Episode description

Rob Verchick is one of the nation’s leading scholars in disaster and climate change law and a former EPA official in the Obama administration. He holds the Gauthier-St. Martin Eminent Scholar Chair in Environmental Law at  Loyola University New Orleans. Professor Verchick is also a Senior Fellow in Disaster Resilience at Tulane University and the President of the Center for Progressive Reform, a research and advocacy organization that advocates for solutions to our most pressing societal challenges. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including The Octopus in the Parking Garage. A Call for Climate Resilience.

“Well, there are good stories and bad stories. So the good stories are, Oh my gosh, renewable energy is just a wonderful technology story with solar panels getting as cheap as almost anything. Wind turbine technology. We're working on offshore wind farm planning in the Gulf right now, and we're going to build wind turbines that can survive hurricanes. So there's a lot of technology going on in energy storage that involves batteries. And I'm hoping that at some point we're going to get to batteries that don't use things like lithium so much, so that we don't have to be involved so much in the mining of those kinds of things.

There's a lot of really interesting technology going on with using natural landscapes to protect against flooding and storms. So we have a coastal restoration effort in Louisiana, one of the largest in the world. And what we're experimenting with is diverting water from the Mississippi River to replenish sediment and grow new wetlands on our tattered shores. And that's technology, too. I mean, we've got some of the best engineering firms in the world down here, and NASA trying to figure out exactly how to do that. And if we can do it, we'll export that technology all over the place and help rebuild coastlines. So those are some really bright spots in terms of the technology that I see.”
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