Current and future leaders convened at Yale to explore a proactive approach to natural disasters.

It’s been six months since Superstorm Sandy devastated the Northeast, but its impact can still be felt. Recently, members of the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network held a conference at Yale University to consider the policy implications of the disaster. New Haven Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro set the stage for the conference with a keynote reminding us that “disasters test contracts of citizenship.” This notion was embodied in student presentations on ongoing policy work influenced by actions that governmental and non-governmental agencies took to manage the crisis.

A guiding principle behind these student policies and the speaker presentations: planning efforts for a natural disaster are hardly limited to trouble-shooting the problem when it occurs. As future policymakers, we must have thoughtful disaster plans in place, anticipate factors that contribute to the occurrence of natural disasters, and forecast the ramifications of rebuilding an area after a disaster strikes.  

Preparedness

Sandy was an opportunity for citizens to pull together in the face of adversity. This positive outcome aside, we should not lose sight of why community members had to create ad hoc campaigns in the first place: they were filling gaps in formal disaster relief efforts, some of which still haven’t even been identified. Students advocated for increased efficiency in relief plans to help neglected segments of the population, with one calling for an assessment of the role of civilian first responders in order to understand what public agencies can do to organize this manpower going forward.

To take one example, Sandy separated many mental health patients from their caretakers and limited their access to medicine. As one student policy pointed out, well-intentioned individuals tried to fill the void, but they lacked the background to handle these situations. Speaker Mary Casey Lockyer, Manager of Disaster Services for Health Services at the Red Cross, explained that while many Red Cross volunteers are registered nurses who have the training to handle mental health issues, they are also over the age of 50. These well-practiced volunteers faced challenges in moving around during the storm due to their advanced age. Her recommendation is for younger people to volunteer with the Red Cross as apprentices to these professionals so that they can be trained and mobilized in the event of another Sandy-sized disaster.

Another student policy in progress identified the asymmetric level of relief available to low-income Americans compared to their wealthier counterparts. In identifying this gap, public agencies can revise disaster plans to incorporate all Americans. Speaker Robert Smuts, Director of Emergency Management in New Haven, stressed that it is critical for public agencies to anticipate what will go wrong and prepare the right units accordingly. In anticipation of Winter Storm Nemo, which brought 34 inches of snow to New Haven, he prepared snow trucks that also had medical supplies and tools to cut down fallen trees.

Preventative Measures

Natural disasters are not entirely preventable, but there are measures that public agencies can adopt to mitigate the level of damage and the frequency with which they occur. Several student policies made the connection between climate change and natural disasters. One Roosevelter investigated the role of weather forecasting in disaster prevention. In her research, she found that America’s forecasting model lags behind Europe’s. This is a critical technical deficiency, since an advanced computer model could alert us to disasters sooner and allow us to build adequate buffers to mitigate damages and limit human suffering by evacuating people from areas that are likely to be devastated.

Another approach to prevent the effects of climate change is to limit the use of fossil fuels that release greenhouse gas emissions. One student policy looked at using solar power towers to harness the sun’s energy in lieu of fossil fuels.

Rebuilding    

If there is one takeaway from the conference, it is that we need to rebuild devastated areas thoughtfully. Speaker James Rausse, President of the American Planning Association’s New York chapter, enlightened us on the reality of overseeing a rebuilding project in Breezy Point. The storm destroyed several businesses, which had repercussions for the local economy. The challenge of rebuilding Breezy Point lies in deciding what ought to be developed and how to finance the project.

Congresswoman DeLauro addressed the challenge of financing rebuilding efforts through a National Infrastructure Bank. This entity would leverage private investments for public projects. The Concourse Fund, a student-run microfinance institution that began in Fordham University, suggested a stock market model for ideas on rebuilding in order to answer the question of “what ought to be developed.” The exchange would provide public officials with the opportunity to review all rebuilding ideas, as well as the cost and effectiveness of these ideas. This would allow them to make sound decisions and justify those choices to the public based on the market results.

Students also contributed their own ideas on what ought to be built, including a suggestion that we create a national park to serve as a buffer between high sea levels and residential communities in the Lower East Side. This would also allow the community to raise revenue from park entrance fees and events.

In order to answer the questions of “what ought to be developed” and “how to finance projects”, the Concourse Fund introduced the idea of retrofitting buildings with green roofs, which limit the fossil fuels that city buildings use for maintenance. As an added advantage, these green roofs would be financed through small business loans from community banks, which would result in active small businesses that stimulate the local economy.

The conference at Yale was an invaluable experience for all who attended. Several of the student presentations led to collaborative brainstorming sessions, which led to partnerships to develop ongoing policy work. Students also connected with speakers to help them develop their policies. Some of these students have already shown interest in showcasing their projects at the Roosevelt Institute’s annual Policy Expo in Washington, D.C., and submitting their final policies for publication in the next edition of the 10 Ideas journal. The conference was a unique opportunity for students to hear from individuals who are active in the Sandy recovery and rebuilding efforts, and it gave current leaders the chance to hear from future leaders in public service.

Preeya Saikia is the Economic Development Policy Director at The City College of New York's Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network.

Though Superstorm Sandy is fading from the headlines, we must keep working to help its victims and build a safer future.

On October 29, Superstorm Sandy made landfall in New Jersey, leaving damage strewn across the Caribbean in its wake. With a diameter of 820 miles, Sandy was the largest Atlantic tropical storm to date and caused roughly $50 billion in damage, making it the second most costly disaster after Hurricane Katrina. Hospitals were evacuated, the stock exchange was closed for the first time since 1888, levees broke, the New York City subway flooded, power was cut to 8 million homes, and communities were left to cope with property damage and the loss of loved ones. While damage and hardship were widespread, the storm greatly affected the region’s most vulnerable: the poor, the ill, and the elderly.

The storm may be long over, but its effects are still tangible today. To ensure a strong recovery and resilient future, it is essential that people continue to engage, innovate, and take action on issues related to Sandy’s impact and larger implications. As the people who will be grappling with future storms, environmental issues, health impacts, and community vulnerability, Millennials can and must make a considerable contribution in determining how we move forward.

Communities have proven resilient, with businesses, politicians, utility workers, organizations, and residents uniting to help provide relief and begin rebuilding, but there are still many ongoing struggles and lingering questions. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, there were calls to address climate change and outdated infrastructure, but that sense of urgency has largely subsided. Hospitals are coping with the closure of facilities and an overflow of patients. More than 3,500 families in the region still have no home and others no heat, relying on continued support from FEMA. Those whose flooded homes did withstand the storm face the problem of mold, and homeowners along the coast are worried about the increasing cost of flood insurance. President Obama cited Sandy’s disruptions to economic activity as one reason why the economy shrunk in the last quarter of 2012. Clearly, though Sandy has faded from the headlines, many in the Northeast are still feeling its effects.           

Other communities across the country are similarly grappling with the lasting impact of extreme weather events. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans just over seven years ago, and while there has been much progress, people are still coping with its effects. Under half of the pre-Katrina bus routes are running in New Orleans, a third of low-income mothers in the city are still suffering from post-traumatic stress symptoms, and many homes remain abandoned or damaged. Even when Sandy hit the Northeast in October, New Jersey and other parts of the region were still recovering from Hurricane Irene, which made landfall in August 2011. Given this recognition that a storm’s impact lasts long after its landfall, it is particularly important that we continue to monitor recovery and develop innovative solutions in Sandy’s aftermath.

Government, in its capacity as a steward of the common good, has a critical role in leading relief efforts and promoting development strategies that will reduce vulnerability. Many elected officials have embraced this role. Recently, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed purchasing homes that were damaged by Sandy, tearing them down, and maintaining the easily flooded areas as undeveloped land, which would serve as a natural buffer to protect coastal communities. While not yet approved, that program, which would pay residents the pre-storm value of their now damaged homes and offer incentives for others in vulnerable areas to sell and relocate, would cost roughly $400 million and involve approximately 10,000 homes in the 100-year flood plain. However, many elected officials have avoided some of the most difficult questions. This past August, North Carolina’s state legislature passed a law that banned the use of the latest data on sea level rise when planning coastal development, leaving residents along the coast without the long-term strategies that could reduce vulnerability to floods, storms, and rising oceans.

Students and other young people are determined to consider these difficult questions and build on innovative policy solutions. As we approach the six-month mark of Superstorm Sandy in April, Millennials around the Northeast are coming together to examine what has been done and is being done to help affected groups and to consider the best ways to protect our communities in the future. With the state of emergency now in the past, we have a measure of distance and perspective that makes it possible to envision strategies for a more resilient future in addition to ongoing recovery efforts. There are serious concerns that warming oceans may provide fuel for increasingly powerful storms, but climate change isn't the only issue that warrants attention. We must also consider how we prepare and build, how we support the most vulnerable members of our communities, and how we can fairly and effectively respond after a disaster. Many community organizations, decision makers, members of the defense community, and businesses have been eager to engage in this discussion and have proposed changes to emergency response and infrastructure. Millennials, many of whom felt Sandy’s impact, are eager to push this conversation and action forward. If we fail to act today, they are the ones who will be affected by and tasked with addressing these challenges in the years to come. 

President Obama's second inaugural had soaring language but fell short of a transformational vision of the future.

Inaugural addresses are poetry and vision. They are not about governing and programs. Judged this way, President Obama's second inaugural speech was wonderful poetry. The president excels at these big set pieces and he delivers them magnificently. In these moments he is magnetic, and it would take a very crabbed spirit not to acknowledge this. To quote Newt Gingrich, it was a good speech. But the vision of America in the speech is disappointing -- not because it is wrong, but because it isn't sufficiently penetrating and insightful. It is far too incomplete. It does not rise to the quality of his mind or of his poetry.

Some thoughts about the president's speech itself before expanding on my concerns about the president's vision:

The headline instant analysis of the speech all said this was a defiantly progressive statement. Maybe history will see it that way, but I doubt it. This was a very, very conventional restatement of progressive thought and values. It can only be thought of as some sort of signature statement because of how far toward the right debate in Washington shifted after the arrival of the Tea Party.  

I'm not a "progressive" in today's terms, but nevertheless I'd argue that the values the president emphasized have become conventional because they are right. And after a completely unedifying and at times ugly presidential campaign, and then a really dispiriting congressional lame duck session, some of these values needed to be reasserted. We do face problems requiring government and collective action, as the president discussed. The nation is not divided neatly into givers and takers as Governor Romney believes. Equal opportunity for every American ought not to be a question we debate. And even in the middle of a bitter immigration dispute about who are or can become Americans, we have to act decently. We ought to be able to resolve our immigration problem without seemingly taking delight in making good and decent men and women miserable, even if they are here "illegally."

I even found the president's statement of support for Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security completely traditional and unexceptional. The statement that "The commitments we make to each other – through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security – these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us" is hardly a call to the barricades. Who out there expected the president, after winning a second term, to say anything differently? Who put the odds very high above zero that the president would suddenly acknowledge that Paul Ryan was right after all?

And I'm delighted that the president finally returned to climate change -- although it is very, very late. I'll acknowledge a high degree of self-interest here. I chair Resources for the Future, a 65-year-old economic think tank that is one of the world's leading centers of thought on climate, energy, and the environment. I believe there are more and less effective ways to approach climate and environmental issues, but I think the problems are real and have to be addressed. It is depressing that much of the Republican Party -- once again never missing a chance to miss a chance -- has decided, immediately after the president's speech, that the whole climate issue is a ruse, part of a deviously clever plot by the president to expand the regulatory state. I guess I'm glad for the human species that there are climate deniers like Holman Jenkins and George Will who are so awesomely smart that with 1,000 words and a few anecdotes they can disprove a quarter century of climate science. But I don't take a word of any of this as serious commentary. Since we are, right now, trashing the planet, I hope forging a long-term creative approach to this central question is how the president chooses to be transformational.

But this brings me to the incompleteness of the president's vision. America is a great deal more -- and is entering times more challenging -- than today's conventional progressive vision suggests or the president said in his speech. I'd underline three subjects the president left out: change, business and economic growth, and our decentralized society.

To start with, we are facing immense simultaneous changes in our economy, the world economy, technology, the diversity of our population, the nature of work, and our environment. Any vision you choose to have about America has to be put in the context of these changes.

But we are experiencing a very low rate of economic growth, and we cannot cope with these big changes unless our economic growth rate rises. The only way that can really happen is through business and the private sector. We have the most dynamic and innovative private sector in the world. Unless it stays that way, as a nation we won't be able to afford all of that collective action the president wants. However, the president never mentions the private sector and it seems conspicuously excluded from his insistence that we have to work together. To have the only mention of the private sector focus exclusively on rules and regulations just isn't remotely appropriate.

More broadly, we have the richest and most diverse civil society in the world, strong state and local governments, and an ethos that is insistently individualistic and decentralized. These are mostly strengths. Big government and big companies really do have a strong tendency to take all of the air out of the room, to homogenize everything, and to relentlessly oppose innovation and change. It is our decentralization and diversity that makes us a uniquely dynamic nation.

We are a very complicated mosaic and much more of it should be celebrated than the president chose to in his speech. I wish he had put his insistence on the timeless quality of the values he underlined in the context both of the need to retain the dynamism of American society and the American economy and in the context of the immense changes we are facing. How to keep these values fresh in the midst of the changes we have to navigate -- that's a topic made for a second inaugural.

Finally, a brief specific point. The president said, "[W]e reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future." Great. But that's exactly the choice we are making now, and there is no sign we are changing. Our national government is already mostly about defense, transfer payments to the elderly, and the cost of our (growing) debt. On current trends we will spend all of our tax revenues on those three functions in the year 2020. And the president's speech was decidedly lukewarm about resolving the state of our fiscal health. If I were in the generation that "will build America's future," I'd be gratified by the sentiment and all, but I'd worry a lot more about the numbers.

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter is formerly a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm. Recently, he served as the leader of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team. He has also served in senior roles in the White Houses of two Democratic Presidents.

As part of the "Millennial Priorities for the First 100 Days" series,

When Hurricane Sandy decimated the East Coast, laying waste to coastal towns, flooding main streets, and shutting down power for 8 million people, the U.S.’s 40-year inaction on climate change slapped us in the face. If there was ever a wake-up call, this is it. We can no longer afford to argue whether or not global climate change will affect us. It can, it will, and it already has.

With our climate at a crossroads, I call upon newly re-elected President Obama to take necessary, bold action. We must prepare ourselves for the effects of the climate change we’ve already committed and, most importantly, we must revolutionize the way we operate. The Millennial generation will not accept the status quo, and we will not watch the newly re-elected Congress and president squander the viability of our future resources. We demand that our future not be short-changed for the political profits of today.

Our wealth as a nation blinded us to the destabilization already suffered by the majority of the world. We are no longer exempt—our tax base won’t stop the rising seas, our fortunes won’t halt the positive feedback cycles undermining our agricultural, aquacultural, and economic systems.

But our collective action can. We must, as a nation, commit to reinvesting our time, energy, and financial resources in building an economy that does not sacrifice the ecological stability of the planet. This means admitting that the dinosaur industries that currently dominate our economy aren’t sustainable economically, socially, or environmentally. This means that we must not fear the enormity of the task at hand—we need not only to overhaul our fossil fuel addiction, but also to challenge our Western perceptions of development.

This is not to say we are powerless. We remain the most innovative, well-funded, and resource-rich country in the world. We possess in our communities leaders who envision an equitable future and a private sector with all of the inventive thinking to construct efficient ways of delivering clean energy. We have bountiful prairies, mountains, watersheds, and coastal shores that, if protected and managed properly, could easily provide for the country.

Here are the first steps President Obama can take to a pragmatic, equitable future:

1) Dismantle inequitable subsidies: Oil, coal, and corn subsidies mean that market prices reflect a higher supply than is realistic. Subsidies also fuel colossally inefficient systems that waste precious natural resources and disconnect the consumer from the producer. Stripping subsidies away from large industries will provide incentives both in the private sector (in the research and development of cleaner, more reliable forms of energy and agriculture) and in the consumer households (by encouraging efficiency and empowering consumer choice). Taxpayer money, currently used for subsidizing these industries may be used to finance grid overhaul, public education programs, retrofitting efforts in older cities, off-shore wind farms, etc. President Obama’s administration should work with legislative allies to deconstruct antiquated subsidies in order to better invest in an economy of the future.

2) Reinvest in cities and public infrastructure: By reinvesting in efficient public transport and inner-city education programs, as well as restructuring tax and utility systems to reward high-density communities, cities could become beacons of sustainability. The strongest model of sustainability promotes environmental, social, and economic sustainability equally—we must be careful not to disenfranchise current communities for the sake of old models of environmentalism. Ground-up, neighborhood-based movements utilizing community strengths to tackle community weaknesses combat social and environmental inequities. Urban agriculture, watershed management, and diverse economies are proven steps in the movement toward sustainable cities. President Obama must support energy policies and infrastructure reform that would allow for state and local governments to exercise creativity and innovation.

3) Create jobs through sustainable energy systems: Climate change has been wrongly, and successfully, framed as a choice between the abstract “environment” and the concrete impact of the “economy.” But by reinvesting in long-term, renewable, clean energy (wind, geothermal, sun, cellulosic ethanol), the United States can create high-paying, steady employment while reducing the environmental health costs commonly associated with fossil fuel industries. Why remove a mountain for minimal amounts of coal at the high cost of community health when you can install wind turbines, protect the water, air, and land of the local community, and promote long-term job stability?

4) Ban the XL Keystone Pipeline: Allison Rich investigated the claims of the pipeline’s proponents and found that the proposed project makes no sense economically, socially, or environmentally. None of the profits would stay here. The construction jobs are menial and short-term, a band-aid economic solution to a country that needs economic surgery. We’d get all the pollution but not a drop of the profits.

5) Introduce cap and trade legislation to regulate greenhouse gases: A market of transferable pollution permits with expiration dates would distribute a limited amount of permits (potentially through lottery or auction). The number of permits would originally be determined not by current use, but by what the acceptable amount of pollution is that proves least disruptive. In our case, the number of permits would need to be radically low—I suggest a moderate amount at first, allowing approximately 60 percent of current amount of GHG pollution, with expiration dates. The private sector would be forced to invest in research and development of more efficient, less wasteful practices, and dinosaur industries (those that could not survive without cheap fossil fuels) would give way to more sustainable consumption patterns.

6) Assume responsibility: In order for any of these crucial steps to be taken, we must first recognize the following: The science is indisputable. Hurricane Sandy is only the beginning. As a resource-rich and wealthy country, we’ve been living in a falsely cushioned world. Per capita, we are the most impactful society on this planet. It is our responsibility to quit our selfish behavior. The president should make a public statement regarding not only our disproportionate role in catalyzing climate change, but also our determination to become a more environmentally equitable country.

We’ve waited long enough. We’ve elected you, Mr. President. Now let’s get to work.

Hannah Locke is the Senior Fellow in Energy & the Environment for the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Networkn and a senior environmental studies and biological sciences double major at Goucher College.

Barack Obama image via Shutterstock.com.