Gov. Malloy: Infrastructure needs to be hardened for climate change

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) on Tuesday night said the United States needed to rebuild its infrastructure to protect against extreme weather caused by climate change.

"Number one, I have been talking about climate change since 1997," he told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. "It's happened. It's alive and well in Connecticut. Number two, we have to raise a lot of infrastructure, literally lift it up off the ground, and we have to think of our cities very differently than we thought about in the past."

As an example, Malloy said the first four floors of a high rise could be used as a parking garage, which is less susceptible to damage from flooding than offices or apartments. He said public transportation systems like subways also need to be redesigned to withstand extreme weather.

New York's subway system make take weeks to recover from Hurricane Sandy due to downed power lines and flooding.

"We need to rebuild our infrastructure, we need to harden our infrastructure, we need to protect that infrastructure, and we need to do that not for ourselves, but for coming generations," Malloy added.

"Not to make judgments about whether we're going to be able to compete with the rest of the world, it's whether our children and grandchildren are going to be able to compete with the rest of the world. That was never a question for other American generations. But all of a sudden, we're questioning whether we should make those investments, at least some of us are."

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