LESS WATER MIGHT BE PLENTY FOR CALIFORNIA, EXPERTS SAY, AND CONSERVATION IS ONLY THE START

Original Story: latimes.com

Across California this summer, residents have been racking up water conservation numbers that defy expectations — a 27% reduction in June, followed by 31.3% in July.

Perhaps more impressive than the percentage figures, however, is the actual volume of water saved over two months: 414,800 acre-feet.

That's a lot of water — more than twice the amount projected to be available annually from two proposed storage facilities that would cost a combined $3.5 billion to build: the Temperance Flat Dam on the San Joaquin River and an expansion of Shasta Dam. A Denver natural resources lawyer is reviewing the details of this case.

The conservation performance raises a host of possibilities, and profound questions, for water policy analysts and managers as they contemplate California's hydrological future in an era of climate change and increased competition for an essential natural resource.

Some experts see an approach following the lead of the energy sector in California.

In the last quarter century or so, a "soft path" to energy reliability — one built on conservation, innovation and mutual incentives for buyers and sellers alike — has replaced the brute strategy of building all the generation plants needed to power all of the state all of the time.

Advocates for a comparable approach regarding water envision a mix of heightened consumer awareness, especially when it comes to landscaping options, as well as increased efficiencies in homes, industry and agriculture.

They also point to better reuse of water through groundwater reclamation, recycling and rainwater capture, and a reformulation of a financial model so that water agencies are not forced to charge more when their customers use less. A Houston energy lawyer assists landowners in resolving disputes involving operators' improper use of the land and other breaches of their contracts with landowners.

"The reality is that there are so many soft paths that we can take that might have a lot less environmental impact and be a lot less expensive, and still meet our future demand," said Newsha Ajami, director of urban water policy for Stanford's Water in the West initiative. "This is probably a smarter tack than building more infrastructure, and moving more water around long distances."

Scientist Amory Lovins popularized the term "negawatt" in the 1980s to describe the idea that there is marketable value in power not produced or consumed.

Utilities clamoring for more generation plants "have gotten into the terrible habit of looking at the top line instead of the bottom line, because for a century they've had sales and revenues going up together," Lovins observed in a 1989 speech entitled "The Negawatt Revolution."

"For some reason, it's hard for them to get used to the idea that it's perfectly all right to sell less electricity, and so bring in less revenue, as long as costs go down more than revenues do," he said.

Asked to ponder the possibilities of a "negawater" revolution, Lovins in an interview ran down a list of two dozen or more approaches that might be borrowed from the energy sector and applied to water.

They included incentives for appliance stores to stock only the most water-efficient products, fostering "robust and diverse" markets that would place a tradeable value on conserved water, and finding ways for water providers to balance their books even as they sold less water.

He even suggested retraining the state's famously energetic bar of water lawyers to become water traders instead.

Some of the suggestions, he said, already could be found piecemeal in California and elsewhere. But a comprehensive approach, Lovins said, could make California "not permanently water rich, but permanently water secure."

He pointed to work of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland-based water think tank. With the Natural Resources Defense Council, it published a report last year that identified a host of measures that, if pursued in California, could generate 10 million to 14 million acre-feet of water a year without creating major crimps in lifestyle or dents in the economy. A Birmingham natural resources lawyer is following this story closely.

The institute's Peter Gleick, a longtime proponent of a softer approach to water supply development, said the conservation response to the drought only underscored the potential.

"I think the message is pretty clear," he said. "The idea that we can build traditional infrastructure and have any hope that it will solve our water problems is an idea from the last century and not the current one. … There is still vast untapped potential to do all that we want to do in this state with less water."

While applauding the response of Californians, many water policy experts also cautioned against seeing conservation as a permanent panacea. Said Lester Snow, executive director of the California Water Foundation: "Conservation is one of the tools, but I would not want to count on it completely."

Many advocate an every-tool-in-the-shed approach, which state water board chair Felicia Marcus likes to call "belts, suspenders and flying monkeys." And that would include increased storage capacity, whether above ground in reservoirs or below in aquifers.

"The debate on storage water," said Ellen Hanak, an economist with the Public Policy Institute of California, "is more about where are we going to put the water, rather than should we do it."

Climate change, she said, might mean the Sierra snowpack will become less reliable from year to year and, if so, an increased capacity to capture and store rainwater will become crucial. In fact, the paucity of snowmelt in this drought has been its distinctive natural feature.

"That is why," Hanak said, "this drought is the drought of the future."

If a greater reliance on rainfall is the future, the Sonoma County Water Agency has been living that future for its entire 65 years. None of the water it supplies to districts serving 600,000 customers north of San Francisco comes from Sierra snowmelt or passes through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

The system lives on rainwater, and thus can be seen as something of a proving ground for the state. While residents served by the agency exceeded mandatory reduction targets for two consecutive months, ahead looms a potentially cruel paradox.

Large-scale reductions in consumption also cut into revenues for those in the business of selling water. In time, local agencies must either ask consumers to relax their water-wise efforts, curtail services and maintenance or raise rates, creating a use-less, pay-more paradigm for their customers — and a conservation buzz kill.

In the drought, the Sonoma agency has dipped into reserves to offset the decline in revenues: $6 million last year alone. Looking for a more stable foothold, General Manager Grant Davis and his colleagues are pursuing a long-term approach that will allow water conservation to continue without having to face a financial penalty.

"We have got to get to the point where you use less and ultimately pay less," Davis said.

That will require restraining demand while finding ways to move water more inexpensively, and at the same time ensuring, as Davis put it, that "every molecule that we produce is preserved and extended."

To that end, the agency attacked energy costs by turning to renewables — solar, geothermal, hydroelectric — and building a carbon-free delivery system.

It has engaged scientists in research to better understand storm systems called atmospheric rivers, which in the rainy seasons will allow dam operators to make more nuanced decisions about when to release water for flood control purposes and when to hold it.

It has improved capabilities to clean up and recycle wastewater and replenish aquifers. And it has worked with residential customers to swap out leaky toilets, install turf lawns and employ other conservation efforts.

Along Dry Creek, a major artery for the Sonoma system, the agency intends to spend $50 million to enhance the natural channel, enabling it to deliver water for customers in the summer while also meeting federal mandates to better protect the creek's fall run of coho salmon. The alternative would be a $200-million pipeline to bypass the creek.

By taking this approach, Davis said last week, standing beside the pleasantly gurgling creek, "I can say confidently that we can use less water, and stretch our water supplies further, and pay less money."

Not an unhappy outcome all around.

SHALE GAS AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Original Story: nytimes.com

Every columnist has his or her “go to” sources, people we rely on for their deep understanding of a particular subject, and a mode of thinking about that subject we find persuasive. For me, one such person is Michael Levi, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. An Austin energy lawyer is following this story closely.

Levi believes in the power of facts. Though sensitive to the importance of dealing with climate change, he doesn’t indulge in the hyperbole that you sometimes hear from environmentalists. And while he appreciates the economic import of fracking and shale gas, he isn’t afraid to call out the industry on its problems. Early in the fracking boom, he went to Pennsylvania to observe what drilling for shale gas was doing to communities — and came away believing that “it was going to stir up much more local controversy than many were assuming.” Which is exactly what happened.

For the latest issue of Democracy, a quarterly magazine focused on progressive ideas, Levi has written an article titled “Fracking and the Climate Debate,” which he described to me the other day as a kind of summing up of his views about the role of cheap natural gas and fracking in the fight against climate change. A Tulsa energy lawyer represent clients in energy matters including drilling contracts, fracking, mineral rights, and renewable energy disputes.

There are many people, of course, who believe that natural gas shouldn’t have any role at all in the climate change fight; while it may emit half the carbon dioxide of coal, it is still a fossil fuel that will keep us from going all-in on renewable energy. And the methane that can leak from fracked wells is a potent greenhouse gas that can negate natural gas’s advantage over coal.

There are others who see natural gas as a panacea. They believe that so long as we keep increasing production of inexpensive natural gas — mooting the need to build more coal-fired power plants, and even making it possible to shut some down — then we will be doing more than enough to control carbon emissions. In his article, Levi says, in effect: You’re both wrong. A Baton Rouge energy lawyer provides professional legal counsel and extensive experience in many aspects of energy law.

After recounting a little history — was it really only a half dozen years ago that environmentalists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were promoting natural gas as a “step towards saving our planet”? — Levi delves into the three rationales behind their abrupt change of heart. One is the disruption that fracking imposes on communities. The second is the methane problem. The third is the “rapid progress” being made by renewable energy, which many environmentalists believe makes further reliance on natural gas unnecessary.

Levi believes that appropriate rules by both state and federal governments can mitigate the first two problems. Indeed, he believes that the industry needs to be better regulated for its own sake; otherwise, people will continue to fear the worst. As for renewables, the hard truth is that if the country were to move away from natural gas, the big winner would be coal, not solar or wind.

But that doesn’t mean that those who cling to the “free-market fundamentalist dream that a thriving shale gas industry will make climate policy unnecessary” have got it right. On the contrary, writes Levi, “merely making natural gas more abundant may do little, if anything, to curb carbon dioxide emissions.” How can this be? The answer is that, although cheap natural gas is helpful in that it “shoves aside coal,” it also boosts economic growth (which means more emissions), and “gives an edge to industries that are heavy energy users and big emitters.” These two conflicting forces effectively cancel each other out.

The best way to maximize the good that shale gas can do, concludes Levi, is to make it a key component of an overall energy policy that is bent on driving down carbon emissions. The government could promote policies to move the country away from coal, “which accounts for three-quarters of carbon dioxide produced in U.S. electricity generation.” A San Antonio energy lawyer represents clients in fee mineral and royalty transactions, in negotiating the terms of seismic permits, option agreements, oil and gas leases, easements, and surface and subsurface use agreements, as well as in uranium leasing transactions.

And while he doesn’t say so explicitly, he does seem to see shale gas as a potential bridge to renewables: If the government enacted policies that “reward emission cuts” no matter what technology achieves that goal, then coal users would gravitate to natural gas, while natural gas users might well move toward renewables. Government would also have to encourage policies that “drive down the cost of zero-based emissions.”

My own belief is that shale gas has been a blessing for all kinds of reasons: It has given us a degree of energy security that we haven’t seen in many decades, and has been a key source of economic growth. And, no matter how much environmentalists gnash their teeth, it is here to stay. That’s why the responsible approach is not to wish it away, but to exploit its benefits while straightforwardly addressing its problems. Ideologues will never get that done. That’s why Michael Levi’s realism — and his pragmatism — are so critical to hear.

CALIFORNIA'S THIRST SHOULD BE NATION'S WAKE-UP CALL

Original Story: freep.com

California Gov. Jerry Brown broke the bad news from a parched field bereft of greenery or moisture: "We should be standing on 5 feet of snow," he said. "We are in a historic drought."

For Californians, a fourth consecutive year of below-average rainfall and snowmelt will mean the first mandatory water restrictions in the state's history.

But those of us living in the other 49 states won't be exempt from the fallout. California farmers, who provide about half the country's fruits and vegetables, have already lost hundreds of thousands of acres of previously productive farmland. The impact on produce prices at your local grocery store will only intensify if the drought, already reckoned the worst in California's recorded history, persists.

As U.S. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, noted, "the entire nation should take notice that the most productive agricultural state in the country has entered uncharted territory." A Tulsa natural resources lawyer is following this story closely.

Californians have contended with water shortages for more than a century, and meteorologists and climate scientists disagree about the extent to which climate change is culpable for the current crisis.

Most say that natural variability accounts for the state's dramatically reduced rainfall, although a group of researchers at Stanford University blame greenhouse gas emissions.

But California's lack of rain has been exacerbated by a warming trend that is more conclusively linked to man-made climate change. Higher temperatures accelerate evaporation and reduce the snowpack that has historically served as a natural reservoir for California farmers. This year's snowpack measures just 6% of the historical average. A Chicago auto accident lawyer is following this stroy closely.

Brown's drought-fighting strategy has so far focused on a combination of long-term efforts to reduce greenhouse gases and conservation initiatives. The 25% reduction mandated for California's towns and cities this week was imposed only after the state fell far short of the 20% reduction that Brown sought when he issued voluntary conservation standards in January 2014.

Republican legislators skeptical that Californians can conserve or ration their way out of the current drought have called for new water projects that could boost the state's fresh water supply. They are the ideological brethren of the drill-baby-drill crowd that seeks to parry a looming energy shortage by increasing the domestic production of oil, coal and natural gas. An Atlanta natural resources lawyer represents clients in environmental, land use, and natural resources matters.

But many of these supply-side efforts are energy-intensive, threatening to deepen California's dependency on fossil fuels even as the drought reduces hydroelectric power.

Our proximity to abundant supplies of freshwater may give many Michiganders a false sense of security, at least until they wander into the produce aisle. But Brown's emergency edict makes it clear that the consequences of climate change are growing less theoretical, and more concrete, with each passing season.

Global warming is the challenge to which all of our destinies are increasingly linked. Michigan policymakers to whom California's troubles seem remote are missing the point, and squandering an important learning opportunity.

Keystone Pipeline: Opposing View-Points

Story first appeared in USA Today -

Build Keystone Pipeline: Our View

More than four years of exhaustive study is enough. Stop the foot-dragging.

Many controversial issues lend themselves to split-the-difference compromises, but the Keystone XL pipeline isn't one of them. That puts President Obama in a tough spot as his administration nears a decision on the proposed $7 billion project, which would carry tar-sand oil from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries.

For the environmentalists who strongly supported Obama's re-election, Keystone has become a crucial test of his promises to take climate change seriously. Thousands demonstrated in Washington on Sunday against the project, asserting that the pipeline would unlock so much dirty oil that it would be "game over" for the globe if the project proceeds.

For Canada, whose government badly wants the pipeline to go forward, the decision is an equally crucial test of the two neighbors' relationship. And for the United States, the project offers a rare opportunity to create jobs and lessen the nation's decades-long dependence on oil from unstable or unfriendly suppliers.

Both sides make strong arguments, but after more than four years of exhaustive study, the right answer on Keystone remains: Build it.

At a time of rising global competition for energy resources, the pipeline would bring reliable new oil supplies to a U.S. that still imports 40% of its crude, 7.6 million barrels a day last year. And 40% of those imports come from OPEC nations such as Venezuela, Iraq and Nigeria. Keystone is expected to supply 830,000 million barrels a day, a key step toward the long-sought goal of North American energy independence, which suddenly seems attainable.

Much of the opposition to Keystone has come from critics who say running a big pipeline through the heart of the USA is too risky. Haven't they noticed that tens of thousands of miles of oil pipelines already crisscross the United States? As long as the nation's quarter-billion vehicles rely almost exclusively on gasoline and diesel, pipelines are the safest and most efficient way to move it.

Obama delayed a final decision on Keystone last year, in part to allow a rerouting around environmentally sensitive areas in Nebraska. That has been accomplished, and Nebraska's governor signed off on the new map last month.

Nor would blocking Keystone keep the tar-sands oil in the ground. In a world starving for oil, it's overwhelmingly likely the oil would find another way to market — through a pipeline to West Coast ports to carry it to China, to East Coast ports to carry it to other nations, or by barge, rail and existing pipelines into the USA.

The goal of locking down tar-sands oil and stopping other forms of fossil fuel production such as fracking — as many protesters demanded in Sunday's demonstration — would be more compelling if the U.S. were ready to shift to renewable fuels such as solar, wind and biomass to power vehicles, heat homes and run factories. Last year, though, renewables supplied just 9.4% of all U.S. energy needs, despite robust tax incentives for wind power and electric cars. Shutting down conventional sources of energy at this point is naive and economically destructive.

Demand might be further reduced by making vehicles and buildings more efficient. A carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system could do the same by making the price of conventional fuels better reflect their cost to the environment.

Until that day, though, the best choice for the economy and the planet is to ensure ample, secure supplies of energy. The Keystone pipeline is an essential part of that strategy.

            ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pipeline Project Defines Folly: Opposing View

Keystone will prolong our addiction to fossil fuels and damage the climate.

A year ago, President Obama sent the Keystone pipeline project back for more review. In the months since, Mother Nature filed compelling public testimony:

• The hottest year in American history.
• An epic drought that drove up the price of food worldwide.
• Superstorm Sandy, with the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded north of Cape Hatteras.
• An Arctic melt so intense that NASA scientists said we faced a "planetary emergency."

Those abrupt and extreme changes in the planet's patterns demonstrate the stupidity of prolonging our addiction to fossil fuel, which is exactly what Keystone will do.

By providing a new and easy way to access the "dirtiest oil on earth," the pipeline will drive the expansion of tar-sands production. It is the definition of folly.

Its proponents have always claimed it will create lots of jobs (it will create some, for a couple of years, which is nothing to sneeze at — but the real jobs bonanza comes when we move decisively toward renewable energy) or boost energy independence (which is nonsense — this oil is destined for export). By easing the glut of Canadian oil, even its backers concede, it will raise, not lower, gas prices.

But the biggest argument for Keystone has always been: If we don't take the oil, someone else will. The oil barons boasted a year ago that they would build a pipeline to the Pacific instead — but people across Canada have risen up to block that plan, which is now all but dead.

That same kind of movement has arisen in the United States, where Keystone has become the first environmental issue in a generation to bring Americans into the streets and jails.

Sunday, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the largest climate rally in U.S. history took direct aim at the pipeline. As the Rev. Lennox Yearwood said, "This is our lunch-counter moment for the 21st century," when activism can help decide the future.

And should President Obama reject the pipeline, he'd be the first world leader to block a big infrastructure project because of the damage to the climate.

That's a legacy — the only one people will care about in the decades ahead.

Protesters rally in D.C. against climate change

Story first appeared on Philly.com -

More than 500 people from the region joined thousands of protesters Sunday in Washington, calling for strong action on climate change and a stop to the Keystone XL pipeline.

The pipeline would transport oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast. Opponents say it would worsen climate change by encouraging further development of the tar-sands oil resource.

They spent several hours in the bitter cold and a strong wind cheering, waving signs, listening to speakers, and marching around the White House, although President Obama was in Florida for a golf game.

Many - from experienced hands who have been at this for years, to middle-school students excited to be at their first big rally - consider climate change the defining issue of their time.

"Twenty-five years from now, nobody is going to look back at our era and say, 'Boy, I wonder how that fiscal cliff thing came out,' " said Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, an environmental group fighting climate change and one of the sponsors of the rally.

"Everyone is going to look back and say, 'Well, the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?' "

The rally came after a week of climate-change developments.

In his State of the Union address Tuesday, Obama said: "For the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change." He added, "If Congress won't act soon to protect future generations, I will."

On Wednesday, as a precursor to Sunday's rally, nearly 50 activists, including Philadelphian Eileen Flanagan, were arrested in an act of civil disobedience outside the White House.

The next day, the Government Accountability Office added the financial liability of climate change to its list of "high-risk" areas for the U.S. government, and two senators introduced climate-change legislation that would impose a fee on carbon emissions.

The Sierra Club, Clean Air Council, Earth Quaker Action Team, Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future, and other groups organized bus transportation from this region.

After adding yet another bus Saturday - Sierra Club organizer William Kramer said he was getting phone calls and e-mails up to the end - 11 buses with more than 500 people on board headed out from King of Prussia, Quakertown, Devon, West Chester, and Philadelphia. Several more left from central New Jersey.

For Jean Mollack, 58, a laid-off worker from Doylestown, it was one more in a series of Washington rallies that began with a Vietnam War protest in 1971. "I think we're ruining the world with our dependence on fossil fuels," she said.

If Mollack was an old hand, Grace DiGiovanni, 12, who goes to Green Street Friends School in Philadelphia, was one of the newbies. She said that attending the rally was all about her future. "This is for my generation of kids."

Groups from schools and houses of worship joined the buses. Organizers estimated the crowd at 35,000.

Joy Bergey, 57, a policy director for the environmental group Citizens United for Pennsylvania's Future, brought eight youths from Chestnut Hill United Church, where she's a longtime member.

They included Sarah Noonan-Ngwane, 16, who said environmental issues "should be at the core of what happens over the next four years."

And Monica Guess, 17, who said that if the Keystone pipeline got built, "it changes our whole future."

For Bergey herself, the rally was the continuation of a battle she began in 1979, when she had her first argument with someone who said climate change wasn't happening.

"I will not stop fighting," she said. "I want there to be a livable planet for all God's creatures."

Nancy Grossman, 53, a pharmacist who lives in Jackson, N.J., was worried about climate change even before she saw the destruction that Hurricane Sandy left along the coast.

"It's one disaster after another," she said. "I don't know what other proof people are looking for."

Albert Accoe, 62, a security consultant from West Philadelphia, said he was attending "for my children and grandchildren."

Liz Robinson, 63, who heads the Energy Coordinating Agency in Philadelphia and attended with her entire family, said, "Everybody should be here. . . . It's very profitable to burn oil. Unless all of us stand against climate change, it'll be too late."

Sea Level Debate Continues

story first appeared on usatoday.com

Echoes of Superstorm Sandy remain from Manhattan's once-flooded streets to Maryland's battered boardwalks to New Jersey's washed-away beaches.

No surprise. The Eastern Seaboard — or any coastal region — occasionally finds itself in the cross hairs of ferocious ocean storms. But it may have taken Sandy to drive home the added threat that scientists have been warning about for years: a rise in the sea level.

More of the same could lie ahead, suggest ocean scientists such as U.S. Geological Survey oceanographer Asbury Sallenger. The storm triggered the expected arguments about global warming's role, but that debate aside, the new constant for any storm is the increasingly important role likely to be played by sea level. In a study out Tuesday, climate scientists led by Stefan Rahmstorf of Germany's Potsdam Institute report that since 1993 sea level has risen worldwide at a rate 60% higher than predictions. The findings appear in the Environmental Research Letters journal.

Sallenger says sea-level rise is accelerating along the East Coast

The real question, Sallenger and other ocean experts say, is what effect rising sea levels, which are accelerating along a "hotspot" stretching from Cape Hatteras, N.C., to Maine, will have on storms hitting these places.

In June, Sallenger and colleagues reported in the journal Nature Climate Change that sea-level rise along the U.S. Atlantic Coast has been climbing at a rate three to four times higher than the global average since 1950. About 1.5 inches per decade now, it doesn't sound like a lot. But each inch counts, and New York Harbor's water level is 11 to 16 inches higher than it was a century ago, Sallenger says.

The accelerating sea-level rise springs partly from "subsidence," where groundwater withdrawals to sate thirsty towns and farms along the coast cause the ground to sink, and partly from warming waters in the North Atlantic, the study suggests. Warmer water simply takes up more space than cold water.

Not to be forgotten is that teetering infrastructure poses as much of a problem as global warming, says Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us.

Most climate scientists would see Superstorm Sandy as a largely natural event, not something born as a result of global warming, says Texas Tech climate researcher Katharine Hayhoe. But she acknowledges that the storm, sea-level rise and climate change are hard to disentangle.

A water level that's a few inches higher pales in comparison with a 14-foot storm surge in Lower Manhattan, but those few inches meant the surge was higher than it might have been otherwise.

And was the storm surge stronger because of climate change? Indeed. Warmer ocean temperatures could have provided up to 20% greater power for the storm, so climate change's role isn't necessarily an either-or question, Hayhoe says.

Most climate projections that look ahead to the coming century see hurricanes that look stronger, but are fewer in number. Why? Warmer waters strengthen storms but stronger winds above the equatorial oceans wreck the stillness that burgeoning tropical storms need to become ferocious hurricanes.

MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel says that while he does expect increased hurricane damage in the U.S. as the climate warms, Sandy is not a pure example of a hurricane. It was a hybrid event that started as a tropical storm, grew into a hurricane, and morphed into an intense nor'easter. He says climate science doesn't have enough data to say whether these hybrid storms like Sandy will become more or less frequent.

It also doesn't matter, Emanuel writes in the current Foreign Policy magazine, because the real problem is sea-level rise.

The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that warming alone, which expands ocean waters, would raise sea levels worldwide by almost two feet over the next century. Add in future melting glaciers in Greenland and elsewhere, and sea level could rise more than 3 feet by then, NASA climate scientist James Hansen and Stanford's Ken Caldeira reported at last year's American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Sallenger believes the "hotspot" study suggests this worsening will continue, yet he acknowledges other researchers are taking a more "wait-and-see" attitude.

Also worth noting, a 2009 study led by Environmental Protection Agency analyst Jim Titus concluded that 60% of the East Coast's coastal land is zoned for more development, while less than 10% is zoned for wetlands that soak up storms.

At the same time, dikes, or seawalls, are an unlikely remedy for the entire East Coast, says civil engineer Robert Traver of Villanova (Pa.) University. Of the 25 most-densely populated counties nationwide, 23 are coastal ones. "We can't build barriers around everything," Traver says.