> The agency’s projection that the system will “no longer provide [required] risk reduction as early as 2023” illustrates the rapidly changing conditions being experienced both globally as sea levels rise faster than expected and locally as erosion wipes out protective barrier islands and marshlands in southeastern Louisiana.
The article repeatedly refers to sea level rise without noting the contribution of this factor relative to erosion. Equal? Highly tilted toward sea level rise? Does erosion account for most of the problem, and if so how does one separate this factor from seal level increase?
Neither the article nor the source document offer much insight:
> “I think this work is necessary. We have to protect the population of New Orleans,” Vuxton said.
I'm not so sure, especially because the full costs of doing so appear to be so uncertain.
How much money will people living in other states be willing to dump into a cause with cost increases as far as the eye can see? It's not like sea level rise is expected to suddenly stop dead in its tracks.
Ever-greater engineering efforts are one option. Mass evacuation of the most vulnerable areas is another. There may be options in-between.
This says three main factors:
1.)sediment flow changes - we changed flow of Mississippi River to benefit a lot of upstream communities (for flood control/farming/maintaining river boundaries against nature's desire) - continuing to do so robs Louisiana of land mass
2.) subsidence - pumping out water aquifers and extracting oil (without replacing fluids) cause land levels to sink
3.) sea level rise
It's not just a few houses built by irresponsible people.
Nola has the highest port tonnage in the country. The impact on GDP is estimated in the hundreds of billions. There's also billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure here.
Most goods that pass through to the midwest and many through the rest of the country come through here.
Without Nola, hundreds of billions of dollars of the economy will go away. Gas prices set a record after Katrina.
Porque no los dos? Keep the port and relocate the rest of the city. It's not that you need hundreds of thousands people to run port facility. Damn, if you even need 500.
The rest of the population are hospitality workers and ambulance chase lawyers.
A lot of the current problem in New Orleans is that it's built on deep layers of silt which are slowly compacting. And channelizing the Mississippi has resulted in loss of protective barriers offshore because the silt now goes right out the end of the channel into deep water. Bonus the bedrock itself is slowly tilting sinking towards the gulf.
What the place needs is about three meters of compacted fill under the whole city. ALA Galveston TX and Downtown Chicago.
It's neither. Erosion and sea level changes are not at all the problem here.
The problem is that keeping the lowest point dry causes subsurface water to be removed from the area. Also, that water doesn't get replenished. Things tend to shrink when they dry out, and the land under New Orleans is no exception. It's becoming like a shriveled up raisin or sponge.
The more you pump the place dry, the more the place sinks lower.
Sea level has been rising at three millimeters a year as long as detailed measurements have been made. There has been no acceleration in that rate. We are, after all, still coming out of an ice age, and the oceans are still expanding due to accumulated heat.
Locally apparent changes are primarily due to land subsidence due to sediment deposits or rebound after the ice melted.
That is only a small part of the data, just 25 years worth of satellite data. There are ground measurements going back almost 150 years. Using all the data shows a clear acceleration:
The comment about coming out of an ice age is also not relevant - sea levels have indeed been rising since then, but nowhere near the current rate, so the current increase is mostly unrelated to that. For example:
Your first link has the essentially same data as what I referenced - 3.2 mm per year recently. Since 1919, they show a rise of about eight inches. The current rate amounts to 12 inches per century.
Your second link is interesting - thanks! It’s not different from what I said. We have come out of an ice age. The interglacial epochs have been historically relatively short.
Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear. The first link I gave has two graphs. The top one indeed has the same data you linked to - the 25 year satellite record. The second link is the one I was actually referring to though - that is the almost 150 year record including tidal gauge data. There is a pretty clear acceleration there. The earlier rate is lower than the later rate - in fact you even said that too (12" vs 8"). So I am a bit unclear why you said originally there was "no acceleration in the rate"?
I think that fitting a quadratic to such a short run of data is premature, and that extrapolating that same acceleration for 80 years is tendentious. However, the paper is otherwise interesting, and I hope they do an update in ten years and include their previous prediction :-)
Yes, that's the article I was thinking of, good find!
Agreed the extrapolation is debatable.
What is most astounding to me is that they are able to measure not just an increase of 3mm a year in sea levels by satellite, but that the data are precise enough that they can determine the change in this rate. The precision of the instrumentation and processing required to measure to that level of precision is astounding.
As I understand it, the Netherlands pays for this maintenance themselves, and not from EU funding? If it were relying on EU funds then I'd expect some kind of European benefit analysis would be required.
We have a seperate branch of government called Water Boards[0]. They are some of the oldest forms of government in the world dating back to 1255.[1]
The water boards raise their own taxes, and we elect officials for it in separate elections.
Basically we don't want regular politicians to make budget trade offs between long term safety and short term <whatever they campaign for>. I'm sure we're all familiar with long term planning capabilities of regular politicians.
To answer your question: yes. We do fund this our selves. I was saying I'm glad we do it this way in stead of begging the EU for funds.
The Sewerage and Water Board in Orleans Parish is autonomous and exempt from certain civil service rules for much the same reason (although the Mayor appoints the director and can chair meetings). This is not to be confused with the Orleans Parish Levee District, which rightly or wrongly was perceived as having its fingers in too many pots after Katrina so had many of its responsibilities taken over by regional agencies controlled by state government (SLFPA-E and W)
It's just a headline, but this title makes me sigh.
For this thread, it's the title; for others today, it has been the "dose of realism" cynical first comment. It's probably just bad luck, but it feels like the first comment on every thread I've read today has been some variation of "here are the clouds to this silver lining."
In this case, it's amazing that we give enough of a damn about each other to allocate the money in the first place. How many people say caring for the less fortunate should be a matter for charities but then don't donate a dime themselves? How many in an honest moment would reply, "that's tough, move to Houston." Yet some among us cares enough to try instead of just rolling their eyes at building below sea level. I'm happy to take more trying and failing if it's in exchange for "serves them right" hindsight or abject cynicism.
Proceeding to read the article, over a decade the Army Corps of Engineers raised hundreds of miles of levees. If this were a thread about how the US can't complete big projects any more, that alone would be a ray of sunshine.
There are real problems in the world, folks. There's no denying that. But when the people with the ability and the inclination to be doers spend their time wringing their hands or giving themselves over to "the constipation of bittersweet philosophy" that's when there's really a problem.
Instead of worrying about the state of the world, spend an hour of your social media/fuck around time a day/week/month doing something for someone else. It'll do some actual good.
I would rather we spent tax dollars on fixable problems with much more social good per dollar. I'm tired of subsidizing flood insurance for idiots that keep building in areas that flood every 10 years. Subsidizing someone to have a nice home on a Miami beech is not "actual good". L
What you're missing is the Nola has the highest port tonnage in the country. The impact on GDP is estimated in the hundreds of billions. There's also billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure here.
Most goods that pass through to the midwest and rest of the country come through here.
Without Nola, hundreds of billions of dollars of the economy will go away. Gas prices set a record after Katrina.
For anyone else who might be confused like I was, "Nola" seems to be a nickname for New Orleans, derived from "New Orleans, Louisiana" -> "New Orleans, LA" -> "NOLA" -> "Nola".
What if we just keep the port and relocate the rest of the city? It's not that you need hundreds of thousands people to run port facility. Damn, if you even need 500.
We spend more tax dollars on the military than anything else; that’s also a sort of never-ending wall building exercise intended to prevent floods of war & immigration... maybe we’re all idiots. ;)
It’s not really a subsidy, just poor use of tax dollars. I like my taxes being used for wise infrastructure projects. As a whole, the benefit the whole. Individually they benefit some individuals more than others. But I don’t consider that a subsidy.
Maybe the whole country would be better if everyone was willing to give up these sorts of unsustainable subsidies?
We (society as a whole) have an economic mechanism for protecting against risk - insurance. In places where insurance is too expensive or not available at all, perhaps we should consider letting nature take over.
One persons's 'unsustainable subsidy' is another person's 'showing compassion for those who are less fortunate'. It's not like New Orleans is a particularly affluent area either, and people have lived there for a very long time.
Take health insurance—one view could be that it forces people who are healthier to subsidize those who are less healthy.
While some people are unhealthy due to factors outside of control, others are unhealthy because they do unhealthy things. Would you consider the latter an 'unsustainable subsidy'?
Wait what? You're comparing healthcare, which is a necessity, to choosing to live in a particular city. People that need healthcare don't have a choice, people _do_ have a choice to relocate to a more sustainable city though.
I agree with you that NOLA isn't just the wealthy. But, that doesn't change the fact that its not a sustainable city to live in.
I'm reacting to the harsh, judgmental attitude towards people in NOLA and using health care insurance to point out that the world is complicated.
Some people are certainly unhealthy because of choices they made (yet there's still broad support for universal risk sharing), while some people in NOLA certainly aren't there by choice.
The poverty rate there is about twice the US average, and something like 40% of Americans don't have any substantial savings. Many people aren't able to uproot themselves and move even if they wanted to without outside financial assistance, at which point I'm sure someone will be asking 'why should we pay to move people when they made a bad choice of where to live?', forgetting that these people may have lived there for generations.
You can be poor anywhere in the US, it doesn't have to be in a flood zone.
The main argument for rebuilding these areas seems to be "these people have lived there for generations". People move, and catastrophic flooding seems like a better reason than most.
It should. I believe you should pay more if you have unhealthy life style. First implement a good universal health care, second make people making the wrong choices (smoking is a wrong choice, being old is not) pay more.
There is substantial research that says that conditional care like what you propose is often used as a cudgel to deny Government assistance to those that need it the most.
In other words, I think the cost of putting in these guardrails, often with good intentions, is that they're misused against minorities and the poor. If that's the case, I would rather a few freeloaders/bad decision makers abuse it rather than the most needy going without the healthcare they desperately want.
It's tricky. For instance: My understanding is that people who smoke tend to die younger, and therefore spend less for healthcare over their lifetime than people who don't. So why should they pay more?
Then there is the whole question of "what is an unhealthy lifestyle?" It seems likely that not getting enough exercise is probably unhealthy, but diet advice is all over the place. You need better science than we have now to make these decisions.
> People that need healthcare don't have a choice, people _do_ have a choice to relocate to a more sustainable city though[...]
People have a choice in relocating from New Orleans for less flood risk, but they don't have a choice to relocate from the US if their main problem with living there is is with the US's health care system?
I'm not going to argue that they should, but this example isn't exactly doing the work for you that you seem to think it's doing. If you're going to say "just move from New Orleans" someone else can say "just move to Canada".
You can argue about the relative difficulty of those things, but they're not inherently different, and there's certainly people for whom it's a lot easier to move countries than say people in abject poverty in New Orleans who can't imagine pulling off a move to another city in the US.
Have you ever actually tried moving to a different country? Its exponentially harder than moving a few miles down the road.
Plus this argument is losing the point that the government is already spending the money trying to temporarily fix the problem instead of using that money to buy up the properties at a price point that would allow the residents to move.
I know not everyone would want to move, so I'm personally a fan of mandatory flood insurance in those flood prone areas. When there inevitably is a flood the resident can rebuild from their own pocket or use the insurance to move.
Yeah, four times now. As noted I'm not saying it's easier than moving down the street, just that if we're talking about people in such poverty that they couldn't move down the street comparing it to the experience of other more well-off people moving countries is hardly unreasonable.
Sometimes in history whole cities get moved a few miles. It's expensive, yes, but it does it done. In the 1950s and 60s Ontario and Quebec in Canada moved some smaller villages away from the St. Lawrence river when it was being expanded. Some cities get moved because damns are being built like in China's Three Gorges Dam.
Don't a large number of people have health problems as a result of poor diet and lack of exercise? I think that would qualify as a choice. I know I could probably lower my cholesterol with more discipline. If I choose not to, it's reasonable for me to pay higher insurance premiums.
I live in revelstoke, if we do that Canada cant ship goods from coast to coast from december to april (the subsidy I have in mind is the Rogers pass avalanche control program) Those subsidies exist because they benefit people.
The usual counterargument to this is that the people who benefit should pay for it themselves. Only if the true price is available to consumers can they make informed choices.
I don't fully subscribe to it myself, since I support some subsidies, but for many things it applies.
This seems like a good idea, until you get to interconnected systems that everyone depends on (like eg. the levees around an island, or a large harbor). Then it's STILL a good idea; in those cases everyone should pay!
You're assuming they're shipping luxury, optional goods, but what if they're essentials like food and medicine?
I mean yes you can make the argument that if it's too expensive you shouldn't be living there, but that's not how it works (case in point: SF, where people rather live in substandard housing or the street and have a shot at a big tech or startup company than move somewhere affordable).
> I mean yes you can make the argument that if it's too expensive you shouldn't be living there, but that's not how it works
It sounds like you're saying "we oughtn't change the status quo because it wouldn't be the status quo". What am I misunderstanding? (Apologies if this is obvious; still waking up)
I'd suggest a more rational subsidy. Tornadoes, earthquakes, lightning, fire, those can be managed for but are largely unpredictable. Water is predictable, it follows gravity. We have maps already that tell us where it will go in a flood. I'd like the program to be, the government will pay you the value of the property before the flood. Then it becomes government property, basically parkland, and no one can build on it ever again. You are going to have to rebuild somewhere else. Eventually all the places that can flood will flood and then there will be no more subsidy necessary.
The planet is in constant change except on longer timescales than humans can perceive. Just because a geographic location is great for a city at one time doesn't mean it will stay that way forever.
They should just pay people affected by this to move.
Speaking specifically about New Orleans, it will _never_ be a good place for a city. It's a coastal city with large areas below sea level. The foreseeable future (for decades to centuries) is that sea levels will rise and Gulf hurricanes will increase in severity.
* > Proceeding to read the article, over a decade the Army Corps of Engineers raised hundreds of miles of levees. If this were a thread about how the US can't complete big projects any more, that alone would be a ray of sunshine.
Unfortunately even that sunshine requires applying sunscreen as it reminds of their calculations that don’t favor helping the most people.
Still, even if the [Army Corp of Engineers] approach is designed to avoid picking winners and losers, it ends up doing so anyway, favoring wealthier neighborhoods. "It's also going to be [choosing] more valuable businesses," Kling says. "More valuable real estate."
I would say in these cases though that he levees are the problem. You have silted up channels because the river needs to flood, and the excessive levee system makes that problem more pronounced and contributes to the shrinking of the delta.
That said, New Orleans shouldn’t die. But we’re making the problem worse for most stakeholders in other places.
>> “I think this work is necessary. We have to protect the population of New Orleans,”
Not that I like either option, but I'd rather my tax dollars be spent on relocating these people than fighting an eternal war against the inevitable march of nature. Can I do anything personally about it? Not really. Certainly far less than any individual who lives there. But if my taxes are going to be used to help, then please help in a way that is more effective than doing the same stupid thing (building below sea level) that they've been doing for a hundred years.
Nola has the highest port tonnage in the country. The impact on GDP is estimated in the hundreds of billions. There's also billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure here.
Most goods that pass through to the midwest and rest of the country come through here.
Without Nola, hundreds of billions of dollars of the economy will go away. Gas prices set a record after Katrina.
>Instead of worrying about the state of the world, spend an hour of your social media/fuck around time a day/week/month doing something for someone else. It'll do some actual good.
Unfortunately, the current zeitgeist is one in which if you say the wrong thing, are misinterpreted, "mansplain" or simply disagree with the wrong people you're going to get railroaded, brigaded, reported to authorities, fired or blacklisted.
In a world like that, where everyone is an opponent, who wants to "help their neighbour"?
Feigned moral indignation over 'cynicism' won't change the fact that real money was really wasted.
> Instead of worrying about the state of the world, spend an hour of your social media/fuck around time a day/week/month doing something for someone else. It'll do some actual good.
Also, speak for yourself. You don't know what people spend their time doing outside of writing comments on HN.
I do that, and I agree: I wish people would spend as much time complaining about other people as they do helping them. Yet, 40% of my paycheck is still taken against my will anyway.
> Emily Vuxton, policy director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, an environmental group ... said repair costs could be “hundreds of millions” of dollars, with 75% paid by federal taxpayers.
“I think this work is necessary. We have to protect the population of New Orleans,” Vuxton said.
Summed up as: “I think our unsustainable way of life should be subsidized by the rest of the country at a 3:1 rate”.
I enjoy NOLA, but how are we going to deal with this at any kind of scale?
The key to my comment was the last clause “at any kind of scale”.
If the community living there can’t support the costs of environmental maintenance, at a certain point it becomes like a superfund site: people will need to move to higher ground. In NOLA, in Houston, in Miami and beyond.
What about the forest fires in the West and even places like NC? Overflowing rivers throughout the US? Tornadoes from the mid-West to the mid-Atlantic? Hurricanes? Where in the US is safe as climate change induces more frequent and more extreme weather-related disasters?
Fighting the entire USA coastline against rising oceans is batshit crazy and would bankrupt the country if we tried.
I always found it crazy that flood insurance would pay people to rebuild... on a flood plain. I've read stories where people rebuild once a decade or so. Seems clearly irrational and people living outside of floodplains should subsidize those that don't.
Similarly if you are high risk of fires or earthquakes you should pay a premium on insurance and that insurance should depend on reasonable mitigations. A friend moved into high risk area and they required a clear area near the house and a rooftop watering system to get the insurance that was required to get the home loan.
So yes, the country should either pay for mitigation (levees, fire control, earthquake resistant building costs etc) where it makes sense or ban developments in high risk areas. Paying for people to live below ocean level makes no sense.
> Similarly if you are high risk of fires or earthquakes you should pay a premium on insurance
You do for fire risk and standard homeowners insurance doesn't cover earthquakes, you need a separate policy, which is non-free, so you are clearly paying a premium for it.
I used to sell insurance, including homeowners. As part of selling a homeowners policy, I was supposed to ensure that a home was not ridiculously vulnerable to catching fire. An example would be making sure the owner hadn't stuffed the house full of canisters of gasoline, or that the exterior of the house wasn't in direct contact with an abundance of dry vegetation.
Any insurance company that is willing to be represented by agents too lazy too verify a home is a fire waiting to happen is gonna lose money big time. It seems the logical approach to handling house in a wildfire prone area orvavflood plain would be to simply charge stupid high rates or not offer the insurance at all.
It seems the logical approach to handling house in a wildfire prone area orvavflood plain would be to simply charge stupid high rates or not offer the insurance at all.
Which is exactly what insurance companies do. It is usually very difficult to get flood insurance in a flood plain. Rather than taking that as a clue that people shouldn't live there, all too often, the government steps in to subsidise the risk. I don't want to over simplify, things are complicated and sometimes it is appropriate to subsidise such risk, but sometimes it is not.
>Paying for people to live below ocean level makes no sense.
Well, Amsterdam is currently 2 meters below sea level already and it will be pretty interesting to see what happens to New Amsterdam, I mean, York. For one thing, Manhatten is essentially floating already, they have to pump it out continuously otherwise it sinks.
edit - ok, around sea level, it isn't at 2 meters below. I stupidly thought google would be correct.
Amsterdam is an interesting example. Is Amsterdam asking anyone else to subsidize them? From what I've read they made a conscious decision that the pumping, levees and related was worth the cost of the extra acres of land they provided.
New Orleans seems to be arguing that it only makes sense if 75% of it is paid by someone else... forever.
a lot of of economic activity in NL is below sea level.
No, Amsterdam did not directly pay for it. But yes, the most profitable regions contributed the most.
You are right, I trusted google and I repent. Most of it is pretty much at sea level though and they still have to spend a hell if a lot of effort in keeping the sea away.
If Insurance is priced right who cares. Your insurance factors in the risk of loosing the home, and should ensure the insurance company always wins long term.
Normally I agree with you, but I am told in the US flood insurance is basically a government fund and doesn't operate like a private profit-seeking insurance at all. This leads to weird cases where people just rebuild in the same place in full knowledge that they will rebuild again in a few years, with flood insurance covering the expense.
Aka if we priced insurance at the right level. You'd likely see people stop buying homes on some of these flood plains. As insruance would cost too much.
The premiums for flood insurance can be pretty steep, and I would be extremely surprised if the fund operated at a loss. In my case, the annual premium is a little over 1% of the covered value, even though the historical record high (back in the 1960's) would probably only require about 10% of the total coverage purchased to replace (in this case, mostly from a few out buildings that are a little lower than the house itself).
After doing some more digging, it turns out that roughly 20% of NFIP policies are subsidized, and the up-to $30b debt was authorized by Congress in 2012 due to the shortfalls.
80% of the policies (the non-subsidized ones) are thought to be actuarially sound, barring unintended consequences of out-of-date flood maps.
So, I'm not terribly surprised. Were it operating like a traditional insurer, it might even be doing fine (especially if it had some other reforms such as eliminating or having better oversight over WYO policies).
People rebuild all sorts of stuff all the time. Look around your average city or drive around and tell me how old all the buildings are. You’ll notice most of them are less than 20-40 years old. And the ones that aren’t have almost certainly been essentially rebuilt recently in practice.
We knock stuff down and change or rebuild it all the time, there’s no such thing as permanent against the weather. Or just changing tastes and technology, I mean indoor plumbing is less than 100 years old. Shit changes.
Huh? The house I grew up in was built in 1895 and had plumbing from the start.
It looks like rich people started getting indoor plumbing in the early 1800s (the White House got it in 1833) and it was widespread in new construction by the end of the century.
It's still seeing a net population decline though, both in the Metropolitan and suburban areas. A recent post on the Columbus subreddit showed Cleveland has one of the lowest average internet speeds in the country, and this story from Ars [0] shows actual redlining in how new cable was (not) being laid down. The apartment I lived in growing up was using dial-up until my freshman year of high school a decade or so ago.
I have family in southern/central Ohio and, while they've always been a risk, there has been a marked uptick in the occurrence of tornadoes. Xenia, OH very famously has been hit multiple times by serious tornadoes. Where my parents are, where I did most of my growing up, in southeastern Ohio, is a little safer because of the Appalachian foothills, but I fondly remember the tornado sirens blaring every Wednesday at noon during the spring, summer, and fall.
A friend of mine from high school, who is a meteorologist and storm chaser today, was telling me the last time that we spoke that tornado alley is potentially / actually shifting eastward over time. I haven't tried to verify what he was saying, because I trust him given his career choices, but it does seem to bear out from the anecdata that I have available.
Tornados cut a narrow swath, compared to a hurricane. I’d wager all the tornados in the last 100 years cause less total economic damage than a single hurricane hitting a coastal city.
Well, I believe that the point is that as tornado alley shifts east that these natural disasters will come closer to larger or perhaps denser metropolitan areas. I do agree with your point. Though, if / as torando alley shifts eastward there could be some significant overlap between the areas that could be impacted by both torandos and hurricanes. I'm reminded of the tornados that hit Alabama last year.
Tornadoes do so little damage the insurance market actually works. The complain is insurance markets that need to be subsidized by federal funds because they don't raise enough money on their own (see florida, Louisiana, etc.).
A LOT of the forest that burned in the CA Camp fire isn't going to come back. Thanks to warming winters, the pine bark beetles are making their way up the Sierras and laying waste to entire mountains of pine trees. The folks who want to live in the burned out areas will now likely be surrounded by chaparral instead of pine forest.
How much federal aid is given to California wild fires vs. east coast hurricanes vs. New Orleans floods? How valuable are those regions to the financial health of the country?
This evaluation kind of fails though. Even if (for example) California is worth lots of aid because of its massive economic value, who's to say it will still be massively valuable economically after a decade of storms? That could decimate agriculture and other infrastructure, undermining its ability to host businesses.
It seems pretty hard to account for this in advance.
I'm not disputing the idea of actuary science here (I have relatives who work as actuaries), I'm disputing the idea of 'we should abandon this entire city because it's not worth the cost of saving the residents from hurricanes based on some economic projections', which seems to be a recurring theme here.
It's one matter to make insurance really expensive due to very obvious risk or make other pricing adjustments based on projections and quite another to axe a city.
Get rid of the government subsidized insurance and it will effectively axe the city as no new mortgages will be offered since no private companies are willing to offer insurance for it. No one is going to offer you insurance for a sure loss.
Non-term life insurance seems a good counterpoint. The price of the insurance may equal effectively a second mortgage over some timeframe but it can be priced.
In reality the risk of loss across the region is not nearly as high as implied.
Non term life insurance is a waste of money ignoring any tax advantages that don’t apply for most people since you can just directly invest the premiums in a low fee index fund and not pay the overhead costs of the life insurance company.
If the price of the insurance was so high that it was a second mortgage, then that would still devastate real estate prices and still cause economic decline in the region.
Being alive does involve a level of risk. My understanding is the number of hurricanes, for example, are expected to a little-less-than-double [0]. So, if you experience a hurricane it is still probably not due to global warming. Probably broadly true of the others, too.
We have words for these things because they've been threats since the dawn of time - nowhere has ever been especially safe safe from things going horribly wrong. The biggest problem always has been and will remain a lack of preparedness by communities for disasters.
> Hundreds of millions of dollars is barely a blip on the federal government's budget.
That doesn’t mean that’s how it should be.
When you listen to old radio, you get the impression people actually cared about how money was spent and didn’t casually write off millions of dollars, just because “that’s the budget.” Why are people these days willing to let the government drop millions of dollars so casually?
Take for example this episode of Johnny Dollar: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PXa86HJ49iE (1956). The way the people in this episode are pissed off about their money being wasted, you’d think it was some other country.
When did people become OK with wasting money like this?
NOLA brings in $8 billion a year in tourist money alone. The metropolitan region had a GDP of $235 billion in 2017. Investing a few hundreds of millions of dollars to preserve hundreds of billions of dollars in productivity seems like a smart investment.
Maybe the people of 2018 are just better at math than the ones in in 1956.
Thank you for injecting some sanity into the conversation.
The NPV of the region is such that the cost of the levees would have to increase 3 orders of magnitude before most of the comments that amount to “let it flood” would even begin to make any sense economically, despite being entirely morally bankrupt to begin with.
Hey didn’t say anything about NOLA or whether it “should be saved” or anything like that, just the attitude of not caring about millions of dollars just because... it’s in the budget or whatever.
NOLA can't even fix the damn potholes with that revenue. It's not that NOLA residents own Marriott Inc and that good part of money stays in the city. City's budget main contributor is sadly - traffic cameras.
NOLA is spending $2 billion in FEMA money right now to actually repave roads properly, including some in Deisre and Algiers that haven’t been worked over since the mid-90s. Roads in this Parish cost $10 million a mile to do right due to underlying soil geology. Do you even do research before you run your mouth? The contractor takes at least 40% of traffic camera revenue.
It's far lower than that. There's a fake pie chart floating around the internet showing Defense at 57% of the federal budget. For 2019, the real number was 12%. In previous years it was about 15%.
It depends on how you categorize things. The 50% numbers come from discretionary budgets & are accurate. But ‘most’ federal spending is not discretionary. It’s old people care.
There really isn't any non-discretionary spending. The closest we have is payments specified in international treaties, and even that can simply not be paid. All the rest is just a couple congressional votes and a presidential signature away from being eliminated.
Discretionary spending is about 1/3 of the budget, and, yeah, defense is half of that, but when the GP wrote that "military spending takes up more than half of the budget" it paints a misleading picture.
A social program would be building schools, bridges, improving access to education, funding research for medicines to be put in public domain so it’s affordable. Adding a 12th aircraft carrier or developing an unnecessary fighter plane is not a social program.
Not everyone joins the military because the alternative is absolute shit, but it often is, and they often do. It is absolutely a social program in that sense, and if you cut it, your other social programs are going to have to take up the slack. You have to de-rate the "win" from cutting it accordingly.
Not if you defer additional infrastructure spending until the land has declined in value from water intrusion. To pay more today is a transfer to those whose land is expected to lose value in the future from sea levels rising.
It cost $100 million already (with an additional $400 million planned) just to keep the water out of Miami Beach (with another ~$3 billion in expected costs due to septic and well failures in Miami proper), some of the most valuable real estate in the country. NOLA is not Miami Beach/Miami (value-wise).
At some point, we have to stop throwing good money after bad.
Not if you defer additional infrastructure spending until the land has declined in value from water intrusion.
Insurance is going to pick up some of this until the land is declared un-insured. so, some parts of the relocation cost will be socialized if you like it or not, because premiums will rise in the market to offset this cost.
Policies will be outright cancelled before that happens, except through the national flood insurance program, which could be used to slowly migrate folks out over time. But let's not think that some sort of twisted Manifest Destiny requires we pour hundreds of millions or billions of dollars into New Orleans when there are other options available.
The only thing that is constant is change. We must be willing to adapt.
Off the coast of Louisiana is the Mad Dog spar oil platform, installed in 2005, which at maximum production is pumping 100,000 barrels of oil a day. Louisiana receives no tax revenue from it.
I'm not totally sure what point you're trying to make... I don't have a particularly strong opinion on how to allocate tax revenue in this situation, but it seems relevant to mention that the platform is 150 miles off the coast.
That's 138 miles into international waters. Percentage-wise, it's... a little closer to Louisiana than Texas? Florida and Mexico are't all that far away either.
Nola is built on silt. Due to waterway controls etc., the delta isn’t getting the silt it historically received to keep erosion/subsidence at bay. Cost benefit would say keep the farming/irrigation, diversion due to economics and sacrifice a sinking delta. Not much different from Alexandria+Nile.
Nola should have taken the opportunity to move and rebuild on higher ground.
That’s something for geologists to answer. All I can say is the place we know has historically sunk and we know is sinking and will continue sinking in the future due to soil, hydrology, etc., is not the place to rebuild.
I understand that. But New Orleans is subsiding. It's sinking every year. It's easier to maintain levees if the land beneath them isn't sinking. I don't know why my comment is getting downvoted.
Wouldn't that be nice. Sadly, levees actually contribute to the problem due to several factors (IIRC 2 factors were the blocking of silt deposition and the lowering of ground water levels). The ground water levels are something that can be managed, the silt deposition is something you need to learn to live without.
Thing is, if the land wasn't sinking to begin with, exactly why were you considering levees in the first place? ;-)
Whatever the case may be, if you're building levees, you need to factor in the sink rate of the land around you, among the many factors. And you need to factor in the cost to maintain them indefinitely.
It's an expensive proposition; but by the simple fact that you're alive, standing there, and considering it already, chances are the ROI is worth it.
Yes the Netherlands is sinking. Hilariously enough its because of draught. The entire country is basically man made and a natural disaster. Luckily there is virtually unlimited budget and good engineering to keep things going.
How much do the Feds collect in taxes from the city each year? How much more will they collect in the future because the city floods less? A few hundred million dollars to protect a major city sounds like an incredible bargain with a great ROI.
From the sources I found (from 2017) GDP per capita is $52,536 (from Open Data Network), and population is 393,292 (US Census Bureau), giving a GDP of right around $20B.
We’ve already spent 14 on it, and will continue to need to spend indefinitely, so the numbers really aren’t great.
Indeed. This was totally predictable. New Orleans has been sinking for centuries. And sea level rise is inevitably occurring at an increasing rate.
So yes, just move everybody. There can be boat tours. Same for Florida. With porous limestone, it's a lost cause. Even New York City will be a challenge. Lots of Manhattan is built on old garbage.
New Orleans isn't the most unsustainable place around. The intractable swampy surroundings have prevented it from becoming as suburbanized as most American cities; if you look at it from a satellite, there is a sharp boundary between the city and the swamp. The situation is much worse in, say, Miami. Many other coastal cities will also need levees and have uglier boundaries.
>New Orleans isn't the most unsustainable place around
You can't really treat New Orleans as a single entity. The French Quarter and where the high rises are is (relatively) comfortably above sea level. The sprawl that stretches towards Lake Ponchartrain isn't. That area is well and truly screwed. They keep sinking, the sea keeps rising, and the hurricanes get stronger.
There's no real solution. You can keep building the levees higher, but that's sort of like paying off a credit card with anotehr credit card. It's a temporary solution that makes the reckoning a lot worse when the piper comes calling.
this could be the ideal testing grounds for dealing with global sea-level rise. What's happening to new orleans is expected to happen at most low-sea-level cities relatively soon.
Nola has the highest port tonnage in the country. The impact on GDP is estimated in the hundreds of billions. There's also billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure here. Most goods that pass through to the midwest and many through the rest of the country come through here.
Without Nola, hundreds of billions of dollars of the economy will go away. Gas prices set a record after Katrina.
If the federal government would just do what North Carolina did and pass a law prohibiting basing coastal policies on the latest scientific predictions of how much the sea level will rise, these levees would last indefinitely.
As a non-American, can someone explain to me why the army was responsible for this work? When does the normal tender/contractor process not occur? Is it a scale or political decision?
The US Army Corps of Engineers is generally and historically responsible for waterway dredging and flood control. It's one of their core (peace-time) responsibilities. These are typically large projects that benefit the public good yet are rather complex and lack sufficient financial incentives for privatization. The wikipedia article [1] gives a general idea of how and when this came to be. (Canals.)
It's complicated. The Army Corps of Engineers has had a civilian mandate to support flood control prevention since 1917 [1]. Beyond that, they are also involved in large public works projects such as the building of roads and bridges, and Superfund clean-up sites. On top of this, they regularly receive large pork barrel grants from Congress that can siphon money into a senator's state or a congressperson's district. They do have a large contracting arm and are actually pretty well-regarded for their comprehensive procurement and management process for these large public works projects.
So it's scale, politics, and history/momentum at this point.
> As a non-American, can someone explain to me why the army was responsible for this work?
Because...path dependency. The Army Corps of Engineers has long been responsible, largely, as I understand it, from mission following capacity rather than vice versa.
> When does the normal tender/contractor process not occur?
It can, but that process requires
a government agency over the top, and the ACE is the responsible agency. They contract out work.
It is a bit odd, but the Army Corps of Engineers has historically always been responsible for a lot of maintenance of the country's rivers and waterways, dams, parts of the Great Lakes, etc. including flood control.
They have a concept of “waters of the United States” where if it’s a navigable water it is federally managed and historically army cane first so their Corp of engineers are the ones who carry out the operations
As an American I know. These levees were built KNOWING that they sink at a mathematical formulate rate. This is FAKE NEWS. The 14 billion dollar cost is a cost rate over a decade or more, lets say 1 billion at 14 years long. This billion a year is the cost to keep adding on to the existing well made and constructed infrastructure.
Please don’t co-opt the phrase “fake news” even if you don’t believe what’s being said is an accurate portrayal — it disparages the news media by implicitly legitimizing self-serving uses of the term. Every time this phrase is used it hurts the fourth estate. The media gets things wrong sometimes, and we should hold them accountable but this isn’t how.
Y'all questioning whether it's worth saving should stay in New Orleans for a month. There is so much joy there, such a rich culture and long history that we all stand to lose.
Not everybody want's to live as a functional alcoholic in crime ridden city.
Besides, The World didn't even blinked when thousands years of mankind history was decimated in Iraq.
Move on.
I saw a program on Netflix or Prime Video about how rising sea levels are changing the lives of people living in a community in coastal California as the tides flood the streets more and more. People are emotionally bonded to their homes and are unable to decide to move away.
This is a new type of problem that is going to happen more and more globally. Maldives is going to be among the first to sink. However, their government has sobered up to that fact and are making plans. These type of events cannot be handled at the local level and government leaders need to coax and guide people to relocate.
Then again, we have deniers of climate change and rising sea levels...
Is it a new problem? The dustbowl hit, and some people were completely unwilling to move, even though their way of life was unsustainable.
Change is inherently hard to deal with. I think one of the big roles of government, and perhaps culture, is to temper the peaks and valleys. Some of us are going to face hard hard choices. Some of those choices are very rapid, like an earthquake. Some of those choices are very slow, like rising sea levels.
We pretty much know that there will be earthquakes and rising sea levels. How do we influence people to minimize that impact today?
I'm a fan of big cash payouts for flood insurance in exchange for losing the land, ever increasing taxes on the sale of costal properties and converting coastline to national park.
When folks homes are inevitably destroyed, make sure they have plenty of money to move. Make it harder and harder to sell property on the risky coasts, and finally when enough homes have been destroyed (50%? 95%? doesn't really matter the higher the fraction, the more painful the change will be), take the land and turn it into parks for everyone to use.
I'm not exactly opposed to the very wealthy hanging on to a cabin or a mansion, but there needs to be a clear line that they are living on public land. People can camp in their yard.
Maybe it's a stupid idea. We do have an opportunity to unwind the massive, massive risk incurred by allowing, even encouraging, people to live in places where they will fail miserably, eventually.
Right now, the risks are low. So the stakes should be low. I have no problems with my tax dollars giving a small bonus for them to move away, and turn that land into national park. In 50 years when they are well and truly fucked - who cares? Maybe stop issuing flood insurance in 40 years. Plenty of time to figure out a plan.
But where they are living is increasingly risky. Slowly, gradually make it clear that we as a culture and government aren't going to subsidize that. It's ok if they are super-rich, and can afford to rebuild every few years. but the land will be nationalized eventually. And no one is going to subsidize rebuilding efforts in the very long run.
I think this is an unsustainable strategy in the long term. Many of America's biggest most profitable cities are on the coasts. With rising sea levels many will be at risk. Some (eg. New Orleans) already are.
On the other hand, investing a little money in terraforming never hurt anyone and has a proven track record.
there are high and low density locations. The dutch have proven that very little technology can protect land from the sea. I'm not opposed to special cases, but the coastline is _huge_. I don't believe we can protect all of it anymore.
Perhaps it was an option at one point, but we're past that point (in my humble opinion. i'm not a climatologist or an economist, i'm likely full of shit).
i think it's too late to reduce carbon emissions, and that requires global buy in. I think it's too late to build a wall along the whole coast. I think there are obvious places for exceptions, but 99% of the coast is going to sink. let's just own that and make the change as painless as possible.
The Netherlands - being situated in a delta- once had a disproportionately long natural coastline. One of the strategies employed is to shorten that coastline dramatically by strategic placement of walls. Of course, in a country like the USA, not even all of the coast requires additional protection; only parts of it.
I do agree with you that certain cities (like Miami) might be difficult-to-impossible to protect with current technology. Other cities (like New Orleans) have well-known challenges with well known solutions, and there is absolutely no reason why people couldn't protect them.
What is needed is for people to put together the political will, attitude and organization required to survive and thrive in those kinds of conditions (with a strong push towards prevention rather than recovery).
That too has already been done many times over the centuries; and there's no reason to believe that Americans (or Louisianans) are in any way inferior to other peoples.
Which is not to say I agree or disagree with you completely:
Harry Shearer has been pointing out the problem for years on his podcast "Le Show", the movie "The Big Uneasy", and other sites. He calls out the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for incompetence, making past and future disasters inevitable:
"Those bad floodwalls, of course, are the ones that failed so catastrophically in 2005. The Corps’ plan calls for keeping rainfall outflow in those canals at a set level, above which, the agency believes, the walls might fail. Again. The Corps should know. It designed and supervised the construction of those floodwalls."
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ill-consider-it-criminal_b_17...
Once, a long time ago, during an extended drought in the South East, I met the Corps's commander general. I asked him if they could use their vast water reservoirs to help alleviate the problem. He explained how this would adversely affect their Byzantine obligations to the power grid, which apparently had a higher priority.
I'm not informed or smart enough to criticize his position. But it did shift my perspective on what counts as "a higher priority" for the Corps. And I suspect this is the sort of thing that is at the core of their failures when dealing with the levees.
Then again maybe $14 billion dollars just ain't enough.
The levees along the Mississippi are one of the big reasons why the land around New Orleans is sinking.
>When Bienville founded New Orleans in 1718, the delta was more than 400 feet deep at the river's mouth and extended northward on top of that Pleistocene foundation to midway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. It continued growing southward until the late 1800s, when construction of flood-control levees prevented the river from resupplying the delta with new sediment.
And that's when subsidence became a serious problem.
what should be done for cities like new orleans as sea levels continue to rise? trying to save them feels like a losing, expensive battle - but "moving a whole city" feels even harder
Whenever property is completely destroyed in a floodplain they could offer say a 5% bonus to their insurance payment from the government if they give up rights to that property and no longer use it for housing or business, alternatively they could rebuilt the structure on pylons, propping it up above the flood levels. And if they decide to rebuild despite that offer, you could remove all eligibility from the subsidized cost of government-backed flood insurance, and instead let them take on the full cost of private insurance flood coverage rates.
And they really should, but on the other hand, as a population they pay enough in taxes to the federal government that it's not ridiculous for them to ask for some federal assistance with something like that.
(it's also not ridiculous for a major cultural landmark like New Orleans, but that's a more complicated argument)
I do not see why the rest of the country needs to pay for this. I can understand why Holland has to resort to this sort of civil engineering, otherwise their country would cease to exist. For the US, keeping New Orleans afloat is just an unnecessary expense.
Yes, much of it is below sea level and stupidly expensive to quite literally keep afloat. It's quite the expense, and it's probably best to move. It's not the job of the feds to take money from one state to cover the expenses of another.
I was in Algiers Point recently and the river was about 6 feet higher than the ground on the dry side of the earthen levee. All I could think was 'the people who built this levee were not Dutch, this cannot be even remotely safe'.
"The highest rates of sinking were observed upriver along the Mississippi River around major industrial areas in Norco, and in Michoud, with up to 2 inches (50 millimeters) a year of sinking."
It is crazy they build the system to a 100 year standard. The Dutch delta works are build to a 2000 4000 or 10000 year standard, depending on the area being protected. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works
Stealing a line from others, but: That's the difference between the US and Europe. In Europe, 100 miles is a long distance. In the US, 100 years is a long time.
Coastal cities will only be saved if lots and lots of money is spent on them. New York City will almost certainly survive for the foreseeable future (they've already got sea wall plans...). New Orleans, highly vulnerable and lacking money, will not survive.
Hard facts are hard facts. If New Orleans is going to be under water in 4 years, they will have to do something about it.
Actually, we should probably treat New Orleans as a case study and learn from it since due to rising sea levels, a lot of cities may have to evacuate in 10-20 years.
fighting the ocean is a bad idea. just build up like in venice. old tech, old approach, WORKS.just build one extra floor on each building every 50 years and plan for sinkage.
Dutch person here. This is not a technical problem but a mentality problem. Louisiana has been under Republican leadership for some time. Part of the Republican agenda seems to be downplaying the notion of climate change and the associated side effects like e.g. more hurricanes and sea level rises. Well, if nature proves politicians wrong, things get ugly. Put bluntly, Louisiana needs to own that problem and stop relying on federal money and the army to fix things while they pretend this is not an issue and cut taxes and corners on keeping themselves safe.
Simple solution, acknowledge the changes that are coming, start planning accordingly and get shit done. I'm pretty sure neither Republicans nor Democrats believe in wet feet as a long term sustainable political agenda. This shouldn't be a political debate. Either you do something about it or you don't. The next time these levies break, there will be a public outrage: heads will roll.
So, the pragmatic thing to do would be to come up with a better plan than hoping that won't happen, which seems to be the current plan. And yes, that's going to cost money. Lots of it. The alternative is accepting the likely disasters and then mopping up the damage at much greater cost. Katrina cost well over a hundred billion. The budget for preventing the next such disasters (plural) should be of a similar scale.
The good news is that that actually is an investment that can give birth to an industry that is likely to have its work cut out in the next decades as world + dog will be facing the same issues. Also, as I understand it, Louisiana could use some employment opportunities. Big projects like this always have positive side effects.
The Netherlands had their wake-up call in the 1953 when a severe winter storm + spring tide flooded a large part of it. The subsequent decades we fixed our infrastructure with some massive projects at the cost of many more billions than are on the table for this in the US. The companies that helped do that still exist today and are involved in very lucrative projects across the globe (e.g. building islands off the coast of Dubai, off shore airports, etc.). I believe there was a fair bit of consulting after Hurricane Katrina as well. Business is booming for these companies. Great return on investment for Dutch tax payers and we got to keep our feet dry.
"Republican leadership for some time. Part of the Republican agenda seems to be downplaying the notion of climate change"
Republicans believe in climate change. They just think paper straws are not going to fix the problem. Republicans think there is nothing they can do to stop China from producing massive amounts of carbon emissions. Republicans don't control Louisiana - so your entire narrative is wrong.
Louisiana has been Democrat for a very long time, only interrupted for a short while by Bobby Jindal. So there's that.
Also, Louisiana is not the Netherlands, the conditions may not be so good, meaning that 'the plan' may be mass evacuation, which is politically a much more challenging thing than saying 'we need to repair the dykes and our nation will be ok'.
> The agency’s projection that the system will “no longer provide [required] risk reduction as early as 2023” illustrates the rapidly changing conditions being experienced both globally as sea levels rise faster than expected and locally as erosion wipes out protective barrier islands and marshlands in southeastern Louisiana.
The article repeatedly refers to sea level rise without noting the contribution of this factor relative to erosion. Equal? Highly tilted toward sea level rise? Does erosion account for most of the problem, and if so how does one separate this factor from seal level increase?
Neither the article nor the source document offer much insight:
https://www.eenews.net/assets/2019/04/11/document_ew_01.pdf
Also from the article:
> “I think this work is necessary. We have to protect the population of New Orleans,” Vuxton said.
I'm not so sure, especially because the full costs of doing so appear to be so uncertain.
How much money will people living in other states be willing to dump into a cause with cost increases as far as the eye can see? It's not like sea level rise is expected to suddenly stop dead in its tracks.
Ever-greater engineering efforts are one option. Mass evacuation of the most vulnerable areas is another. There may be options in-between.
This says three main factors: 1.)sediment flow changes - we changed flow of Mississippi River to benefit a lot of upstream communities (for flood control/farming/maintaining river boundaries against nature's desire) - continuing to do so robs Louisiana of land mass 2.) subsidence - pumping out water aquifers and extracting oil (without replacing fluids) cause land levels to sink 3.) sea level rise
https://www.factcheck.org/2017/03/land-loss-in-louisiana/ All three together paint a pretty grim picture of the future of New Orleans.
It's not just a few houses built by irresponsible people.
Nola has the highest port tonnage in the country. The impact on GDP is estimated in the hundreds of billions. There's also billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure here. Most goods that pass through to the midwest and many through the rest of the country come through here.
Without Nola, hundreds of billions of dollars of the economy will go away. Gas prices set a record after Katrina.
14 billion is a bargain to keep this city going.
Porque no los dos? Keep the port and relocate the rest of the city. It's not that you need hundreds of thousands people to run port facility. Damn, if you even need 500. The rest of the population are hospitality workers and ambulance chase lawyers.
Ask not whose ambulance is being chased, one day it’ll be thine with that flippant attitude. Not everyone down here is paid by the hour.
I don't know if you're trolling or just actually ignorant.
A lot of the current problem in New Orleans is that it's built on deep layers of silt which are slowly compacting. And channelizing the Mississippi has resulted in loss of protective barriers offshore because the silt now goes right out the end of the channel into deep water. Bonus the bedrock itself is slowly tilting sinking towards the gulf.
What the place needs is about three meters of compacted fill under the whole city. ALA Galveston TX and Downtown Chicago.
It's neither. Erosion and sea level changes are not at all the problem here.
The problem is that keeping the lowest point dry causes subsurface water to be removed from the area. Also, that water doesn't get replenished. Things tend to shrink when they dry out, and the land under New Orleans is no exception. It's becoming like a shriveled up raisin or sponge.
The more you pump the place dry, the more the place sinks lower.
Thanks. So is it basically the same dynamic that's causing subsidence in parts of California's Central Valley?
Yes, exactly so.
> The more you pump the place dry, the more the place sinks lower.
See also: Mexico City
I'm not an expert, but intuitively, I'd think that sea level rise would contribute to ground subsidence.
Sea level has been rising at three millimeters a year as long as detailed measurements have been made. There has been no acceleration in that rate. We are, after all, still coming out of an ice age, and the oceans are still expanding due to accumulated heat.
Locally apparent changes are primarily due to land subsidence due to sediment deposits or rebound after the ice melted.
Well, here is the data:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/content/2018rel1-global-mean-se...
That is only a small part of the data, just 25 years worth of satellite data. There are ground measurements going back almost 150 years. Using all the data shows a clear acceleration:
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
The comment about coming out of an ice age is also not relevant - sea levels have indeed been rising since then, but nowhere near the current rate, so the current increase is mostly unrelated to that. For example:
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/gornitz_09/
Twentieth century sea level trends, however, are substantially higher that those of the last few thousand years.
Your first link has the essentially same data as what I referenced - 3.2 mm per year recently. Since 1919, they show a rise of about eight inches. The current rate amounts to 12 inches per century.
Your second link is interesting - thanks! It’s not different from what I said. We have come out of an ice age. The interglacial epochs have been historically relatively short.
Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear. The first link I gave has two graphs. The top one indeed has the same data you linked to - the 25 year satellite record. The second link is the one I was actually referring to though - that is the almost 150 year record including tidal gauge data. There is a pretty clear acceleration there. The earlier rate is lower than the later rate - in fact you even said that too (12" vs 8"). So I am a bit unclear why you said originally there was "no acceleration in the rate"?
This article supports your claim (pdf):
Climate-change–driven accelerated sea-level rise detected in the altimeter era
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/9/2022.full.pdf
I think that fitting a quadratic to such a short run of data is premature, and that extrapolating that same acceleration for 80 years is tendentious. However, the paper is otherwise interesting, and I hope they do an update in ten years and include their previous prediction :-)
Yes, that's the article I was thinking of, good find!
Agreed the extrapolation is debatable.
What is most astounding to me is that they are able to measure not just an increase of 3mm a year in sea levels by satellite, but that the data are precise enough that they can determine the change in this rate. The precision of the instrumentation and processing required to measure to that level of precision is astounding.
As a Dutchman it's weird to see people discuss if the ROI on this investment makes it worth it.
1/3 of our country is below sea-level or around 0m NAP. Levees and flood protection are like fashion or politics: they're never finished, not really.
I'm glad we do this out ourselves in stead of the EU deciding whether they want to subsidies a bunch of people living in a delta.
As I understand it, the Netherlands pays for this maintenance themselves, and not from EU funding? If it were relying on EU funds then I'd expect some kind of European benefit analysis would be required.
We have a seperate branch of government called Water Boards[0]. They are some of the oldest forms of government in the world dating back to 1255.[1]
The water boards raise their own taxes, and we elect officials for it in separate elections.
Basically we don't want regular politicians to make budget trade offs between long term safety and short term <whatever they campaign for>. I'm sure we're all familiar with long term planning capabilities of regular politicians.
To answer your question: yes. We do fund this our selves. I was saying I'm glad we do it this way in stead of begging the EU for funds.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoogheemraadschap_van_Rijnland
The Sewerage and Water Board in Orleans Parish is autonomous and exempt from certain civil service rules for much the same reason (although the Mayor appoints the director and can chair meetings). This is not to be confused with the Orleans Parish Levee District, which rightly or wrongly was perceived as having its fingers in too many pots after Katrina so had many of its responsibilities taken over by regional agencies controlled by state government (SLFPA-E and W)
It's just a headline, but this title makes me sigh.
For this thread, it's the title; for others today, it has been the "dose of realism" cynical first comment. It's probably just bad luck, but it feels like the first comment on every thread I've read today has been some variation of "here are the clouds to this silver lining."
In this case, it's amazing that we give enough of a damn about each other to allocate the money in the first place. How many people say caring for the less fortunate should be a matter for charities but then don't donate a dime themselves? How many in an honest moment would reply, "that's tough, move to Houston." Yet some among us cares enough to try instead of just rolling their eyes at building below sea level. I'm happy to take more trying and failing if it's in exchange for "serves them right" hindsight or abject cynicism.
Proceeding to read the article, over a decade the Army Corps of Engineers raised hundreds of miles of levees. If this were a thread about how the US can't complete big projects any more, that alone would be a ray of sunshine.
There are real problems in the world, folks. There's no denying that. But when the people with the ability and the inclination to be doers spend their time wringing their hands or giving themselves over to "the constipation of bittersweet philosophy" that's when there's really a problem.
Instead of worrying about the state of the world, spend an hour of your social media/fuck around time a day/week/month doing something for someone else. It'll do some actual good.
I would rather we spent tax dollars on fixable problems with much more social good per dollar. I'm tired of subsidizing flood insurance for idiots that keep building in areas that flood every 10 years. Subsidizing someone to have a nice home on a Miami beech is not "actual good". L
What you're missing is the Nola has the highest port tonnage in the country. The impact on GDP is estimated in the hundreds of billions. There's also billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure here.
Most goods that pass through to the midwest and rest of the country come through here.
Without Nola, hundreds of billions of dollars of the economy will go away. Gas prices set a record after Katrina.
14 billion is a bargain to keep this city going.
For anyone else who might be confused like I was, "Nola" seems to be a nickname for New Orleans, derived from "New Orleans, Louisiana" -> "New Orleans, LA" -> "NOLA" -> "Nola".
What if we just keep the port and relocate the rest of the city? It's not that you need hundreds of thousands people to run port facility. Damn, if you even need 500.
There's also one of, if not the, largest petrochemical manufacturing corridors as well. Tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of GDP.
How about you guys just pay the money so you can keep your gas prices low, GDP up, and imported goods flowing to your house?
That's sounds like something that can be easily relocated to Texas.
To noted non-flooding at all cities Houston and Galveston?
Yeah but it's not there? Why not relocate Wall Street to Cleveland? Or Silicon Valley to Pittsburg?
'easily'
Why not just relocate silicon valley to Pittsburgh where rents are cheaper?
Problem solved!
So much plain and simple arrogance and ignorance in this thread. Mind blowing.
14 bil year is a bargain for what this city provides.
We spend more tax dollars on the military than anything else; that’s also a sort of never-ending wall building exercise intended to prevent floods of war & immigration... maybe we’re all idiots. ;)
It’s not really a subsidy, just poor use of tax dollars. I like my taxes being used for wise infrastructure projects. As a whole, the benefit the whole. Individually they benefit some individuals more than others. But I don’t consider that a subsidy.
Take a hard look at the subsidies you are benefiting from. Be ready to give them up if you’re going to take the holier than thou route.
Maybe the whole country would be better if everyone was willing to give up these sorts of unsustainable subsidies?
We (society as a whole) have an economic mechanism for protecting against risk - insurance. In places where insurance is too expensive or not available at all, perhaps we should consider letting nature take over.
One persons's 'unsustainable subsidy' is another person's 'showing compassion for those who are less fortunate'. It's not like New Orleans is a particularly affluent area either, and people have lived there for a very long time.
Take health insurance—one view could be that it forces people who are healthier to subsidize those who are less healthy.
While some people are unhealthy due to factors outside of control, others are unhealthy because they do unhealthy things. Would you consider the latter an 'unsustainable subsidy'?
Wait what? You're comparing healthcare, which is a necessity, to choosing to live in a particular city. People that need healthcare don't have a choice, people _do_ have a choice to relocate to a more sustainable city though.
I agree with you that NOLA isn't just the wealthy. But, that doesn't change the fact that its not a sustainable city to live in.
I'm reacting to the harsh, judgmental attitude towards people in NOLA and using health care insurance to point out that the world is complicated.
Some people are certainly unhealthy because of choices they made (yet there's still broad support for universal risk sharing), while some people in NOLA certainly aren't there by choice.
The poverty rate there is about twice the US average, and something like 40% of Americans don't have any substantial savings. Many people aren't able to uproot themselves and move even if they wanted to without outside financial assistance, at which point I'm sure someone will be asking 'why should we pay to move people when they made a bad choice of where to live?', forgetting that these people may have lived there for generations.
You can be poor anywhere in the US, it doesn't have to be in a flood zone.
The main argument for rebuilding these areas seems to be "these people have lived there for generations". People move, and catastrophic flooding seems like a better reason than most.
No, he's comparing an unhealthy lifestyle to choosing to live in a particular city. People _do_ have a choice to change their lifestyle.
Yet, the healthcare doesn't discriminate between consequential and circumstantial ailments. I wonder why not?
It should. I believe you should pay more if you have unhealthy life style. First implement a good universal health care, second make people making the wrong choices (smoking is a wrong choice, being old is not) pay more.
There is substantial research that says that conditional care like what you propose is often used as a cudgel to deny Government assistance to those that need it the most.
In other words, I think the cost of putting in these guardrails, often with good intentions, is that they're misused against minorities and the poor. If that's the case, I would rather a few freeloaders/bad decision makers abuse it rather than the most needy going without the healthcare they desperately want.
It's tricky. For instance: My understanding is that people who smoke tend to die younger, and therefore spend less for healthcare over their lifetime than people who don't. So why should they pay more?
Then there is the whole question of "what is an unhealthy lifestyle?" It seems likely that not getting enough exercise is probably unhealthy, but diet advice is all over the place. You need better science than we have now to make these decisions.
If people choose to go rock climbing or ride motorcycles should they also pay more for health care?
> People that need healthcare don't have a choice, people _do_ have a choice to relocate to a more sustainable city though[...]
People have a choice in relocating from New Orleans for less flood risk, but they don't have a choice to relocate from the US if their main problem with living there is is with the US's health care system?
I'm not going to argue that they should, but this example isn't exactly doing the work for you that you seem to think it's doing. If you're going to say "just move from New Orleans" someone else can say "just move to Canada".
You can argue about the relative difficulty of those things, but they're not inherently different, and there's certainly people for whom it's a lot easier to move countries than say people in abject poverty in New Orleans who can't imagine pulling off a move to another city in the US.
Have you ever actually tried moving to a different country? Its exponentially harder than moving a few miles down the road.
Plus this argument is losing the point that the government is already spending the money trying to temporarily fix the problem instead of using that money to buy up the properties at a price point that would allow the residents to move.
I know not everyone would want to move, so I'm personally a fan of mandatory flood insurance in those flood prone areas. When there inevitably is a flood the resident can rebuild from their own pocket or use the insurance to move.
Yeah, four times now. As noted I'm not saying it's easier than moving down the street, just that if we're talking about people in such poverty that they couldn't move down the street comparing it to the experience of other more well-off people moving countries is hardly unreasonable.
Sometimes in history whole cities get moved a few miles. It's expensive, yes, but it does it done. In the 1950s and 60s Ontario and Quebec in Canada moved some smaller villages away from the St. Lawrence river when it was being expanded. Some cities get moved because damns are being built like in China's Three Gorges Dam.
Don't a large number of people have health problems as a result of poor diet and lack of exercise? I think that would qualify as a choice. I know I could probably lower my cholesterol with more discipline. If I choose not to, it's reasonable for me to pay higher insurance premiums.
Yes.
I live in revelstoke, if we do that Canada cant ship goods from coast to coast from december to april (the subsidy I have in mind is the Rogers pass avalanche control program) Those subsidies exist because they benefit people.
The usual counterargument to this is that the people who benefit should pay for it themselves. Only if the true price is available to consumers can they make informed choices.
I don't fully subscribe to it myself, since I support some subsidies, but for many things it applies.
This seems like a good idea, until you get to interconnected systems that everyone depends on (like eg. the levees around an island, or a large harbor). Then it's STILL a good idea; in those cases everyone should pay!
You're assuming they're shipping luxury, optional goods, but what if they're essentials like food and medicine?
I mean yes you can make the argument that if it's too expensive you shouldn't be living there, but that's not how it works (case in point: SF, where people rather live in substandard housing or the street and have a shot at a big tech or startup company than move somewhere affordable).
> I mean yes you can make the argument that if it's too expensive you shouldn't be living there, but that's not how it works
It sounds like you're saying "we oughtn't change the status quo because it wouldn't be the status quo". What am I misunderstanding? (Apologies if this is obvious; still waking up)
You might not want to give the new Alberta government any ideas.
Where do I sign up? If ever there's been a holier than thou route it's thinking your ideas are so good that buying them should be mandatory.
I'd suggest a more rational subsidy. Tornadoes, earthquakes, lightning, fire, those can be managed for but are largely unpredictable. Water is predictable, it follows gravity. We have maps already that tell us where it will go in a flood. I'd like the program to be, the government will pay you the value of the property before the flood. Then it becomes government property, basically parkland, and no one can build on it ever again. You are going to have to rebuild somewhere else. Eventually all the places that can flood will flood and then there will be no more subsidy necessary.
Tu quoque much?
The planet is in constant change except on longer timescales than humans can perceive. Just because a geographic location is great for a city at one time doesn't mean it will stay that way forever.
They should just pay people affected by this to move.
Speaking specifically about New Orleans, it will _never_ be a good place for a city. It's a coastal city with large areas below sea level. The foreseeable future (for decades to centuries) is that sea levels will rise and Gulf hurricanes will increase in severity.
incentivize people not to be idiots and move to areas less susceptible to environmental catastrophe
* > Proceeding to read the article, over a decade the Army Corps of Engineers raised hundreds of miles of levees. If this were a thread about how the US can't complete big projects any more, that alone would be a ray of sunshine.
Unfortunately even that sunshine requires applying sunscreen as it reminds of their calculations that don’t favor helping the most people.
Still, even if the [Army Corp of Engineers] approach is designed to avoid picking winners and losers, it ends up doing so anyway, favoring wealthier neighborhoods. "It's also going to be [choosing] more valuable businesses," Kling says. "More valuable real estate."
https://www.npr.org/2019/03/05/688786177/how-federal-disaste...
I agree with you re the cynicism.
I would say in these cases though that he levees are the problem. You have silted up channels because the river needs to flood, and the excessive levee system makes that problem more pronounced and contributes to the shrinking of the delta.
That said, New Orleans shouldn’t die. But we’re making the problem worse for most stakeholders in other places.
No kind deed goes unpunished, and it's starting to really leave a bitter taste in some people's mouths. The cynicism is real and deserved.
Well I came to comment no this:
>> “I think this work is necessary. We have to protect the population of New Orleans,”
Not that I like either option, but I'd rather my tax dollars be spent on relocating these people than fighting an eternal war against the inevitable march of nature. Can I do anything personally about it? Not really. Certainly far less than any individual who lives there. But if my taxes are going to be used to help, then please help in a way that is more effective than doing the same stupid thing (building below sea level) that they've been doing for a hundred years.
Nola has the highest port tonnage in the country. The impact on GDP is estimated in the hundreds of billions. There's also billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure here. Most goods that pass through to the midwest and rest of the country come through here.
Without Nola, hundreds of billions of dollars of the economy will go away. Gas prices set a record after Katrina.
14 billion is a bargain to keep this city going.
They're not keeping it around to be nice.
>Instead of worrying about the state of the world, spend an hour of your social media/fuck around time a day/week/month doing something for someone else. It'll do some actual good.
Unfortunately, the current zeitgeist is one in which if you say the wrong thing, are misinterpreted, "mansplain" or simply disagree with the wrong people you're going to get railroaded, brigaded, reported to authorities, fired or blacklisted.
In a world like that, where everyone is an opponent, who wants to "help their neighbour"?
Wait America deserves a pat on the back for providing basic infrastructure? What standards do we hold the US to, Bangladesh or the Netherlands?
Feigned moral indignation over 'cynicism' won't change the fact that real money was really wasted.
> Instead of worrying about the state of the world, spend an hour of your social media/fuck around time a day/week/month doing something for someone else. It'll do some actual good.
Also, speak for yourself. You don't know what people spend their time doing outside of writing comments on HN.
I do that, and I agree: I wish people would spend as much time complaining about other people as they do helping them. Yet, 40% of my paycheck is still taken against my will anyway.
> Emily Vuxton, policy director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, an environmental group ... said repair costs could be “hundreds of millions” of dollars, with 75% paid by federal taxpayers. “I think this work is necessary. We have to protect the population of New Orleans,” Vuxton said.
Summed up as: “I think our unsustainable way of life should be subsidized by the rest of the country at a 3:1 rate”.
I enjoy NOLA, but how are we going to deal with this at any kind of scale?
Hundreds of millions of dollars is barely a blip on the federal government's budget.
Federal dollars subsidize all kinds of local and regional infrastructure.
The key to my comment was the last clause “at any kind of scale”.
If the community living there can’t support the costs of environmental maintenance, at a certain point it becomes like a superfund site: people will need to move to higher ground. In NOLA, in Houston, in Miami and beyond.
What about the forest fires in the West and even places like NC? Overflowing rivers throughout the US? Tornadoes from the mid-West to the mid-Atlantic? Hurricanes? Where in the US is safe as climate change induces more frequent and more extreme weather-related disasters?
Fighting the entire USA coastline against rising oceans is batshit crazy and would bankrupt the country if we tried.
I always found it crazy that flood insurance would pay people to rebuild... on a flood plain. I've read stories where people rebuild once a decade or so. Seems clearly irrational and people living outside of floodplains should subsidize those that don't.
Similarly if you are high risk of fires or earthquakes you should pay a premium on insurance and that insurance should depend on reasonable mitigations. A friend moved into high risk area and they required a clear area near the house and a rooftop watering system to get the insurance that was required to get the home loan.
So yes, the country should either pay for mitigation (levees, fire control, earthquake resistant building costs etc) where it makes sense or ban developments in high risk areas. Paying for people to live below ocean level makes no sense.
> Similarly if you are high risk of fires or earthquakes you should pay a premium on insurance
You do for fire risk and standard homeowners insurance doesn't cover earthquakes, you need a separate policy, which is non-free, so you are clearly paying a premium for it.
I used to sell insurance, including homeowners. As part of selling a homeowners policy, I was supposed to ensure that a home was not ridiculously vulnerable to catching fire. An example would be making sure the owner hadn't stuffed the house full of canisters of gasoline, or that the exterior of the house wasn't in direct contact with an abundance of dry vegetation.
Any insurance company that is willing to be represented by agents too lazy too verify a home is a fire waiting to happen is gonna lose money big time. It seems the logical approach to handling house in a wildfire prone area orvavflood plain would be to simply charge stupid high rates or not offer the insurance at all.
It seems the logical approach to handling house in a wildfire prone area orvavflood plain would be to simply charge stupid high rates or not offer the insurance at all.
Which is exactly what insurance companies do. It is usually very difficult to get flood insurance in a flood plain. Rather than taking that as a clue that people shouldn't live there, all too often, the government steps in to subsidise the risk. I don't want to over simplify, things are complicated and sometimes it is appropriate to subsidise such risk, but sometimes it is not.
Private companies don’t offer flood insurance in those areas, that cost is spread around federal taxpayers via the Nationals Flood Insurance Program.
>Paying for people to live below ocean level makes no sense.
Well, Amsterdam is currently 2 meters below sea level already and it will be pretty interesting to see what happens to New Amsterdam, I mean, York. For one thing, Manhatten is essentially floating already, they have to pump it out continuously otherwise it sinks.
edit - ok, around sea level, it isn't at 2 meters below. I stupidly thought google would be correct.
Amsterdam is an interesting example. Is Amsterdam asking anyone else to subsidize them? From what I've read they made a conscious decision that the pumping, levees and related was worth the cost of the extra acres of land they provided.
New Orleans seems to be arguing that it only makes sense if 75% of it is paid by someone else... forever.
>Is Amsterdam asking anyone else to subsidize them?
Depending on your point of view maybe half the world did, one way or another. Though I really shouldn't point fingers, being British.
a lot of of economic activity in NL is below sea level. No, Amsterdam did not directly pay for it. But yes, the most profitable regions contributed the most.
As usual, it's complicated. It's a system, part of which is centuries old. Amsterdam is just 1 city.
Diverse responsibilities are divided between county, water board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands) , province, and the "federal" government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate-General_for_Public... .
> Is Amsterdam asking anyone else to subsidize them?
Nowadays, mostly tourists. But, they come willingly to be fleeced, being priggish.
Thats because most of the countries goods pass through New Orleans.
>Amsterdam is currently 2 meters below sea level alread
Small parts of Amsterdam are that low. Most of the city is above sea level and the main parts are several to 10s of meters higher.
You are right, I trusted google and I repent. Most of it is pretty much at sea level though and they still have to spend a hell if a lot of effort in keeping the sea away.
If Insurance is priced right who cares. Your insurance factors in the risk of loosing the home, and should ensure the insurance company always wins long term.
Normally I agree with you, but I am told in the US flood insurance is basically a government fund and doesn't operate like a private profit-seeking insurance at all. This leads to weird cases where people just rebuild in the same place in full knowledge that they will rebuild again in a few years, with flood insurance covering the expense.
"If insurance is priced right..."
Aka if we priced insurance at the right level. You'd likely see people stop buying homes on some of these flood plains. As insruance would cost too much.
The premiums for flood insurance can be pretty steep, and I would be extremely surprised if the fund operated at a loss. In my case, the annual premium is a little over 1% of the covered value, even though the historical record high (back in the 1960's) would probably only require about 10% of the total coverage purchased to replace (in this case, mostly from a few out buildings that are a little lower than the house itself).
Then you're extremely surprised.
"Currently, the NFIP’s debt totals $24.6 billion, nearly six times the program’s total annual receipts of $4.3 billion"
https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/115th-congress-2017-2018/re...
And Planet Money, as always, has a great take:
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/09/29/554603161/epis...
After doing some more digging, it turns out that roughly 20% of NFIP policies are subsidized, and the up-to $30b debt was authorized by Congress in 2012 due to the shortfalls.
80% of the policies (the non-subsidized ones) are thought to be actuarially sound, barring unintended consequences of out-of-date flood maps.
So, I'm not terribly surprised. Were it operating like a traditional insurer, it might even be doing fine (especially if it had some other reforms such as eliminating or having better oversight over WYO policies).
People rebuild all sorts of stuff all the time. Look around your average city or drive around and tell me how old all the buildings are. You’ll notice most of them are less than 20-40 years old. And the ones that aren’t have almost certainly been essentially rebuilt recently in practice.
We knock stuff down and change or rebuild it all the time, there’s no such thing as permanent against the weather. Or just changing tastes and technology, I mean indoor plumbing is less than 100 years old. Shit changes.
> indoor plumbing is less than 100 years old
Huh? The house I grew up in was built in 1895 and had plumbing from the start.
It looks like rich people started getting indoor plumbing in the early 1800s (the White House got it in 1833) and it was widespread in new construction by the end of the century.
I mean it existed before that of course. But it wasn’t widespread until the 1930s.
Cities had indoor plumbing, electricity, and teliphones fairly early.
Isolated rural houses often much later.
Ohio seems reasonably safe. Maybe Cleveland will see real estate prices go up for the first time in 20 years?
It's still seeing a net population decline though, both in the Metropolitan and suburban areas. A recent post on the Columbus subreddit showed Cleveland has one of the lowest average internet speeds in the country, and this story from Ars [0] shows actual redlining in how new cable was (not) being laid down. The apartment I lived in growing up was using dial-up until my freshman year of high school a decade or so ago.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/att-a...
Depends on where...
I have family in southern/central Ohio and, while they've always been a risk, there has been a marked uptick in the occurrence of tornadoes. Xenia, OH very famously has been hit multiple times by serious tornadoes. Where my parents are, where I did most of my growing up, in southeastern Ohio, is a little safer because of the Appalachian foothills, but I fondly remember the tornado sirens blaring every Wednesday at noon during the spring, summer, and fall.
A friend of mine from high school, who is a meteorologist and storm chaser today, was telling me the last time that we spoke that tornado alley is potentially / actually shifting eastward over time. I haven't tried to verify what he was saying, because I trust him given his career choices, but it does seem to bear out from the anecdata that I have available.
Tornados cut a narrow swath, compared to a hurricane. I’d wager all the tornados in the last 100 years cause less total economic damage than a single hurricane hitting a coastal city.
Well, I believe that the point is that as tornado alley shifts east that these natural disasters will come closer to larger or perhaps denser metropolitan areas. I do agree with your point. Though, if / as torando alley shifts eastward there could be some significant overlap between the areas that could be impacted by both torandos and hurricanes. I'm reminded of the tornados that hit Alabama last year.
No, even if they hit denser metropolitan areas, they do nothing compared to a hurricane in aggregate damage.
I never said they did.
Tornadoes do so little damage the insurance market actually works. The complain is insurance markets that need to be subsidized by federal funds because they don't raise enough money on their own (see florida, Louisiana, etc.).
A LOT of the forest that burned in the CA Camp fire isn't going to come back. Thanks to warming winters, the pine bark beetles are making their way up the Sierras and laying waste to entire mountains of pine trees. The folks who want to live in the burned out areas will now likely be surrounded by chaparral instead of pine forest.
How much federal aid is given to California wild fires vs. east coast hurricanes vs. New Orleans floods? How valuable are those regions to the financial health of the country?
This evaluation kind of fails though. Even if (for example) California is worth lots of aid because of its massive economic value, who's to say it will still be massively valuable economically after a decade of storms? That could decimate agriculture and other infrastructure, undermining its ability to host businesses.
It seems pretty hard to account for this in advance.
It’s called actuary science, and it turns out to be so good overall that a nearly trillion dollar business model runs quite well on it.
I'm not disputing the idea of actuary science here (I have relatives who work as actuaries), I'm disputing the idea of 'we should abandon this entire city because it's not worth the cost of saving the residents from hurricanes based on some economic projections', which seems to be a recurring theme here.
It's one matter to make insurance really expensive due to very obvious risk or make other pricing adjustments based on projections and quite another to axe a city.
Get rid of the government subsidized insurance and it will effectively axe the city as no new mortgages will be offered since no private companies are willing to offer insurance for it. No one is going to offer you insurance for a sure loss.
Non-term life insurance seems a good counterpoint. The price of the insurance may equal effectively a second mortgage over some timeframe but it can be priced.
In reality the risk of loss across the region is not nearly as high as implied.
Non term life insurance is a waste of money ignoring any tax advantages that don’t apply for most people since you can just directly invest the premiums in a low fee index fund and not pay the overhead costs of the life insurance company.
If the price of the insurance was so high that it was a second mortgage, then that would still devastate real estate prices and still cause economic decline in the region.
A lot of the land in California and western states are federally owned so I would not consider those portions aid.
Being alive does involve a level of risk. My understanding is the number of hurricanes, for example, are expected to a little-less-than-double [0]. So, if you experience a hurricane it is still probably not due to global warming. Probably broadly true of the others, too.
We have words for these things because they've been threats since the dawn of time - nowhere has ever been especially safe safe from things going horribly wrong. The biggest problem always has been and will remain a lack of preparedness by communities for disasters.
[0] https://www.c2es.org/content/hurricanes-and-climate-change/
If you don't get federal disaster money for the tide rising, you shouldn't get it for forests historically managed by fire.
What if it is federally owned land?
> Hundreds of millions of dollars is barely a blip on the federal government's budget.
That doesn’t mean that’s how it should be.
When you listen to old radio, you get the impression people actually cared about how money was spent and didn’t casually write off millions of dollars, just because “that’s the budget.” Why are people these days willing to let the government drop millions of dollars so casually?
Take for example this episode of Johnny Dollar: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PXa86HJ49iE (1956). The way the people in this episode are pissed off about their money being wasted, you’d think it was some other country.
When did people become OK with wasting money like this?
NOLA brings in $8 billion a year in tourist money alone. The metropolitan region had a GDP of $235 billion in 2017. Investing a few hundreds of millions of dollars to preserve hundreds of billions of dollars in productivity seems like a smart investment.
Maybe the people of 2018 are just better at math than the ones in in 1956.
Thank you for injecting some sanity into the conversation.
The NPV of the region is such that the cost of the levees would have to increase 3 orders of magnitude before most of the comments that amount to “let it flood” would even begin to make any sense economically, despite being entirely morally bankrupt to begin with.
Hey didn’t say anything about NOLA or whether it “should be saved” or anything like that, just the attitude of not caring about millions of dollars just because... it’s in the budget or whatever.
NOLA can't even fix the damn potholes with that revenue. It's not that NOLA residents own Marriott Inc and that good part of money stays in the city. City's budget main contributor is sadly - traffic cameras.
NOLA is spending $2 billion in FEMA money right now to actually repave roads properly, including some in Deisre and Algiers that haven’t been worked over since the mid-90s. Roads in this Parish cost $10 million a mile to do right due to underlying soil geology. Do you even do research before you run your mouth? The contractor takes at least 40% of traffic camera revenue.
What else could be funded with hundreds of millions of dollars? Opportunity cost.
moot point when you consider that military spending takes up more than half of the budget
~16%: https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...
It's far lower than that. There's a fake pie chart floating around the internet showing Defense at 57% of the federal budget. For 2019, the real number was 12%. In previous years it was about 15%.
It depends on how you categorize things. The 50% numbers come from discretionary budgets & are accurate. But ‘most’ federal spending is not discretionary. It’s old people care.
There really isn't any non-discretionary spending. The closest we have is payments specified in international treaties, and even that can simply not be paid. All the rest is just a couple congressional votes and a presidential signature away from being eliminated.
Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are considered mandatory spending because politicians tend to like being reelected.
That and it doesn’t go through the standard appropriations process.
Discretionary spending is about 1/3 of the budget, and, yeah, defense is half of that, but when the GP wrote that "military spending takes up more than half of the budget" it paints a misleading picture.
Nope. It takes up about a third of the budget and is itself in large part a social program.
a "social" program for defense contractors. I m sure they are hurting, and need to make more money.
A social program for able bodied men and women willing to work for a living. It's how my father escaped poverty.
A social program would be building schools, bridges, improving access to education, funding research for medicines to be put in public domain so it’s affordable. Adding a 12th aircraft carrier or developing an unnecessary fighter plane is not a social program.
Not everyone joins the military because the alternative is absolute shit, but it often is, and they often do. It is absolutely a social program in that sense, and if you cut it, your other social programs are going to have to take up the slack. You have to de-rate the "win" from cutting it accordingly.
Sure, it’s small in the singular. But what happens after you get yours, and I get mine, and so one. That’s not affordable.
Its not robbery if its a small part of the budget after all
Wasteful spending is wasteful spending. Buy the land, condemn it, and call it a day.
The price to buy and condemn New Orleans > hundreds of millions of dollars.
Not if you defer additional infrastructure spending until the land has declined in value from water intrusion. To pay more today is a transfer to those whose land is expected to lose value in the future from sea levels rising.
It cost $100 million already (with an additional $400 million planned) just to keep the water out of Miami Beach (with another ~$3 billion in expected costs due to septic and well failures in Miami proper), some of the most valuable real estate in the country. NOLA is not Miami Beach/Miami (value-wise).
At some point, we have to stop throwing good money after bad.
Not if you defer additional infrastructure spending until the land has declined in value from water intrusion.
Insurance is going to pick up some of this until the land is declared un-insured. so, some parts of the relocation cost will be socialized if you like it or not, because premiums will rise in the market to offset this cost.
Policies will be outright cancelled before that happens, except through the national flood insurance program, which could be used to slowly migrate folks out over time. But let's not think that some sort of twisted Manifest Destiny requires we pour hundreds of millions or billions of dollars into New Orleans when there are other options available.
The only thing that is constant is change. We must be willing to adapt.
So? At this rate they will need another $14B soon.
Off the coast of Louisiana is the Mad Dog spar oil platform, installed in 2005, which at maximum production is pumping 100,000 barrels of oil a day. Louisiana receives no tax revenue from it.
I'm not totally sure what point you're trying to make... I don't have a particularly strong opinion on how to allocate tax revenue in this situation, but it seems relevant to mention that the platform is 150 miles off the coast.
That's 138 miles into international waters. Percentage-wise, it's... a little closer to Louisiana than Texas? Florida and Mexico are't all that far away either.
>how are we going to deal with this at any kind of scale?
Get the Army Corps of Engineers to hire the Dutch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands)
Nola is built on silt. Due to waterway controls etc., the delta isn’t getting the silt it historically received to keep erosion/subsidence at bay. Cost benefit would say keep the farming/irrigation, diversion due to economics and sacrifice a sinking delta. Not much different from Alexandria+Nile.
Nola should have taken the opportunity to move and rebuild on higher ground.
And where would that be? Hammond? Baton Rouge? Morgan City? Watford Gap service station?
That’s something for geologists to answer. All I can say is the place we know has historically sunk and we know is sinking and will continue sinking in the future due to soil, hydrology, etc., is not the place to rebuild.
Alternatively, it is excellent practice that we all are really going to need. Also, again, go explain that point of view to the Dutch - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_control_in_the_Netherlan...
The Dutch have a lot less land to retreat to than those of us in the states.
Retreat is still very expensive though. Why retreat when you can control the landscape and make it your own?
Maintaining a constant war on water is still a lot cheaper than colonizing the moon or mars; and the ROI is pretty decent.
Oh clearly none of you downvoters watch Yes, Prime Minister
Is the Netherlands sinking though?
Most of the Netherlands only exists due to sheer bloodymindedness. Nearly 20% of it is actually below sea level.
I understand that. But New Orleans is subsiding. It's sinking every year. It's easier to maintain levees if the land beneath them isn't sinking. I don't know why my comment is getting downvoted.
The Netherlands has always been sinking. They just don't seem to care and just keep making more of it. Here's their latest plans - https://www.thestructuralengineer.info/news-center/news/item...
Wouldn't that be nice. Sadly, levees actually contribute to the problem due to several factors (IIRC 2 factors were the blocking of silt deposition and the lowering of ground water levels). The ground water levels are something that can be managed, the silt deposition is something you need to learn to live without.
Thing is, if the land wasn't sinking to begin with, exactly why were you considering levees in the first place? ;-)
Whatever the case may be, if you're building levees, you need to factor in the sink rate of the land around you, among the many factors. And you need to factor in the cost to maintain them indefinitely.
It's an expensive proposition; but by the simple fact that you're alive, standing there, and considering it already, chances are the ROI is worth it.
Yes the Netherlands is sinking. Hilariously enough its because of draught. The entire country is basically man made and a natural disaster. Luckily there is virtually unlimited budget and good engineering to keep things going.
How much do the Feds collect in taxes from the city each year? How much more will they collect in the future because the city floods less? A few hundred million dollars to protect a major city sounds like an incredible bargain with a great ROI.
As of 2017 Louisiana has a Balance of Payments of $17.7B, meaning they receive that much more in federal funding than they pay in taxes [1]
I say it’s time to move people to somewhere above sea level and let NOLA return to being the river delta it is so desperately trying to be.
[1] https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...
What is the figure for New Orleans specifically? Looking at the entire state isn’t terribly informative.
New Orleans is a pretty great place, but in no way is it a major city.
Whatever you want to call a metro area of over a million people with a GDP approaching $80 billion, a few hundred million to protect it seems cheap.
Where’s the $80B number coming from?
From the sources I found (from 2017) GDP per capita is $52,536 (from Open Data Network), and population is 393,292 (US Census Bureau), giving a GDP of right around $20B.
We’ve already spent 14 on it, and will continue to need to spend indefinitely, so the numbers really aren’t great.
Metro area, not just the city proper. https://www.frbatlanta.org/economy-matters/2015/08/20/new-or...
New Orleans only has about 300,000 people. There's high ground a few miles north. Relocation, not levees.
Florida is worse off. Florida doesn't have much high ground.
Indeed. This was totally predictable. New Orleans has been sinking for centuries. And sea level rise is inevitably occurring at an increasing rate.
So yes, just move everybody. There can be boat tours. Same for Florida. With porous limestone, it's a lost cause. Even New York City will be a challenge. Lots of Manhattan is built on old garbage.
New Orleans isn't the most unsustainable place around. The intractable swampy surroundings have prevented it from becoming as suburbanized as most American cities; if you look at it from a satellite, there is a sharp boundary between the city and the swamp. The situation is much worse in, say, Miami. Many other coastal cities will also need levees and have uglier boundaries.
>New Orleans isn't the most unsustainable place around
You can't really treat New Orleans as a single entity. The French Quarter and where the high rises are is (relatively) comfortably above sea level. The sprawl that stretches towards Lake Ponchartrain isn't. That area is well and truly screwed. They keep sinking, the sea keeps rising, and the hurricanes get stronger.
There's no real solution. You can keep building the levees higher, but that's sort of like paying off a credit card with anotehr credit card. It's a temporary solution that makes the reckoning a lot worse when the piper comes calling.
this could be the ideal testing grounds for dealing with global sea-level rise. What's happening to new orleans is expected to happen at most low-sea-level cities relatively soon.
Nola has the highest port tonnage in the country. The impact on GDP is estimated in the hundreds of billions. There's also billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure here. Most goods that pass through to the midwest and many through the rest of the country come through here.
Without Nola, hundreds of billions of dollars of the economy will go away. Gas prices set a record after Katrina.
14 billion is a bargain to keep this city going.
If the federal government would just do what North Carolina did and pass a law prohibiting basing coastal policies on the latest scientific predictions of how much the sea level will rise, these levees would last indefinitely.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/north-carolina-bans-latest-science...
As a non-American, can someone explain to me why the army was responsible for this work? When does the normal tender/contractor process not occur? Is it a scale or political decision?
The US Army Corps of Engineers is generally and historically responsible for waterway dredging and flood control. It's one of their core (peace-time) responsibilities. These are typically large projects that benefit the public good yet are rather complex and lack sufficient financial incentives for privatization. The wikipedia article [1] gives a general idea of how and when this came to be. (Canals.)
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Corps_of_...
It's complicated. The Army Corps of Engineers has had a civilian mandate to support flood control prevention since 1917 [1]. Beyond that, they are also involved in large public works projects such as the building of roads and bridges, and Superfund clean-up sites. On top of this, they regularly receive large pork barrel grants from Congress that can siphon money into a senator's state or a congressperson's district. They do have a large contracting arm and are actually pretty well-regarded for their comprehensive procurement and management process for these large public works projects.
So it's scale, politics, and history/momentum at this point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers_c...
A little pork aside, I wonder if they could be leveraged into a lot more.
Wherever infrastructure is done responsibly, it makes sense to invest it'd seem ...
> As a non-American, can someone explain to me why the army was responsible for this work?
Because...path dependency. The Army Corps of Engineers has long been responsible, largely, as I understand it, from mission following capacity rather than vice versa.
> When does the normal tender/contractor process not occur?
It can, but that process requires a government agency over the top, and the ACE is the responsible agency. They contract out work.
It is a bit odd, but the Army Corps of Engineers has historically always been responsible for a lot of maintenance of the country's rivers and waterways, dams, parts of the Great Lakes, etc. including flood control.
The Army Corp of Engineers can be viewed as the federal government's civil engineering service. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Corps_of_En... for a good description.
They have a concept of “waters of the United States” where if it’s a navigable water it is federally managed and historically army cane first so their Corp of engineers are the ones who carry out the operations
As an American I know. These levees were built KNOWING that they sink at a mathematical formulate rate. This is FAKE NEWS. The 14 billion dollar cost is a cost rate over a decade or more, lets say 1 billion at 14 years long. This billion a year is the cost to keep adding on to the existing well made and constructed infrastructure.
Please don’t co-opt the phrase “fake news” even if you don’t believe what’s being said is an accurate portrayal — it disparages the news media by implicitly legitimizing self-serving uses of the term. Every time this phrase is used it hurts the fourth estate. The media gets things wrong sometimes, and we should hold them accountable but this isn’t how.
Y'all questioning whether it's worth saving should stay in New Orleans for a month. There is so much joy there, such a rich culture and long history that we all stand to lose.
With 14 billion dollars you could move a lot of that culture and history to somewhere with less need for swimming lessons.
Better stock up on picture postcards and souvenirs.
Not everybody want's to live as a functional alcoholic in crime ridden city. Besides, The World didn't even blinked when thousands years of mankind history was decimated in Iraq. Move on.
Get bent.
I saw a program on Netflix or Prime Video about how rising sea levels are changing the lives of people living in a community in coastal California as the tides flood the streets more and more. People are emotionally bonded to their homes and are unable to decide to move away.
This is a new type of problem that is going to happen more and more globally. Maldives is going to be among the first to sink. However, their government has sobered up to that fact and are making plans. These type of events cannot be handled at the local level and government leaders need to coax and guide people to relocate.
Then again, we have deniers of climate change and rising sea levels...
Is it a new problem? The dustbowl hit, and some people were completely unwilling to move, even though their way of life was unsustainable.
Change is inherently hard to deal with. I think one of the big roles of government, and perhaps culture, is to temper the peaks and valleys. Some of us are going to face hard hard choices. Some of those choices are very rapid, like an earthquake. Some of those choices are very slow, like rising sea levels.
We pretty much know that there will be earthquakes and rising sea levels. How do we influence people to minimize that impact today?
I'm a fan of big cash payouts for flood insurance in exchange for losing the land, ever increasing taxes on the sale of costal properties and converting coastline to national park.
When folks homes are inevitably destroyed, make sure they have plenty of money to move. Make it harder and harder to sell property on the risky coasts, and finally when enough homes have been destroyed (50%? 95%? doesn't really matter the higher the fraction, the more painful the change will be), take the land and turn it into parks for everyone to use.
I'm not exactly opposed to the very wealthy hanging on to a cabin or a mansion, but there needs to be a clear line that they are living on public land. People can camp in their yard.
Maybe it's a stupid idea. We do have an opportunity to unwind the massive, massive risk incurred by allowing, even encouraging, people to live in places where they will fail miserably, eventually.
Right now, the risks are low. So the stakes should be low. I have no problems with my tax dollars giving a small bonus for them to move away, and turn that land into national park. In 50 years when they are well and truly fucked - who cares? Maybe stop issuing flood insurance in 40 years. Plenty of time to figure out a plan.
But where they are living is increasingly risky. Slowly, gradually make it clear that we as a culture and government aren't going to subsidize that. It's ok if they are super-rich, and can afford to rebuild every few years. but the land will be nationalized eventually. And no one is going to subsidize rebuilding efforts in the very long run.
I think this is an unsustainable strategy in the long term. Many of America's biggest most profitable cities are on the coasts. With rising sea levels many will be at risk. Some (eg. New Orleans) already are.
On the other hand, investing a little money in terraforming never hurt anyone and has a proven track record.
there are high and low density locations. The dutch have proven that very little technology can protect land from the sea. I'm not opposed to special cases, but the coastline is _huge_. I don't believe we can protect all of it anymore.
Perhaps it was an option at one point, but we're past that point (in my humble opinion. i'm not a climatologist or an economist, i'm likely full of shit).
i think it's too late to reduce carbon emissions, and that requires global buy in. I think it's too late to build a wall along the whole coast. I think there are obvious places for exceptions, but 99% of the coast is going to sink. let's just own that and make the change as painless as possible.
The Netherlands - being situated in a delta- once had a disproportionately long natural coastline. One of the strategies employed is to shorten that coastline dramatically by strategic placement of walls. Of course, in a country like the USA, not even all of the coast requires additional protection; only parts of it.
I do agree with you that certain cities (like Miami) might be difficult-to-impossible to protect with current technology. Other cities (like New Orleans) have well-known challenges with well known solutions, and there is absolutely no reason why people couldn't protect them.
What is needed is for people to put together the political will, attitude and organization required to survive and thrive in those kinds of conditions (with a strong push towards prevention rather than recovery).
That too has already been done many times over the centuries; and there's no reason to believe that Americans (or Louisianans) are in any way inferior to other peoples.
Which is not to say I agree or disagree with you completely:
See also perhaps something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ6tbIJAuYk ( How cities can prevent flood disasters | A Dutch water expert weighs in )
Harry Shearer has been pointing out the problem for years on his podcast "Le Show", the movie "The Big Uneasy", and other sites. He calls out the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for incompetence, making past and future disasters inevitable:
"Those bad floodwalls, of course, are the ones that failed so catastrophically in 2005. The Corps’ plan calls for keeping rainfall outflow in those canals at a set level, above which, the agency believes, the walls might fail. Again. The Corps should know. It designed and supervised the construction of those floodwalls." https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ill-consider-it-criminal_b_17...
A thousand times this. Sandy Rosenthal and levees.org have kept the drumbeat going.
Thanks for the info. I'll check 'em out.
Once, a long time ago, during an extended drought in the South East, I met the Corps's commander general. I asked him if they could use their vast water reservoirs to help alleviate the problem. He explained how this would adversely affect their Byzantine obligations to the power grid, which apparently had a higher priority.
I'm not informed or smart enough to criticize his position. But it did shift my perspective on what counts as "a higher priority" for the Corps. And I suspect this is the sort of thing that is at the core of their failures when dealing with the levees.
Then again maybe $14 billion dollars just ain't enough.
Thre's a type of shoreline protection that is free and self maintaining.
It's called mangroves.
But people know better I guess, so we better keep throwing money at the problem we created.
The levees along the Mississippi are one of the big reasons why the land around New Orleans is sinking.
>When Bienville founded New Orleans in 1718, the delta was more than 400 feet deep at the river's mouth and extended northward on top of that Pleistocene foundation to midway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. It continued growing southward until the late 1800s, when construction of flood-control levees prevented the river from resupplying the delta with new sediment.
And that's when subsidence became a serious problem.
https://www.nola.com/coastal/2008/12/part_2_southeast_louisi...
what should be done for cities like new orleans as sea levels continue to rise? trying to save them feels like a losing, expensive battle - but "moving a whole city" feels even harder
Whenever property is completely destroyed in a floodplain they could offer say a 5% bonus to their insurance payment from the government if they give up rights to that property and no longer use it for housing or business, alternatively they could rebuilt the structure on pylons, propping it up above the flood levels. And if they decide to rebuild despite that offer, you could remove all eligibility from the subsidized cost of government-backed flood insurance, and instead let them take on the full cost of private insurance flood coverage rates.
There is proper technology for places below sea level. We should learn from the Netherlands - they're masters of reclaiming land from the ocean.
Perhaps they can teach us how they drove off the hurricanes.
Its called stop building paper/wooden panel houses.
>"moving a whole city" feels even harder
Could do it for Chicago around the 1850's; 'Raising of Chicago' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
Providing relocation assistance to incentivize people to go elsewhere piecemeal, rather than trying to move them all to one place together?
And like Miami, NYC etc. in the coming years.
NYC can probably afford to protect itself without federal funding
And they really should, but on the other hand, as a population they pay enough in taxes to the federal government that it's not ridiculous for them to ask for some federal assistance with something like that.
(it's also not ridiculous for a major cultural landmark like New Orleans, but that's a more complicated argument)
New Orleans is sinking at a rate of up to 2 inches per year:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6513
1) They certainly don’t blame lack of silt 2) There’s a new power plant going up at Michoud (albeit a bad idea for other reasons)
I do not see why the rest of the country needs to pay for this. I can understand why Holland has to resort to this sort of civil engineering, otherwise their country would cease to exist. For the US, keeping New Orleans afloat is just an unnecessary expense.
Yes, much of it is below sea level and stupidly expensive to quite literally keep afloat. It's quite the expense, and it's probably best to move. It's not the job of the feds to take money from one state to cover the expenses of another.
I was in Algiers Point recently and the river was about 6 feet higher than the ground on the dry side of the earthen levee. All I could think was 'the people who built this levee were not Dutch, this cannot be even remotely safe'.
In a AP neighborhood Facebook group old timers say they’ve seen seepage since the 70s and can’t report any significant raising
It's not just the levees. The whole damn city is sinking according to article from 2016.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6513
"The highest rates of sinking were observed upriver along the Mississippi River around major industrial areas in Norco, and in Michoud, with up to 2 inches (50 millimeters) a year of sinking."
It is crazy they build the system to a 100 year standard. The Dutch delta works are build to a 2000 4000 or 10000 year standard, depending on the area being protected. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works
Stealing a line from others, but: That's the difference between the US and Europe. In Europe, 100 miles is a long distance. In the US, 100 years is a long time.
Coastal cities will only be saved if lots and lots of money is spent on them. New York City will almost certainly survive for the foreseeable future (they've already got sea wall plans...). New Orleans, highly vulnerable and lacking money, will not survive.
I think new orleans will in part survive as a bit of a disneyland city. I can't imagine that there aren't some parts that are worth saving.
This is New Orleans we're talking about. Everyone there knows the government is corrupt from top to bottom. This isn't news to anyone inside the city.
Some of them can't leave for various reasons. The rest of them just won't. You have to spend time there to understand it.
The question is do we want to save them.
This is the Feds we’re talking about here, not our sainted Orleans Parish Levee board
Hard facts are hard facts. If New Orleans is going to be under water in 4 years, they will have to do something about it.
Actually, we should probably treat New Orleans as a case study and learn from it since due to rising sea levels, a lot of cities may have to evacuate in 10-20 years.
...and i don't wana swim (sorry, had to, im canadian)
fighting the ocean is a bad idea. just build up like in venice. old tech, old approach, WORKS.just build one extra floor on each building every 50 years and plan for sinkage.
Dutch person here. This is not a technical problem but a mentality problem. Louisiana has been under Republican leadership for some time. Part of the Republican agenda seems to be downplaying the notion of climate change and the associated side effects like e.g. more hurricanes and sea level rises. Well, if nature proves politicians wrong, things get ugly. Put bluntly, Louisiana needs to own that problem and stop relying on federal money and the army to fix things while they pretend this is not an issue and cut taxes and corners on keeping themselves safe.
Simple solution, acknowledge the changes that are coming, start planning accordingly and get shit done. I'm pretty sure neither Republicans nor Democrats believe in wet feet as a long term sustainable political agenda. This shouldn't be a political debate. Either you do something about it or you don't. The next time these levies break, there will be a public outrage: heads will roll.
So, the pragmatic thing to do would be to come up with a better plan than hoping that won't happen, which seems to be the current plan. And yes, that's going to cost money. Lots of it. The alternative is accepting the likely disasters and then mopping up the damage at much greater cost. Katrina cost well over a hundred billion. The budget for preventing the next such disasters (plural) should be of a similar scale.
The good news is that that actually is an investment that can give birth to an industry that is likely to have its work cut out in the next decades as world + dog will be facing the same issues. Also, as I understand it, Louisiana could use some employment opportunities. Big projects like this always have positive side effects.
The Netherlands had their wake-up call in the 1953 when a severe winter storm + spring tide flooded a large part of it. The subsequent decades we fixed our infrastructure with some massive projects at the cost of many more billions than are on the table for this in the US. The companies that helped do that still exist today and are involved in very lucrative projects across the globe (e.g. building islands off the coast of Dubai, off shore airports, etc.). I believe there was a fair bit of consulting after Hurricane Katrina as well. Business is booming for these companies. Great return on investment for Dutch tax payers and we got to keep our feet dry.
Louisiana has had an elected Democratic governor since 2015 (who is running for re-election)
There is a state coastal restoration plan with a mooted price tag of $50-80 billion
"Republican leadership for some time. Part of the Republican agenda seems to be downplaying the notion of climate change"
Republicans believe in climate change. They just think paper straws are not going to fix the problem. Republicans think there is nothing they can do to stop China from producing massive amounts of carbon emissions. Republicans don't control Louisiana - so your entire narrative is wrong.
(I am not a Republican).
Louisiana has been Democrat for a very long time, only interrupted for a short while by Bobby Jindal. So there's that.
Also, Louisiana is not the Netherlands, the conditions may not be so good, meaning that 'the plan' may be mass evacuation, which is politically a much more challenging thing than saying 'we need to repair the dykes and our nation will be ok'.
I know sarcasm never goes well on hn, but perhaps it's time we stop 'giving' the government $14b dollars... ?