Roblog

As Hurricane Ian batters the US, this story from 2017 makes for a staggering read. Its author, Michael Grunwald, visits Cape Coral, Florida – at that point the country’s fastest-growing city, despite it being little more than a swamp and sitting just a few feet above sea level.

Predictably, the city has its origins in what was basically a real estate scam:

“Gulf American unloaded tens of thousands of low-lying Cape Coral lots on dreamseekers all over the world before the authorities cracked down on its frauds and deceptions. It passed off inaccessible mush as prime real estate, sold the same swampy lots to multiple buyers, and used listening devices to spy on its customers. Its hucksters spun a soggy floodplain between the Caloosahatchee River and the Gulf of Mexico as America’s middle-class boomtown of the future, and suckers bought it.”

But, bizarrely, it somehow worked, with disastrous long-term consequences:

“The thing is, the hucksters were right, and so were the suckers. Cape Coral is now the largest city in America’s fastest-growing metropolitan area. Its population has soared from fewer than 200 when the Rasos arrived to 180,000 today. Its low-lying swamps have been drained, thanks to an astonishing 400 miles of canals – the most of any city on earth – that serve not only as the city’s stormwater management system but also its defining real estate amenity. Those ditches were an ecological disaster, ravaging wetlands, estuaries and aquifers. Cape Coral was a planning disaster, too, designed without water or sewer pipes, shops or offices, or almost anything but pre-platted residential lots. But people flocked here anyway. The title of a memoir by a Gulf American secretary captured the essence of Cape Coral: Lies That Came True.”

#

From 2015: Sam Knight’s dispatch from the Welsh war on Japanese knotweed, and the realisation that we’re not so different from the invasive, unkillable pest:

“Taylor kept talking about the knotweed’s power and versatility, and I thought I detected in his voice some of the admiration that I had heard from other professionals who had dedicated their working lives to controlling the weed, a feeling that Trevor Renals, the national invasive-species adviser at the U.K.’s Environment Agency, described when he told me about the time he saw a shoot of knotweed rise from a plant that he thought he had killed thirteen years earlier. ‘That’s my girl.’

“But in fact what Taylor was expressing was not admiration but the pain of recognition, another feeling that many people experience when encountering the plant, and one that I found myself suffering from during the summer I spent in its company. There is no weedier or more invasive species than humankind, and the world that we have made is for generalist organisms like us – Norwegian rats, common crows, zebra mussels, long-horned beetles, brown tree snakes – that can thrive on the far side of any mountain. ‘I mean, Antarctica is the only place we’ve not actually gone to and adapted to,’ said Taylor. ‘Japanese knotweed is the same.’”

#

Last year the payment processor Stripe posted a blog post outlining their belief that, if humanity was to tackle climate change, significant advancements in carbon removal technology would need to be made. They announced an intent to fund cutting-edge research into technologies that could help remove carbon from the atmosphere, either by sequestering it in the ground or by converting it into another form.

This year, they launched an amazing scheme that leverages their core business as a payment processor: Stripe Climate, a scheme whereby merchants who use Stripe can choose to redirect a percentage of their income to carbon removal research.

Opting in is straightforward for merchants, gives them a positive story to tell their consumers, and has the potential to be much more effective than the wishy-washy carbon offsetting programmes used by some merchants (and in particular airlines). I hope it rolls out beyond the US soon. #