[Vision2020] Of Deltas and CO2

[Phil Nisbet]

Ted

The situation in Holland is very different than that encountered in the Gulf 
Coast of North America and though it might just be possible short term to 
engineer solutions, just as previous Corp of Engineer solutions have been 
done in the past, there can be little doubt that any such solution is short 
term.

The Bush administration is the first to actually fund an alternative, the 
half a billion over four years that you mention is the start of the program 
of 14 billion dollars which was to be expended over a 30 year total program, 
which I posted earlier and has been endorsed by the ASCE.

Yes they cut programs that were designed to study extention of the system of 
levees and that might have done something had they actually been built   Yet 
as you noted, any such building program was years away and billions to fund, 
above the more logical expenditures to simply rebuild the delta and its 
wetlands system.

The only way that any help could have been offered would have been for the 
Clinton Administration to have acted back on 1998 when the reports were 
first published.  Both FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers had passed on to 
the Clinton Administration that there was a need to act to save the city in 
the case of a Cat 4 and higher in 1999 and they actually first considered 
the happenings in that event in gaming a disaster in that year.  Clinton 
took no action in 1998 or 1999, rather the administration at that time 
decreased funding below requested levels by all parties concerned, just as 
had every administration going back to Ike in the 1950’s.  As a matter of 
fact, they have po boyed systems to New Orleans under every President except 
Nixon.

The problem in National Guard troops was not the lack of them, but the 
positioning of those asset.  National Guard tropps and their positioning to 
take part in relief work is the job of a State’s Governor.  I the case of 
Florida and other Hurricane impacted states, two days prior to a landfall, 
the Governor calls up the Guard and pre-positions them to be there to act.  
The response of the Louisiana Governor was not to have pre0positioned her 
Guard assets, except for a few and she also failed to call on additional 
assets by pre-declaring state of Emergency and disaster.  You might note 
that though they were much less needed, all those assets were in place and 
moved right in during last years Hurricane in Florida.

The law is pretty plain, the Governor has to ask the Feds to step in.  She 
did not do so until Tuesday, by which time it was darn difficult to get into 
the area.  It takes a couple days to get the guard units in other states and 
to get Federal assets positioned, which is why the law allows a Governor to 
pre-declare an Emergency.

The only reason there would have been a need for overwhelming Guard assets 
was mismanagement at the very beginning.  The Mayor of New Orleans did no 
pre-positioning of food and water assets to the locations he told his 
townspeople to head for in the event of emergency.  The town made no 
provisions for evacuating the poor and the disabled, they simply let them 
fend for themselves.  Had the Mayor taken the time to make sure that those 
folks could be out of the low laying areas prior to the flooding, most of 
this tragedy could have been completely avoided.  No effort was made to 
succor those folks when the streets were very drivable and city buses and 
other assets could have taken them to higher and safer ground.

By the time the call came through from the Governor and the Mayor, it was 
150 miles of destroyed roads and water to get into New Orleans.  Instead of 
a sheltering and feeding operation that is typical for this sort of 
disaster, tens of thousands of people were stranded in inundated houses in 
flooded neighborhoods.  Instead of a few thousand guardsmen needed to keep 
order in a few refuge centers, huge efforts had to be made to even get the 
poor stranded people out of areas they should have been evacuated from.

So even if there were no troops in Iraq, the National Guard even from 
Louisiana would have been arriving on late Thursday and Early Friday, which 
is when the first asset actually did arrive.

We are still losing 16,000 acres of the Delta every year and though that is 
9000 acres less than back under the Clinton Administration, its ignorant 
that we are losing any at all.  If this particular tragedy teaches us 
anything, its that we need to get cracking and get that and the barrier 
islands repaired and growing again.

We also need to be sure that incoming new officials like the Mayor of New 
Orleans and the new Governor of Louisiana are forced to become educated in 
disaster planning.  That is one of the biggest failures of the new Homeland 
Security office, not getting with those guys days before the events to tell 
them what they needed to do to mobilize for this event, instead of just 
assuming that they knew what they were doing.

As for global warming, how much infrastructure do you want to put in place?  
That problem is actually one that is a lot more solvable than river system 
delta planning.

The world total CO2 discharge works out to 25 billion tons a year, a total 
of a one percent increase per annum.  Carbon Credits are currently priced at 
$10-50 a ton.

It’s completely feasible to remove as much CO2 from the atmosphere as you 
want and to fix it in storage, you simply have to be willing to pay the 
price.  Thus far, nobody wants to pay, they just want to reduce the increase 
in their emissions.

In this world, sediments will always travel in streams and always head for 
the oceans and storms will rage and land will subside.  For short periods of 
time we can fight these trends, but they are facts that man’s various 
structures can not win a war with.  But removing our own goop from the 
atmosphere is not that kind of battle and all it takes is the will on the 
part of society to agree to pay for it.

Phil Nisbet

_________________________________________________________________
FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar – get it now! 
http://toolbar.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200415ave/direct/01/