A Tiny Park Becomes a Sacrifice to the Climate-Change Gods ‘Resiliency,’ according to green activists, requires cutting down trees and tearing up grass in lower Manhattan. By Jon Pepper
New York
The bulldozers will come for downtown Manhattan’s Robert F. Wagner Park as soon as next week. In the name of climate change “resiliency,” local authorities have ordered the 3.5-acre park overlooking the Statue of Liberty to be razed and raised, lest it flood from “rising seas” or “storm surges” projected several decades down the road.
Contractors hired by the state-appointed Battery Park City Authority will bring in chain saws for the park’s 112 mature trees. They’ll use shovels to rip up grass where local children now play. They’ll use jackhammers and pickaxes on the park’s benches, walkways and pavilion. Two years and $221 million later, the Authority assures us, there’ll be a new park, albeit with less green space, more commercial space from which to extract rents, and new and improved trees. (They’ll resist salt water, supposedly.)
All this effort will be made for a park that suffered no serious damage during 2012’s superstorm Sandy, the worst storm in New York’s history. Battery Park City was the only neighborhood in Manhattan south of 39th Street that kept its lights on during and after the storm.
If the park’s destruction sounds like an unnatural act, you haven’t been listening to the hysterical rhetoric of the climate lobby. No measure is too extreme for the worst-case scenarios cited by government entities and their activist base to justify renewable energy mandates, net-zero emission requirements, or contractor boondoggles that too often have the opposite effect of what is intended.
Europe’s obsession with reducing carbon emissions left it exposed to Vladimir Putin’s energy blackmail. Car makers, whose profits from gas-guzzling vehicles pay for their adventures in electric cars, were given a boost by U.S. subsidies that gloss over an inconvenient fact: 79% of U.S. electricity still comes from fossil fuels. And residents of New York’s Lower East Side saw the destruction of their waterfront East River Park so that it, too, could be raised away from storm waters projected by various models.
Activists in Lower Manhattan have found that the best way to thwart resistance to their plans is to wave the climate-change banner, today’s bloody shirt. Even to ask questions about climate measures is to risk censure as a “denier,” a nice word for moron.
Still, the Wagner Park experience should be a cautionary tale for cities and towns across the country. Aside from a few astute residents who paid attention to the authority’s plans gaining momentum over the course of a few Zoom meetings during the pandemic, most people were unaware of the drastic actions underfoot. Those who questioned the scientific justification for the plans were limited to two minutes before their microphones were cut off. Now that local schools, students, residents and others have banded together to object to Wagner Park’s destruction, they are blithely told by the authority that they’re too late. Planning is done. Money is secured. Bulldozers are on the way.
Once Wagner Park is complete, the authority plans further “resiliency” measures for the one-mile length of Battery Park City at a cost of another $631 million. More trees will be mowed down. More grass will be torn up. And barriers will go up at various intervals to guard against a threat that arguably doesn’t exist.
Battery Park City was designed to withstand rising seas and storm surges. That’s why its buildings are perched on a bluff away from the water. The grass along the lower-lying waterfront could suffer salt-water damage in the event of water from the Hudson lapping over the sea wall, but it wouldn’t take $221 million to resod.
While it’s said that smart politicians should never waste a crisis, it could also be said that the crisis never ends when it comes to climate. Nor does the line of businesses serving the fast-growing climate industry, which are ready do their part.
Mr. Pepper is a novelist, consultant and resident of Battery Park City.
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