I’m Kal Penn, and this is Getting Warmer.
We hear a lot about climate change endangering the planet,
but the planet is going to keep going for millions of years.
It might rearrange some continental plates, maybe dabble in dinosaurs again.
Who knows? It's got plenty of time.
The danger, obviously,
that we're really talking about here is how climate change will impact us.
So let's focus this episode on the place where a lot of us live.
Cities.
56% of the world's people currently live in cities,
which is expected to increase to 68% by 2050.
Cities are directly in the crosshairs of climate impacts,
so they need to be prepared.
But right now, they're not.
Record setting
temperatures topping 104 degrees,
fueling raging fires across London.
A record amount of rain fell in Manila on Saturday.
The partly submerged city of Yangzhou.
Its subway system now an underground river.
The New York City subway system shut down overnight.
This is a fire that erupted
during the morning rush hour along the busiest interstate there in the city.
Increasingly frequent heat waves are placing a massive strain
on cities, causing failed power grids, buckled roads, melted airport runways
and even melted electrical cables that look something like out of Jurassic Park.
And hold onto your butts because that's actually just the heat.
Many cities have outdated drainage systems,
so heavy rain can cause devastating floods.
Here in New York City in September of 2021, over
three inches of rain fell in a single hour.
And if you've ever been here, you know that the city is mostly steel,
glass, concrete and piles of garbage.
So that rain didn't get soaked up into the ground.
Roads turned into rivers
and tragically, several people drowned in their own apartments.
That's horrific.
And it could get much worse in the coming years.
Intensifying heat and storms will stress
urban infrastructure already weakened by decades of underinvestment.
And that means cities are facing a crisis of infrastructure adaptation.
I know there's a lot of crises to keep track of these days.
So if you're organizing alphabetically, this one goes between
inflation and K-pop military service.
When it comes to adapting cities to climate change,
there are tons of incredible imaginative plans, and they usually come
with beautiful artist renderings that make you think, oh, yes, that looks amazing.
Oh, I'd love to live there.
Look at those windmills.
Oh my God. Is that a person in a hammock?
I love hammocks. Let's do this.
Let's do this right now.
Unfortunately, redesigning cities is an incredibly
expensive and slow process, especially here in America.
Take rapid transit, which desperately needs to be upgraded in several cities.
The Green Line extension in Boston has been under construction for three decades.
And in New York, the Second Avenue subway extension
costs $2.6 billion per mile.
There's no single reason for the high costs and delays.
It ranges from overdesign to understaffing to a lack of expertize.
Since, you know,
the last time we built a bunch of
infrastructure in the United States was in the 1940s.
But look, whatever those important reasons are,
and they are important to keep in mind,
the end result is that less infrastructure gets built and that's bad
because climate change is kicking in our front door
and we need to start adapting yesterday.
Thankfully, some cities have started to take action,
although often as a reaction to tragedy.
Seoul recently moved to ban construction
of its underground apartments, like the ones in the movie Parasite,
after a massive rainstorm drowned several people in their homes.
And it took Superstorm Sandy in 2012
for New York City to get serious about prepping for climate change.