Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (30 page)

To really work, a floating foundation had to feel just like what we already knew: solid ground. Rigidity was key. The larger it was, the more easily this could be achieved. “It will be exactly as you see out there now,” he said, pointing out the window. He pulled out a sheet of paper and began sketching on it with a black marker. “With a houseboat, my house is here. And then I have to park my car over here. I have to walk. My children cannot play outside. But on islands, they can play outside, and I can park my car on it, and there are trees on it—that’s what I like!” With luck and good lawyers, the hybrid cities of the future would sit partly upon Olthuis’s proprietary buoyant foundations: modular, interlocking units made of foam and concrete and protected by a suite of international patents.

His designs were eminently exportable. “You can find sinking islands worldwide,” he told me. “There are many, many island nations with this problem.” Tuvalu and Kiribati could not expect to save themselves by ringing their various atolls with seawalls—as in the Marshalls, the scale and cost of it were inconceivable. But artificial islands, whether or not the lawyers said they were enough for future UN membership, held promise.

Olthuis was planning his first visit to the Maldives in little more than a month. The lowest-lying country in the world, consisting of more than a thousand islands and twenty-six atolls spread along a six-hundred-mile-long archipelago in the Indian Ocean, was an alluring opportunity: Its leaders believed strongly in climate change—they held a cabinet meeting in scuba gear six feet underwater as a publicity stunt before Copenhagen—and among AOSIS countries it was relatively wealthy, a vacation hideaway for the rich and famous. And the tourism economy meant that it was already feeling the effects of climate change. Hotel chains, like oil companies, have a longer investment horizon than many industries, often twenty to thirty years. They weren’t eager to sink money into beach resorts, Olthuis said, whose beaches were eroding away.

He had a patent-pending solution: a floating beach. He pulled up a drawing on his PC and showed me how it could attach to an existing island, expanding the life of a resort. In the stilted language of the patent application, the concrete-foam design would entail “a floating base on which beach material, such as sand, is applied to form the beach, with the particularity that the artificial beach has a flexible mat that is at least partially underwater.” Its key technology, I was surprised to learn, was bacteria-produced artificial sandstone, a smart soil like that developed at nearby Deltares. The market was so much more than sinking islands, Olthuis said: “Dubai has hundreds of kilometers of coastline that are constantly being eroded.” For a short moment, I could almost imagine the global elite bobbing along on a sandy bed of urine-fueled, genetically modified bacteria.

On his PC, Olthuis flipped to an earlier project Dutch Docklands had been hired to develop in Dubai. Known as the Floating Proverb, it was part of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s famous Palm Islands, man-made archipelagoes that were themselves constructed in part by Dutch dredging and land reclamation companies. The eighty-nine floating islands of the Floating Proverb were to have spelled out a poem written by the sheikh himself: “It takes a man of vision to write on water/Not everyone who rides a horse is a jockey/Great men rise to greater challenges.” Since the financial crisis, this and much else in Dubai had ground to a halt. Aerial photographs revealed that the once prestigious development the World, an artificial archipelagic Earth, was already losing its shape, its component islands falling back into the sea. But for Olthuis, Dubai’s boom and bust had worked out fine. He had been paid to develop his vision, and whether or not building resumed, he was confident there was plenty of other water out there.

Under the header “Green IP,” the Dutch Docklands Web site would soon show images of floating gardens, floating solar panels, and even a floating, water-cooled mosque. The company began marketing what it called Affordable H
₂
Ousing: the architects’ solution to the lawyers’ quandary. There was an uncaptioned photo of the floating prison at Zaandam. There was a quotation from Olthuis’s partner, Paul van de Camp: “We told the president of the Maldives, we can transform you from climate refugees to climate innovators.” Dutch Docklands and the Maldives would soon ink agreements for everything from floating villas to a floating marina. Greenstar, a two-million-square-foot floating garden island with shops, restaurants, and a conference center that was originally designed for Dubai, would be recycled and rebranded as a Maldivian national icon. “The green-covered, star-shape building symbolizes Maldivians’ innovative route to conquer climate change,” read the ad copy. “This will become the Number 1 location for conferences about climate change, water management, and sustainability.”

Before I left his office, Olthuis led me downstairs to a private screening room, where we sat back in plush leather chairs to watch the Dutch Docklands corporate movie. He turned on the projector, and a disembodied male voice, clipped and Euro-accented, came in over the speakers. “They say we use only 10 percent of our capacity for thought,” it intoned as electronica began pumping in the background, “and we know we use only 30 percent of Earth’s capacity for life, for living. Well, it’s time for all that to change—and it’s the Dutch who are doing it.” The screen filled with a shot of a roiling blue ocean. “Many centuries of living with water, much of it below sea level, have taught us all we need to know about controlling our wet environment,” the voice continued. Images of floating highways, mosques, neighborhoods, and apartment blocks flashed before us. “Even when confronted with endless stretches of open sea, we are their master . . . It’s all researched, tested, ready for takeoff. So just think of all that idle water in your community and, together with Dutch Docklands, start putting it to work. Because where there is nothing, anything is possible.”

“That last sentence, I really, really like,” said Olthuis. “Because there’s all this water.”

 • • • 

SOUTH OF OLTHUIS’S OFFICE,
the greatest port in Europe, Rotterdam, the point of entry for most of the Continent’s oil, was being turned into a showcase of the Netherlands’ climate readiness. One morning I joined a group of a dozen mostly American urban planners on a tour led by local officials and the Dutch multinational Arcadis, a $3.3 billion, twenty-two-thousand-employee engineering firm that derived its name from Arcadia: in ancient Greek mythology, the nicest place on Earth. The company logo was a fire salamander, an animal at home on land or in water. The senior Arcadis representative with us was Piet Dircke, the director of its international water program. “I’m one of the people who’s leading all of the Dutch efforts to get a position in the U.S. based on climate-change adaptation,” he told me. “I’m trying to connect the international ambitions of Rotterdam to cities like New York and New Orleans and San Francisco.”

What was billed as the Rotterdam Climate Proof tour started on land at the edge of the North Sea, at the crown jewel of the Netherlands’ Delta Works, the Maeslantkering, an enormous storm-surge barrier at the mouth of the port. The barrier consisted of two curved, floating gates that swung closed, then sank into place when one computer system—known as the BOS—predicted a storm surge of at least three meters and told another system—BES—to enact the closure sequence. It was among the largest moving structures on the planet. Each steel swing arm was twice as long as the Statue of Liberty is tall. The Maeslant barrier took six years and $500 million to build and install, and when it was finally in place, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands came herself to inaugurate it. Since then, it has been used only once, in 2007. It was built to withstand all but a one-in-ten-thousand-year storm, though climate change, we were told, could muddy the math.

The planners on the tour busied themselves taking photographs of the open swing arms and clambering up what passed for a hill to try to get an angle on the whole Maeslantkering. It was impossible. It was too big. Inside a visitor center, a guide showed us around a scale model, and after we were suitably impressed, we left for the center of the city. Near the historic headquarters of the Holland America Line, we boarded a water taxi, and soon we were cruising through a four-thousand-acre expanse of former shipyards that had become one of the largest development sites in Europe.

“Rotterdam’s ambition is to be one of the places where the new future will be created,” the port’s redevelopment manager said after we’d clambered out to join him on a pier. We followed him into an ornate building that once belonged to the RDM shipyard. “RDM” no longer stood for Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij, he assured us. It meant Research, Design, and Manufacturing, and the site was being retooled as a futuristic campus for research institutes and technical universities attempting to solve the problems of the world. In adjacent buildings, students were perfecting zero-emissions go-karts, conversion kits for hydrogen-powered buses, and the Sustainable Dance Club, where the power of dancers’ footwork kept the lights on. “We’ll be a center for water tech and for clean tech—the Silicon Valley of the lowlands,” he continued. “People will come even when sea levels are rising.” A planner from the San Francisco Bay Area raised his hand. “But why invest here rather than somewhere else, like Singapore, Shanghai, or the Silicon Valley?” he asked. The port manager smiled. “Because we are turning a threat into an opportunity,” he said. “We’re sending a message to the international community: If you set up shop here, we can guarantee that we will keep your feet dry.”

Having decided to be the global leader in climate adaptation and water knowledge, Rotterdam had created a network it called Connecting Delta Cities, hosting conferences and hastening the flow of its experts and expertise to member cities on six continents. Across the harbor from us, firms including Shell, BP, IBM, and Arcadis had been persuaded to take part in the Rotterdam Climate Campus. “It will likely be floating,” an official told us. Elsewhere in the harbor would be floating neighborhoods and floating laboratories, and some RDM students would be housed on the SS
Rotterdam,
the onetime flagship of the Holland America Line. “We even have a floating prison,” someone said.

Some innovations were already springing up abroad of their own accord. In New Orleans, Brad Pitt’s Make It Right foundation and the Los Angeles architecture firm Morphosis would unveil the Float House, which could rise up to twelve feet on guideposts as floodwaters destroyed its neighbors. Pushing a similar design was the professor behind the Buoyant Foundation Project, who described her areas of research as “the study of wind loads on tall buildings, the aerodynamics of wind-borne debris, strategies for the mitigation of hurricane damage to buildings, and the origins of early 20th-c. Russian avant-garde architectural theory in 19th-c. mystical-religious slavophile philosophy.” But when it came to seawalls, storm-surge barriers, and other city-scale defenses, firms like Arcadis couldn’t help but believe that their services were needed. “The consequence of ‘New Orleans’ is that the Americans have placed orders with a number of Dutch companies to the value of 200 million dollars,” read a quotation from Piet Dircke in one of the Port of Rotterdam’s pamphlets. Arcadis had seventy-one projects in the New Orleans region alone, including part of the two-hundred-foot-wide Seabrook Floodgate, a mini Maeslantkering. And Dircke, I learned, had been to New York City four times in the previous six months.

Dircke and I sat together on the water taxi ride back. “Of course we build on our Dutch reputation as that very small but very brave country battling for centuries against the sea,” he said. “Climate change brings opportunities. You get new challenges.” He brought up the Elfstedentocht, the Netherlands’ famous speed-skating competition, lamenting that ice-skating was becoming an indoor sport. “Are we not living in a crazy world? I’ll tell you what is even more crazy: You can do pretty good skiing now in Holland. It’s down in the south, and it’s called Landgraaf: an indoor ski area. Everybody was laughing about it until two years ago, when they opened the World Cup ski season there. There was no snow in the Alps, and Landgraaf had snow. You know what happened after the World Cup? The Austrian and Swiss teams quickly booked training periods for the next year. In Holland! Imagine the world, a couple years from now, when we have only indoor skiing and no snow on the mountains. And it seems we are already adapting to it. It is normal.” He chuckled. “We are already adapting. Our minds are adapting.”

Dutch companies had already helped build storm-surge barriers for Venice, New Orleans, London, and St. Petersburg—metropolises that could afford to pay much more than any island nation could—but increasingly they looked at New York City. The task would be complex and lucrative. “You can’t seal off New York with just one barrier,” Dircke said. “You need an East River gate. On the New Jersey side you need a gate. At the Verrazano Narrows you need a gate. And you need a gate near Jamaica Bay if you also want to protect JFK airport. There are four holes, luckily not more than that.”

It was three years before Hurricane Sandy began forming in the southern Caribbean and spinning its way north. A conference had just been announced by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) to look at some of the first designs for a New York storm-surge barrier, and Dircke would soon be on his way to the city to present Arcadis’s idea. “It is very exciting,” he said. I decided to follow him there.

 • • • 

ANOTHER BOROUGH, ANOTHER
auditorium, another conference on sea-level rise. This time it was not at Columbia in upper Manhattan but in the decidedly less imposing environs of New York University’s Polytechnic Institute in downtown Brooklyn, not far from where insurance companies were quietly dropping clients near the Gowanus Canal. The ASCE’s “Against the Deluge” conference was the rare scene where the line for the men’s bathroom was always far longer than that for the women’s. It had the air of what was then a lost cause. There was a single paying exhibitor—“Please visit our exhibitor,” implored the organizers—who was an eager Texan waving flyers at all the old men as they waited for the provided spaghetti dinner, which was served cold. The Texan’s invention, FloodBreak, was an ingenious, self-deploying floodgate that was big enough to protect one’s garage but unfortunately not at all big enough to protect Manhattan. Inside, scientists explained the growing threat to New York: The one commonality with Bangladesh was that sea levels here were rising faster than the global average, a foot in the last century. This rate could double just as the city faced more powerful hurricanes. At risk, a city employee told the half-empty room, were 802,000 buildings worth $825 billion with contents worth $560 billion. Another speaker highlighted Breezy Point, the Queens neighborhood that would be flattened by waves and fire in Hurricane Sandy, as particularly at risk. The scientists were followed by engineers and architecture firms presenting rival storm-surge barrier designs, and the Arcadis team gave a sales pitch that was more subtle than the Texan’s—and much more effective.