Year 4, Month 5, Day 5: Just Enough

The LaCrosse Tribune (WI) notes the city’s realistic approach to climate change:

Most of the climate debate occurs at national and global levels. But local officials aren’t ignoring the phenomenon.

La Crosse is working with climate scientists to develop ways to better prepare for more extreme weather and other effects attributed to climate change.

The city also hosted last year a climate change workshop for city and county officials sponsored by the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts.

The primary focus was to build consensus about pragmatic adaptations authorities can make to changing weather.

“That sends up, I think, a message for municipalities: You need to be prepared for this kind of thing,” said Dick Swantz, La Crosse’s new Common Council president and a member of the city’s sustainability committee who attended the conference.

To that end, the city plans to add more green spaces on the South Side to help handle runoff from major rain storms.

The city is receiving more frequent major rainfalls, assistant city engineer Bernie Lenz said, taxing an infrastructure of pipes meant to divert the water out of the city.

Good. April 23:

Realistic approaches to the deepening problem of climate change have to work on more than one level. Whether it’s changing our lightbulbs or shifting our entire economy towards sustainability, no single act or program will defuse the crisis. Individual actions are easy to initiate and continue, but can only have negligible effects in a world with seven billion people. Global actions, on the other hand, demand overcoming extraordinary levels of political inertia, not to mention the dedicated opposition of the fossil-fuel industry, which fights tooth and nail against any moves to renewable energy.

This is why urban initiatives like La Crosse’s are absolutely crucial. Cities offer the possibility of meaningful and immediate collective responses to the runaway greenhouse effect’s devastating consequences — and as humanity overcomes its reflexive denial of the hard facts about our CO2 emissions and their effect on the planet, we are going to need to work together if our species is to survive and prosper in the coming centuries.

Warren Senders