Donald Trump has offered a definitively low-tech – and maddening – ‘solution’ to rising sea levels amid global warming: “Get your mops and buckets ready!”
He came up with the snide, unhelpful suggestion in a tweet as he criticised ongoing discussions about the possibility of constructing a sea wall to protect New York City, where low-lying areas have already experienced increased flooding from the encroaching ocean. The president called it an “environmentally unfriendly idea” that will “look terrible”.
The proposal by the Army Corps of Engineers for New York would create a six-mile-long barrier of man-made islands with retractable gates. The cost would not be $200b (£153.6b), as Trump falsely claimed, but $119b (£91.4b), and it would be constructed over 25 years. A finalised proposal isn’t expected to be presented to Congress until at least 2022. Some experts fear the massive proposal is already too little too late.
Critics were absolutely gobsmacked by Trump’s mocking comeback — particularly because the president has his own “environmentally unfriendly” wall that “looks terrible.” The “environmentally unfriendly” president has also won approval to construct two sea walls at his Turnberry golf resort in Ireland to keep the ocean at bay amid climate change, which Trump has called a “hoax,” but now says is “serious.”