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How The Great Lakes Could Drive The Rust Belt’s Economic Future
The region’s greatest asset is also one of its most underutilized.
Take a drive east into downtown Cleveland on the West Shoreway, and you’ll see it. There on the lakefront, as you pass by First Energy Stadium, The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and the Great Lakes Science Center sits the future of the Rust Belt economy.
Or at least what could be the future: a large wind turbine.
In the face of climate change brought on in large part by fossil fuel consumption, the future of the economy in the Rust Belt — and the rest of the world, really — is alternative energy.
The Great Lakes present a criminally underutilized asset in that regard.
According to a large-scale data analysis and forecasting undertaken by the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania called The 2100 Project: An Atlas for a Green New Deal, some 100 million new people will live in the United States by the end of the century. That’s in addition to the nearly 330 million already making America their home, millions of whom may be forced to…
