Obama proposes $1 billion for climate change risk mitigation

President Barack Obama would spend $1 billion to “better understand the projected impacts of climate change,” encourage local action to reduce future risk, and fund technology and infrastructure that will be more resilient to climate change.

Paul Bledsoe, senior fellow on energy and society at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, says that Democrats and Republicans in Congress “don’t have to agree” on whether the combustion of fossil fuels is causing climate change.

“We just need to agree we have a problem that must be dealt with,” Bledsoe says.

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-to-propose-1-billion-to-prepare-for-climate-change/2014/02/14/d18d3712-95a5-11e3-afce-3e7c922ef31e_story.html)

New York City has two very large buildings dedicated to answering the 911 calls of its five boroughs. With more than 11 million emergency calls annually, it makes perfect sense. The second of these buildings, the Public Safety Answering Center II (PSAC II) is located on a nine-acre parcel of land in the Bronx. It’s an imposing 450,000 square-foot structure—a 240-foot-wide by 240-foot-tall cube. The gleaming aluminum cube risesthe equivalent of 24 stories from behind a grassy berm, projecting the unlikely impression that it might actually be floating. Like most visually striking structures, the building has drawn as much scorn as it has admiration.