With relatively little public notice, four Bay Area regional bureaucracies, the Association of Bay Area Governments, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District and the Bay Conservation and Development Commission have come together under the Orwellian sounding OneBayArea.org.

Their charge is to develop a response to forecasts of a climate-change induced 55-inch rise in sea levels. The result is that these large regional organizations could have enormous impact on limiting land use across hundreds of thousands of acres of prime Bay Area land.

Business is just now waking up to the potential impacts. For instance, consider one of the most extreme ideas floated: Abandon Highway 37 to the bay. No kidding.

That possibility is raised in a report entitled “Climate Change Hits Home” by the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, or SPUR.

In the report’s section on transportation, SPUR recommends public agencies “make decisions about what transportation infrastructure to protect, move, retrofit or abandon.”

SPUR suggests Highway 37 traffic in Sonoma County could be “shifted to Highway 121.” This is part of what SPUR calls “managed retreat.”

Such a “retreat” would, of course, be potentially devastating to landowners, wineries and other businesses dependent on Highway 37 as the primary way customers get to them.

But that is just the beginning. The Bay development commission’s proposed Bay Plan amendment would exert added control over 213,000 acres of the inner ring of the Bay Area, and much of it planned for development.  The area includes San Francisco International Airport and large swaths of land in Sonoma, Marin and Napa counties.

Business groups including the Building Industry Association, the Bay Area Council and the Bay Planning Coalition have strongly objected to the BCDC’s Bay Plan amendment on several grounds.