Nature faces off against politics in North Carolina

RALEIGH, N.C. — During the early morning hours of May 2, part of the northbound lane of North Carolina Highway 12 in Kitty Hawk broke off and washed into the Atlantic Ocean.

While the loss of 200 feet of roadway and about 500 feet of a protective sand berm will be temporary, it was more than just another hit to the road from a big spring storm at high tide under a full moon. In a state that has been engaged in a highly charged, highly politicized debate about climate change for more than five years, it was a reminder that the Atlantic isn’t waiting to see who wins the argument.

It was also a reminder that North Carolina, with its rapidly developing coastline and intricate ecological network of sounds and estuaries, has a lot at stake as sea levels rise. The state has more than 300 miles of direct coastline and thousands of miles of tidal areas. Like much of the Southeastern U.S. coast, commercial and residential development is growing more concentrated on barrier islands that move over time, rolling over themselves and drifting toward and away from the mainland with the rise and fall of the sea.

Given the nature of the North Carolina coast and the intense energy of waves in the Atlantic, official public policy has been not to try to fight the ocean but to deal with its effects. Since the early 1980s the state has prohibited hardened structures like seawalls and jetties. Only recently has it allowed construction of a small number of jetties to protect areas threatened by heavy erosion and to keep inlets clear for boat traffic.

Coastal scientists have conducted extensive modeling on North Carolina’s inlets and coastline and for more than a decade have looked for ways to include analyses of the impact of rising sea levels in their models.

In 2010 the state’s Coastal Resources Commission asked a panel of coastal scientists to study the rate of sea level rise and predict what the coast might look like at the end of the century. But the panel’s report, which said that North Carolina’s coast could see waters rise by as much as a meter by 2100, caused an intense backlash — and not just among climate change denialists but also from coastal developers, landowners and the state’s politically powerful real estate lobby. 

North Carolina’s debate over rising sea levels took place as the state legislature changed hands and as, over two election cycles, the Republican majority grew to supermajorities in the state House and Senate. In November 2012, the sweep was completed when Republican Pat McCrory was elected governor.

The next year, the legislature abruptly ended the terms of nearly all members of the state’s environmental policy boards, including the Coastal Resources Commission, which was charged with overseeing the issue of sea level rise.

It is doubtful that when the sea level rise report is presented to the legislature next year, the debate over climate change and its implications will be any less intense.

In this year’s session of the legislature, few coastal issues were discussed without at least one jab at climate science. In April alone, the topic came up in an agriculture committee during a discussion of new soil science, in a meeting on insurance law changes and in hearings on dredging and port improvements. At all three, it was clear that some legislators remain skeptical.

The controversy over the sea level rise provisions in 2012 failed to chasten climate change skeptics in the legislature. New federal regulations on carbon emissions are also drawing fire among state legislators, since they run afoul of a push by the legislature and the McCrory administration to open up the state to hydraulic fracturing for natural gas exploration in the center of the state and to oil and gas exploration offshore. He still has not taken a direct stand on climate change science. During a news conference after an oil and gas exploration conference last year, he mentioned the need to improve coastal infrastructure because of “changing weather patterns” in response to a question about how to spend royalties from offshore drilling.

The Sierra Club’s state director, Molly Diggins, said the governor is ducking the issue when he should be leading. “We need to be planning for and adapting to an accelerated rate of sea level rise,” she said. “Instead of leadership on the issue, this administration has buried it. We seem to be intent on not being ready for what’s already happening.”

Beyond the political debate, there’s an understanding in coastal communities that acknowledging and planning for sea level rise is the prudent thing to do.

In Dare County, where the combination of rising sea levels and land subsidence is predicted to result in dramatic change, planning for the effects is already in the works. County spokeswoman Dorothy Hester said the political debate has had “little or no effect” on Dare’s planning efforts. “The county’s hazard mitigation plan recognizes that sea level rise may impact the frequency and severity of hazards from natural events like floods, hurricanes, nor’easters and coastal erosion,” she said.