car at the end of a demolition derby that is kind of just spinning around in the middle. That's winning, but that's not resilient, right? That's just being tough. What you want to be—if something bad happens to you, God forbid—you want to be able to assess that situation, figure out how you can change some of the things you might do and actually be a stronger person. Right? Learn some lessons and thrive in a better way.

That's what we want for everything in society as we look at climate change. So, in my book, when I started looking at climate resilience, I looked at all kinds of things. I looked at resilience from wildfires, I looked at restoration of coral in the Florida Keys, I looked at flooding in New Orleans in my neck of the woods. And almost throughout, I'm just blown away by the people I'm meeting. Just all kinds of folks who are working in communities, who are working in schools—people like Chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar or Sharon Levigne, who's an international environmental justice hero—all working in different ways to make their communities safer in an era of climate disruption.

I am going to talk today about power outages, which often come as a second disaster in the wake of the first, main disaster. The question I want to ask is: How do we make the grid more resilient?

Here's why resilience is so important. The climate is changing in a way that has no analog in our history; much faster because of what human beings are doing to it. If we keep looking backwards to understand what the threats are going to be, we're going to have a problem. I'm explaining this already in my own state. Entergy is, as you may know, my region's major electricity provider, and they're putting together their own climate impact assessment and submitting it to our public service commission saying, "We figured out what the risks are and here's how we're going to build better." They figure out the risks by looking at the last thirty years or so. That is exactly—ladies and gentlemen—what we will not have. What we are going to have is something different from that. There's only one jurisdiction that I

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know of in the United States that's taking a different approach at this point. I'll tell you a little bit about that. There are a few that are going to be coming on-line with different approaches.

Here's the other reason that we need to know something about climate resilience. If we turned out the lights today all over the world and never consumed another molecule of fossil fuel, we would still be locked into more than one hundred years of heating. It's the same principle as if you boil a pot of water on the stove and turn the flame off. You're not going to stick your hand into it afterwards; it's got to cool down. And we are going to have the same issue. The other thing is, we are not cutting our carbon pollution down as fast as we need to, despite all the things that we are trying to do. So, we're going to get more warming than we can safely handle. The whole goal is to be able to manage impacts that we can't avoid and avoid impacts that we can't manage. Incidentally, we can't possibly limit global warming to 2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels if we don't cut the demand of fossil fuels, whether it's natural gas, or oil, or any of that. I'm not just saying that; that's the United Nations, that's the National Climate Assessment of the United States, that's climate scientists all over the world. Nobody—nobody—thinks we can hit our goals if we don't reduce the demand of natural gas, oil, and other fossil fuels. So, that must be Job One. The other Job One is preparing for climate disruption.

Now, here's the reason why: because we know it's going to be expensive and hard, right? We know that. But we know that the other side is going to be even worse if we don't do anything to adapt to climate change. If we don't do anything to reduce our demand of fossil fuels by the end of this century, our economy is going to lose half a trillion dollars every single year. Just to put that in perspective, that is about the same amount of money that our economy expands by every year, which is to say any economic expansion we get in 2100 goes to pay off climate change.

So, we've got to have a different plan. Actually, a study published in Nature Climate Change ...