In 2012, North Carolina’s Coastal Resources Commission studied the
question of sea-level rise and the likelihood that coastal areas would
be inundated by severe weather, concluding that the seas were likely to
rise by 39" over the century; the Republican legislature, backed by
property developers building in low-lying coastal regions, passed a bill
prohibiting any such research and decreeing that the seas would rise at
the same rate that they had through history, without regard to any
science about accelerating rates fueled by climate change.
Today, the regions that were greenlit for development by the move are
square in the path of Hurricane Florence and stand to be some of the
hardest-hit in the nation, thanks to sea-level rises that outstripped
the legally decreed limits on what the ocean was allowed to do.
sea-level rises that outstripped the legally decreed limits on what the ocean was allowed to do
And King Canute, late in his years and full of the memory of defeats and victories, took his courtiers with him down to the sea, and there placed a chair within the surf, and sat upon it, crying aloud, “I command the tide to halt!” But the tide did not halt, and it rose about him. Then he rose from his chair, and turned to his courtiers, and said, “You see, now, the limits of my authority. There are some things even a king cannot do.”
And up from the ranks of the courtiers spake a North Carolina Republican, saying, “Hold mine ale and watch thusly.”
