 Bingo, we're back, and I mean that the nicest possible way here on Hawaii, the state of clean energy. Hi Maria Tomei, my co-host. Hello, welcome back. Thank you. I came back from my energy experience in Iceland, yeah? Yeah. It was quite something. I might have a minute or two to tell you about it, yeah? Right. Okay, and we have Brad Romine with us. He is a scientist, and he is a coastal specialist and consultant for the Sea Grant program, yeah? Correct, correct, yeah. Yeah. So I work for the University of Hawaii Sea Grant College program. I'm a coastal geologist by background training, done research studies on beach erosion, sea level rise, human impacts to our coastlines and beaches and all that, and been working with, really closely with the State Department of Land and Natural Resources, among others, to understand what the future looks like for our coastlines with sea level rise. We already have a lot of problems with beach erosion, wave run-up, wave overwashing, high waves and our winters and all that, and unfortunately, we're only expecting those things to get worse in the coming decades with climate change and sea level rise. So been involved in a recent study, this Hawaii Sea Level Rise Vulnerability and Adaptation Report that the State Climate Mitigation Adaptation Commission directed the State DLNR to do, and my work through DLNR helped them develop this report, looking out a few decades out to the end of the century of what sea level rise might look like for our state. You're not scaring me yet. See if you can scare me a little, Brad. We'll get there. I think I scared the last group a little bit at the presentation at Verge, yeah. Yeah, that's one thing about talking about this. It's not the churriest topic, but you know what, it's something we can't bear our heads in the sand. We got to start addressing this issue. I'll give you my imperfect, non-scientific citizen view of this. It's going to inundate our beaches, and as our beaches go, so goes our economy and everything in Hawaii, everything in Hawaii, and that's coming, and it might even come faster than we think, because my view of the science, forgive me that, is that we make predictions, but actually, every time you look it seems to be moving faster than we thought it was moving, and so if you say, oh, we're going to have a problem by 2050, well, it might be 2045 or 2040, and nobody really sees that there's a sort of a logarithmic timeline involved here. So as we look, the idea is to get old really quickly, so you don't have to enjoy it. The old guys are way ahead on this deal, but I'm worried that Hawaii is going to suffer hugely, not only because of the economy, the sea level rise, but because we're going to have extreme storms, and we're going to have the same kind of response. This is my worry. The same kind of response from FEMA and the other groups in the national, holding with the national money that Puerto Rico had, oh, surprise, that's an energy impact, don't you think, Maria? Oh, definitely. Yeah. So I am very worried about this, so you don't have to scare me, I'm already scared. All right, my work's done here then. Yeah, so, Maria, why don't you ask Brad to introduce this report? It's like introducing a guest. Yes, yes. So last week, we had Anu Hidl on who was talking about the climate change, mitigation and adaptation task force, and she mentioned one of the things that they had produced was this report, sea level rise report. So we wanted to find someone to come and talk to us about this report, and it was just what done in, I mean, it was released in December or something like that. It was just finished in December, past December 2017, and delivered to the State Climate Mitigation Adaptation Commission. This is a commission that was brought together by some state legislation, a couple bills, one that was passed in 2017, another one in 2014, which both directed through the State Department of Natural Resources to develop this sea level rise vulnerability and adaptation report. It was about three years in the making since that first act in 2014. It was a major effort with a consultant, Tetra Tech Incorporated, which the state hired through the DLNR. And then working really closely with the UH Coastal Geology Group, that's Dr. Chip Fletcher and his research team. This is his cup of tea with all his charts and graphs and inundation diagrams. They were essential to this report. They did a lot of really incredible modeling, mapping for what some of these impacts from sea level rise will look like at various heights of sea level rise along our coast throughout Hawaii. Looking at what high tide flooding will look like, looking at erosion forecasts, and then looking at wave overwash projections for the coastline, and then mapped all that, and then kind of combined those areas into this overall sea level rise exposure area. Again, this is throughout Hawaii and doing some economic impacts assessments. Economic impact. Yeah, yeah. When I say economic, I mean, this is looking at the vulnerability of property and buildings along our shorelines that would potentially be inundated in this sea level rise exposure area in the report. But we're not surprised with that. We're not surprised that we have sea level rise. I mean, Chip Fletcher has been talking about that, and your school has been talking about that like forever. And we know that the waves are lapping at our shores, and we know that tourism can't tolerate that. And we know there's a problem. And I always wonder, on all these reports, I wonder whether this is like making a report about the hull damage in the Titanic as it is going down, down, down. Tell me why it's important. Well, to your point, sea level is already rising. We're already facing a lot of these problems. We can see on our tide gauges around Hawaii and globally that sea level rise is going on already. We already have widespread coastal erosion problems here in Hawaii. 70% of our beaches we know are eroding on Kauai, Oahu, and Maui. We have coastal highways that are getting eroded up on our windward side that are getting washed away, eroded. So we have these existing problems. The goal of the report, really, from my eyes, is we have these problems. How much worse are they going to get in the future? There's a lot of science on projections of what sea level rise might be, how high and when. And there's a lot of variability in that. But this is the first effort in Hawaii to really map out what areas are vulnerable at varying heights of sea level in the future, within this century. Why do I care what areas are vulnerable? I mean, is this going to go to my real estate appraisal value of my home on the waterfront or what? I don't know. We know how the data will be used. It's possible. I think that people should be aware of this information. It should be something that should be disclosed when somebody buys a property. But they can look it up. It's now publicly available information. You can go on the map and look at what areas are affected, at what heights, and projected what year. Sell immediately. That's like selling in Puna. We just think this is important information. Of course, there's a lot of questions and ramifications. I don't want to get too deep into that. No, no, what I'm really asking is when you find that certain areas are going to be more vulnerable, certain beaches are going to be washed away. There's going to be more inundation here and there. And you need a scientific approach to determine what is going to be affected more than the other places. But query in the report or is there a place in the report that says, well, this beach is critical to the economy. This beach is critical to a neighborhood involving 5,000 homes. This beach is critical to infrastructure. That's pumping water or sewage or what have or electrical power. And this beach is therefore number one priority. So you, the powers that be, have to move that up because of our report to number one priority. And you have to put some money on protecting us from that. I mean, is that where it goes? That's a good example of kind of next steps that I hope will be taken with this information, with the map layers and the report and the information that we have from this is prioritizing. So the report has all this map data, but it has these recommendations. And one of the recommendations is that we should start prioritizing particular beaches that we want to save among 30-some recommendations in a report because we're probably not going to be able to save them all. And there may be some areas where we do want to. You're scaring me now, Brad. You know, we're losing them. We've already lost 13 miles of beaches here in Hawaii to sea walls in front of homes and in our highways and in other development. We've slowed that sea wall construction down. The state has and the counties have in the last couple decades. But it still goes on. And but, you know, we've lost extensive beaches in front of that. We've got to kind of start prioritizing which beaches we want to save. A lot of our coastal areas, particularly here on Oahu, Kauai and Maui as well, we've built right on top of sand dunes and old beach deposits that were laid down, you know, in dovergeal logic history. I don't think we knew. We certainly didn't know to the degree that we do now that a lot of these beaches were chronically retreating like they are. But I have to think. Well, the retreat has increased, accelerated hugely in the past five or 10 years. Well, anecdotally, it seems to have increased. You know, we don't know if the rates of erosion are actually accelerating here in Hawaii. But it's a widespread problem nonetheless. And, you know, I just think, yeah, in the hindsight, I think we could have built a lot smarter and back further back from the coast. But everybody wants to be right up on that white sand in a beautiful blue water. But we're kind of paying for it now. We really left ourselves very vulnerable. Yeah. You know, I have to say that there's a strange connection between this whole analysis and the Puna problem, referring to it as the PP. In the Puna problem, people knew that Puna was sitting on top of geothermal. They knew that there were fissures and seismic rifts and regular seismic activity there forever, forever. And yet they went and they bought. And the banks gave them mortgages. And they invested their lives, as people do in Hawaii, in their homes, in a place where everybody really knew. It wasn't just the geologists. Everybody knew that this was not really sustainable, that something would happen, including the guys at Puna Geothermal Venture. They knew, too. In fact, geothermal is their middle name, as I recall. And so the question is, how does this affect Hawaii's perception of dealing with it? I mean, if I went out and bought a home on the lava now, I'd be crazy. But if I went out and bought a home on a beach which already had signs of inundation, which is in the report as having signs of inundation, would I be any less crazy? Well, you know, everybody has their dream to have a house on the beach. But we're just trying to provide information with this. And it's up to them to use it responsibly. Back to your previous question. We didn't have a lot of information on which areas were more vulnerable, which beach was more vulnerable than that one. And we do now. So I hope the information will be used wisely. And we'll make some better decisions going forward on how we plan our community development and things like that, and how we'll recover from disasters. The situation that happened in Puerto Rico is our worst case scenario. We're a very isolated, vulnerable island state, of course. So we need to be building back smarter in the next round. Or rebuilding, as the case may be. For example, I don't know if this is a good example, but in Puerto Rico, the storm affected electrical power. It toppled power poles all over the place. It somehow stopped the generating plans from generating it. And now you have nothing. If you don't have the distribution system, it doesn't do you any good to keep it generated. Distribution plans nothing. And I sense that there is a parallel here. Because some of our power lines are underground. They're under the, what do you call it, inundation tables, let's be. Yeah, certainly. Anything within the sea level rise exposure area, back to that, is vulnerable. That's our roads. And anything underlying those roads, the sewer networks, the storm drainage networks, the power infrastructure that's under there, is going to be submerged. And a lot of the agencies are starting to wake up to that. Water supply issues, salt water getting into these pipes. And corroding them around. Sure, it's getting out of the pipes. Yeah, potentially. Yeah, and the storm drain system is probably one of the most vulnerable areas. Because that's directly connected to the sea. So with the high tides that we have had the last year and around the king tides and all that, if you talked about that, very often that's where we saw the water coming back up out of the storm drain system. So that's going to be a real challenge. But as sea levels get higher and higher, we actually will see groundwater start cropping up out of some of the particularly low lying areas and essentially creating new wetlands or areas and or areas that don't drain very quickly when there's rain. So it's not just the beaches. It's not just the beaches. It's the back shore areas, too, that are low lying. Yeah, highways. Yeah, the highways really stand out as a real concern for me. Because they're on the peripheral. They're on the peripheral. They're critical links to a lot of these coastal neighborhoods. They're unique links. There's no alternative route. There's no one road around a lot of our islands. And they're already suffering damages. An example would be like Hanoa P'ilani Highway, West Maui going out from Malaya to Lahaina if you've driven that. Very low lying, even tiny small waves and a high tide had overwashed the section of the highway now. So just a foot of sea level rise and have big problems along that road. Luckily, they're starting to move some of that road back with the bypass. Expensive because there's a hillside there. It is expensive. Here on Oahu, the northeast area, Ka'ava, Punulu, those areas already overwashed by waves repeatedly. Drive up there, you see sand across the road after every high tide. And DOTs had to dump more and more rock to protect more and more of the highway. And all the beast was in front of that road has been lost. And that's just kind of the leading edge of the problems we're going to see. We really have to wake up to some of these challenges. That's just serious. So I am getting scared. And I suppose that's not inappropriate. So Maria, can you make a sort of half-time summary of where we've been in this discussion and then take us out to a break? OK, sure. So we started off talking last week about the whole climate change mitigation adaptation task force. Now, the first thing, of course, is what would be the impact of different levels? And so where should the efforts be focused? Is it, I mean, it's a combination of things. Not only are you trying to do the mitigation with reducing the greenhouse gas production. And I'd like to make a pitch for Hawaii's avoidance of greenhouse gases on a ton basis for what you may be small, but we have an ability to influence and to demonstrate success that can have multiplier effects. And so that is one aspect of it. And then there's the other piece of what do you harden? What do you move? How do you plan your investments? How do you mitigate some of those impacts? And so what I liked best about the report was actually not the paper part, but the map. So you can go get a visual of what might be involved. And that gets you scared. But also, we're resilient people. And we will figure out how to make this work. But we need the information upon which to build a plan. And so that's why I think this report is very interesting, very important. And go check it out online. That's a summary? Well, before the break. OK, all right. Now we're going to have a break. OK. That's Maria and Graham will be right back. You'll see. At 2 PM, please join us, where we discuss important and useful information for the Japanese language community in Hawaii. The show will be all in Japanese. Hope you can join us every other Monday at 2 PM. Aloha. Hi, everyone. I'm Andrea Gabrieli. The host for Young Talent's Making Way here in Fintech, Hawaii. We talk every Tuesday at 11 AM about things that matter to tech, matter to science, to the people of Hawaii with some extraordinary guests, the students of our schools who are participating in science fair. So Young Talent's Making Way every Tuesday at 11 AM only on Fintech, Hawaii. Mahalo. Bingo. We came back. That's Maria Tomei, my co-host here. For the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum's Hawaii State of Clean Energy Show every Wednesday at 4 o'clock. And our special guest is Brad Romine. And he is a scientist and a consultant on coastal management, coastal erosion, coastal conditions. Coastal geology, coastal processes, coastal hazards, whatever. Better coastal than postal. Yes, sure. That's a C-grade college at UH Manoa. Thank you, Jay. So to get into some of the more graphic issues, if I could say, what areas should we be most worried about in your view of this report? Yeah, well, so the state report looked at the vulnerabilities from sea level rise statewide, up to a level of three feet of sea level rise. And it looked at statewide and looked at island by island. And among the islands, Oahu really stands out as the most vulnerable. And that's a couple of reasons. One is our geography. We have particularly low-lying coastal planes around our island, sandy coastal planes for the most part, for large part. And we decided to build right close up on the edge of that coastal plane. Oh, let's talk about the reef runway. Yeah, the reef runway. Yeah, we built out on the reef. You can't land the big ones or the small ones or any of the planes there without it. That could be a problem area. Yeah, when we start to get the higher sea level rise projections, that area looks pretty badly flooded. But that's a big money, big ticket area where folks might want to spend money to adapt that. It was an essential piece of infrastructure. Might want to spend some money on that. You might want to keep that piece of infrastructure going, I would think. I worry also about the less developed areas, our more country suburban areas on the coastline. What are we going to do for those folks, those beachfront homes that are going to be impacted by increasing erosion and wave overwash? You know what happens? The same thing, it's the Puna effect. So everybody knew that Puna had a certain risk to it. OK, now the storm comes, so to speak. And they don't have a home. And we're going to put them in the cafeteria where you're going to put them. You got to build them a home, a little home, a little tiny home, maybe, or a big home. They don't have insurance. So when does this burden actually fall for all the people who lost their homes, hundreds of people, where does it fall? It falls on the taxpayer. The government is going to have to. And it's not clear if FEMA or the federal government is going to really get in there, roll up their sleeves, and help out. So those people are burdened. And they add to our existing burden for affordable housing and for homeless, right? Now you take other things in Oahu, where these neighborhoods are inundated, and where are these people going to go? Yeah, good question. These are questions we've got to all work out together. I don't have the answers to that. Maybe we're taking them back to Puna and put them on top of the. No, I'm only kidding. Fortunately with Sea Level Rise, this is for most apart a slow evolving process. I mean, we're facing some problem areas right now, like Sunset Beach, for example, that's having major erosion problems. But we have years to decades to work this out for a lot of other areas. So there's time to do this. I think we don't have to knee-jerk reaction on this. Oh, that's my second question. My second question is, how much time is there? How much time? It depends on location, site by site, area by area. But we need to start planning now. That's the bottom line. We can't ignore this problem any longer. The planning needs to start now. We need to develop funding to maybe move some infrastructure, maybe even private development out of the way in some areas or harden other critical infrastructure. It's going to cost money, of course. And that's what it's going to come down to a lot. But we also need to be smart about this. And one of the places we're working right now is with the community planning process. So the counties are required to develop these community plans, the vision for how they want a community to look out in the future 20 or so years and beyond. So we see that as one critical place to start utilizing this data. So they understand and integrate the sea level rise and coastal hazards map data into the process of developing a vision for their community in the future. For years and years, we've talked at Hawaii, especially about energy, about NIMBY, not in my backyard. Don't build that thing in my backyard. Don't do anything in my backyard. You leave me alone. This is reverse NIMBY. This means please fix my backyard. Come around, spend some money in my backyard to save my backyard. And so when you get into a community plan, everybody has got a silo of personal interest. I want my backyard to be saved, not his backyard. And so you have a very interesting kind of community meeting there, community conversation. It's not the same. It's not the same as the old conversation. It's a brand new kind of conversation. And you really wonder what's going to happen because you could get locked up. And what they're really talking about is spending money. And so now you have the money people, legislature, for example, they have to engage politically with the people in the community who want their backyard fixed. So this is going to be hard. And I almost think that the form of democracy that we have created here in Hawaii where everything is transparent and everything is, what's the word, we listen to everyone. We hear everyone. And we have very long conversations where everyone can express himself, may not be exactly the right model for fixing this. There may not be enough time to have a conversation where everybody gets this two cents in about his backyard being more important than his neighbor's backyard. You don't have to agree. Yeah, I don't have a whole many comments on that. That may be for our politicians to figure that part out. I keep thinking the civil engineers are going to be having some interesting opportunities to figure things out. One thing that strikes me from what you said, Brad, is that the charts and graphs that show you which of the most vulnerable areas don't necessarily tell you which of the areas that our government should be fixing first. Because there are other considerations, as you indicated earlier. There are economic considerations. There are social considerations. There are political considerations as to which of those areas is really at the top of the priority list. So the State Interagency Climate Commission is working on that. And with Sea Grant's help, with UH's help at large, and all these recommendations, the data from Sea Level Rise Report, and trying to prioritize those recommendations, take some next steps with that. But of course, as you mentioned, Maria, that's only one side of the coin. The other side is the climate greenhouse gas mitigation side, too. And the Climate Commission is charged with trying to address that, too. So they're working really hard to try to do that. They meet quarterly. These are public meetings. There's a similar effort going on in the city. They have their Office of Climate Change, Sustainability, and Resilience, and their own Climate Commission at the City and County of Honolulu that's got on a kind of a parallel track. And we're trying to make sure these two commissions are talking, communicating, you know? So this commission is always interested in the coastline. This commission is statewide. And we've done the Sea Level Rise Report with them, which of course looks mostly at the coastline. But they have a much broader charge than that. And again, looking at climate change mitigation, greenhouse gas mitigation, and then ultimately other climate impacts beyond Sea Level Rise. To distinguish between taking steps to stop emissions of carbon and to stop Sea Level Rise. I guess stop climate change, stop globally, stop climate change. That's one category, one basket of things you can do. The other basket is how do you, what's the word you use? You've both used harden. How do you harden our community? So we're better prepared for an extreme storm. We're better prepared for the creeping inundation that we are going to face. I'm sure it is. Go ahead, Jay. So I have, for you, I have a billion dollars. I have a billion dollars for you. Do I spend it on this basket or that basket? I think you've got to kind of split it evenly. And I prefer the term adaptation rather than harden, because there's some places we want to kind of work with nature in kind of a softer approach. Maybe pull back a little bit rather than throwing rocks and walls down everywhere because the environmental impacts of that. But yeah, I think we need to invest in a renewable energy infrastructure. And the state is doing a lot in that direction right now. But the adaptation side, sea level rise is coming even in the best case scenarios. NASA had a statement they made back in 2015. Just given the greenhouse gases that we're already putting in the atmosphere and the heat content into the atmosphere and the oceans from that, we're already committed ourselves to at least three feet of sea level rise. So when that happens, depends on how quickly, if and how quickly we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. But we are going to see substantial sea level rise, Hawaii and globally. So we do have to begin adapting regardless of what we're doing. This is a huge irony, though, as I recall, and you can correct me on this, as we pulled out of COP, as I recall Congress and the White House deny climate change, they deny pretty much the fundamental point of the report here. And as a matter of fact, correct me if I'm mistaken on this, the federal government isn't doing much in terms of spending the money to deal with the root cause, the carbon cause of climate change. Isn't there an irony between spending half of my billion on that when the federal government's not spending anything on it? Yeah, it's absolutely frustrating. But the states are taking the charge. And part of this climate act that directed the state to do sea level rise report also committed the state to the Paris Climate Agreement. So we're all proud of Hawaii for doing that. Other states and major cities around the US are doing that and leading the charge on climate change and greenhouse gas mitigation. So let's go ahead and do it without the federal government. And that may change. Administrations change, of course. Yes, they do. OK, Maria, time for you to try to summarize that one. OK. Are we running out of time already? OK. Well, I think as we move forward in our discussions, the next couple of weeks, we are going to invite the city and county to have their energy guy come and talk about what the city and county's climate change and sustainability group is up to. And we also have Hawaii Green Growth coming to talk about their scorecard. And the nice thing is that there is a lot of communication between these groups. And I do think that there is a lot happening at the local and state level. And that's really where the action is. I mean, we're the ones who have to fix our highways and make sure that we have the infrastructure that we need and we plan and we have many years to do it. So there is hope. It's scary. Check the map, get scared, and then check the recommendations and say, ah, but we're going to work on this together, both the mitigation and the adaptation. Yeah. Well, it reminds me of the last legislative brief when we did in January this year, where Sharon Moriwaki, who's running for office now for the state senate, was determined with a lot of your colleagues to make the point that energy and climate change are inextricably intertwined, and you have to look at sustainability all the time. And I guess that's a big point going forward. I think you alluded to this before. We must be leaders. Why must be a leader? We want people to see what we do and maybe hopefully follow what we do so that regardless of what happens in the White House, we can actually take steps. That's really important. The problem is making sure the legislature understands this. I think they're getting it. They've been very willing participants in the state climate commission. So thank you to our state legislators that pass the climate initiative and for their continuing involvement in this effort. One other thing I want to mention before we close is this, is that in Marshall Islands, they're already going inundate. They're already losing their beaches. I mean, in a few years, there won't be any Marshall Islands. And other such islands in the South Pacific. And it's sort of like the Pune kind of experience because it's an unfunded mandate for Hawaii. They will come here. We will have them. And we will have to find housing for them. And there will be far more of them when their islands submerge than there are now. So we'll take the hit on that probably on a state basis, don't you think? And more than we are taking the hit on it now, we will have to write big checks going forward to save ourselves. But you got how many billions? Did you say you said you had a billion? So thanks. That's a good start. What's that? You said you had a billion dollars. So that's a good start. Well, thanks, Jay. Yeah, let me just get my checkbook out. One more thing is, are they talking about this at Verge? You were there. Is this part of the conversation that is happening around energy right now? Maybe Maria can speak to that a little better. Definitely. I only went to one session. Yeah, I presented on this information at a session. So I was real pleased to be invited and chance to do that. And earlier in the day, there was a presentation on not this is the topic of sustainability, climate change, mitigation adaptation is throughout. And this specific report is actually brought up specifically several times. So definitely, definitely part of Verge. Well, at first, I was concerned that it's not that easy to make the connection, climate change and energy. But it seems it gets easier over time. It does. I think especially if you think about it all under that umbrella of sustainability, that's really what it all comes down to. And what does that really mean? What, sustainability? Yeah, I mean, just that really means not over using our resources. Surviving. Surviving, yeah. As a community, right. Individuals too. That's what we're talking about. Well, thank you very much, Brad. Thanks for the invite, Jay. Great to have you down here. Maria, flowers from across the table. Thank you so much. Thank you.