the black husserl posted:

There is no feasible infrastructure that can save New York City from future devastating storm surges. You're probably imagining NYC as a bunch of skyscrapers, and that's definitely a part of it, but the majority of New York is low-lying residential areas. Every 1/8 inch of sea level rise makes Hurricane Sandy level events more and more likely in the future, and one of those was enough to cost the city $19 billion. We can barely afford to repair the subway after Sandy, and we're still working on repairing the damages - the train I take to work everyday is about to get shut down for more than a year to fix a storm-damaged tunnel. That shutdown is going to cause a massive amount of economic pain to the city and gently caress over hundreds of thousands of commuters, and its just one train among a dozen. If five shut down for a year? Fughedddaboutit.

Even if they manage to put a sea wall, or hell, a dome over the Financial District, that's just going to push the water into low-lying parts of the outer boroughs. Good luck doing fancy deals in those skyscrapers when none of the trains work to send the janitors in from Queens to clean the toilets.