Tech’s Meyer: South lags on climate change plans
OK, it’s not exactly a news flash. But Georgia Tech transportation professor Michael Meyer just showed us a slide at TedXAtlanta that’s pretty depressing: It displayed states that have targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They were all over the map. And none of them come close to the reductions that climate scientists say are necessary to ward off disaster.
But that’s not what bummed me out so much. It was an off-hand observation that Meyer at the tail end of showing us the slide: “There is one region of the country that is noticeably absent when it comes to looking at climate change and climate change issues.” The South.
Meyer isn’t a hippie in Birkenstalks and tie-dies. He’s one of the leading transportation engineers in the country. He’s served as a consultant for both the state of Georgia and the U.S. Department of Transportation.
He was the first of three speakers who focused on climate change at TedXAtlanta, an afternoon of big ideas, fancy talk and schmoozing that I’m attending at Unboundary, a marketing company in Midtown West.
Meyer’s talk actually was about “the impact of climate change on transportation systems” — a subject that appears to be off limits for discussion in Georgia political and media circles. His point was that, whether you believe in climate change or not, the issue already is bringing change to the transportation sector. Even with breakthrough innovations in fuel and technology, over time getting around will become more expensive, less convenient and very different from the current system.
“It’s going to cost us more to get from point A to point B than it does today,” he said simply.
But — and this is me speaking now — those inevitable changes aren’t at all part of the transportation discussion in Georgia. Politicians are still running on getting more roads in rural Georgia, and the big argument is over how to pay for that — not whether it’s entirely insane to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on systems that we know will be outmoded.
Meyer’s point — that we our transportation infrastructure will need to be entirely different from the transportation infrastructure we have now — shouldn’t be a radical statement Georgia political and media circles. But it is. Why is that?
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