Spending $200b to relocated doomed communities will save $1T

The best time to start a 100-year project was a century ago, the second best time is now.

One million US homes are built on floodplains. It would cost $200B to relocate the people who live in them. If we do that, we will save $1T. Those homes are doomed. When (not if) people leave them (either before or after floods come), they merely be arriving at a conclusion that is inevitable today.

https://prospect.org/environment/how-to-de-develop-in-an-age-of-fire-and-flood/

There’s a useful concept to think about here: “Bezzle,” JK Galbraith’s term for “the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.”

Some people call this the anthropocene, but we could also call it the bezzlepocene, the magic interval in which we can pretend that there is a chance that we’ll return to “normal,” and can therefore ignore the increasingly pressing need to get 1,000,000 American homeowners out of the path of the rising, violent waters coming their way.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft