May 2017, Harvard Crimson:
Mark Zuckerberg’s Commencement address at Harvard
How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet and getting millions of people involved manufacturing and installing solar panels? … We get that our greatest challenges need global responses too — no country can fight climate change alone or prevent pandemics.
(The last part is my favorite. In 2017 he predicted that the lavishly funded UN and WHO would, three years later, be able to prevent a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic via muscular action, Scientific interventions such as saliva-soaked face rags, etc.)
February 2026, WSJ:
Billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are the latest California billionaires to buy a home in South Florida. … THE PRICE: While it isn’t clear exactly what Zuckerberg and Chan are paying for the nearly 2-acre property, local real-estate agents said it would likely trade for $150 million to $200 million. Last year, an undeveloped Indian Creek lot of roughly the same size sold for about $105 million.
A peasant to whom $200 million is real money might look at the contrast between the 2017 statement about climate panic (“destroy the planet”) and the 2026 sea level waterfront house purchase and shout out “Hypocrisy!”. But maybe instead it is time for a new level of envy. What if Mark Zuckerberg believes what he’s been saying about climate change and bought the house anyway? That’s the real estate equivalent of driving a $600,000 Ferrari Purosangue to an elementary school with two kids and a bag of drive-thru breakfasts in the back. The owner knows that the kids are doing $200,000 of damage to the interior and simply doesn’t care. Zuck expects the above house to be washed away in 5-10 years, in other words, and is indifferent to the consequent loss of $200 million.
Envy 101: being bitter about the people who can afford to buy beachfront mansions and pass them down to their kids and grandkids
Envy 303: being bitter about the people who can afford to buy beachfront mansions and treat them as disposable
Fun fact: 17% of the land in Netherlands was reclaimed from the sea by building dikes, starting in the 11 century.
So even if rising sea levels were a problem, we’ve known how to mitigate it for 1000 years?
https://phys.org/news/2016-10-dutch-america-coastal-cities-dont.amp
Says Miami should already be under water!
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“Naturally, the water would be up there, you know,” says Erik van Tienhoven van Weezel, pointing at an invisible spot about 10 feet above his head. “We live under the sea level, by quite a bit. And we know the water is a little higher each year. Do we lose sleep over what could happen if the dikes break? Do we worry about how we will survive as the climate gets warmer and the sea gets even higher? No. We have adapted for centuries. We will continue to adapt.”
As far as Dutch adaptation to rising water goes, van Tienhoven van Weezel is at ground zero. Almere, a city of 190,000, used to be covered by the Zuiderzee, a well-known bay of the North Sea that once cut a 60-mile hole out of the northern part of the Netherlands. But the Netherlands has been using windmills and dikes and a network of canals for centuries to expand the tiny nation into the often violent sea, and the Zuiderzee is now dry land. Almere is an example of Dutch success; about 15 percent of the Netherlands used to be covered by ocean waters.
And that lesson, say European climatologists, is an important one for the United States, where studies indicate that large areas of coastal cities such as Miami are likely to disappear under rising seawaters, not in centuries, but in decades. The key, they say, is for U.S. politicians to stop debating the cause of sea level rise and start planning and funding the works that can stave it off.
> A former maintenance manager for the Surfside, Florida, condominium building that collapsed on Thursday said he previously worried about the amount of saltwater that would flood the garage, as authorities continue to search for 156 missing people in the wreckage.
> “Any time that we had high tides away from the ordinary, any King Tide or anything like that, we would have a lot of saltwater come in through the bottom of the of the foundation,” he told CBS 4 Miami, adding they had to use two large pumps to try and remove the rising water.
https://www.newsweek.com/ex-maintenance-manager-surfside-condo-that-collapsed-recalls-saltwater-intrusion-1604508
Perhaps Miami will be transformed into Atlantis, “not with a bang but a whimper”. I probably would have been escorted out of Zuck’s address after saying, “Boo. I think the sea level in the Boston Harbor rose 1/10 of an inch just from your carbon footprint being transported to this meeting.” Maybe it would just be easier if we called out people who weren’t committing hypocrisy, huh?
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