Donald
Trump shelled out $409,759 for property taxes in 2016 on Mar-a-Lago,
his oceanfront club above billionaire’s row in Palm Beach, Fla. Some of
those tax dollars will go toward combating the ravages of climate
change, a phenomenon the president-elect has dismissed as a hoax.
Trump tweeted in 2012 that “the concept of global warming was created
by and for the Chinese” to make U.S. industry less competitive. In early
December he told Fox News that “nobody really knows” whether climate
change is real. He’s picked Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a
staunch denier of climate change, to run the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency.
That’s
not stopping officials in Palm Beach from preparing to deal with its
effects. This year, the town overhauled 12 pumping stations to push
storm runoff up a huge pipe to the Intracoastal Waterway under a
20-year, $120 million infrastructure plan to deal with increased
rainfall and street flooding, among other issues. Palm Beach’s system
can now suck up almost 1 million gallons of runoff a minute. “I just
deal with the reality that sea levels are rising,” says Palm Beach Town
Manager Thomas Bradford. “I don’t want to rile people up about it.”
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