[Vision2020] Of Deltas and CO2

[Pat Kraut]

I disagree! Someone in Louisiana should have told her! Why does everyone
want to make the Fed responsible for everything?? When did they take over?
The locals could have done whole rescue operation if they had paid
attention. There is a picture circulating showing the school buses all under
water. The mayor could have confiscated them and sent those people out of
town by force. But, he keeps yelling about the feds not coming in time! He
is just hoping no one asks him too many questions.
Heard a joke yesterday:
George Bush and Arafat are in a boat on a lake. The wind comes up and blows
off Arafats headscarf. George tells him 'hey no problem, I'll get it for
you! He gets out of the boat and walks across the water gets the scarf and
returns to the boat. The headlines? George Bush Can't Swim!
It is so funny because it is so true!
PK


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phil Nisbet" <pcnisbet1 at hotmail.com>
To: <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Sent: Saturday, September 03, 2005 5:45 PM
Subject: [Vision2020] Of Deltas and CO2


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

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