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Louisiana's Governor Declares State Of Emergency Over Disappearing Coastline (npr.org)
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards has declared a state of emergency over the state's rapidly eroding coastline. From a report on NPR: It's an effort to bring nationwide attention to the issue and speed up the federal permitting process for coastal restoration projects. "Decades of saltwater intrusion, subsidence and rising sea levels have made the Louisiana coast the nation's most rapidly deteriorating shoreline," WWNO's Travis Lux tells our Newscast unit. "It loses the equivalent of one football field of land every hour." More than half of the state's population lives on the coast, the declaration states. It adds that the pace of erosion is getting faster: "more than 1,800 square miles of land between 1932 and 2010, including 300 square miles of marshland between 2004 and 2008 alone."
Oil from all over the place is processed here.
The people that work these jobs, live on the coast and the sealife that supports these folks and provides a good amount of seafood to the US will disappear if this coastal erosion is allowed to continue.
This isn't just for the people of Louisiana, but for the great resources it provides the rest of the US.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
And the Republicans insist climate change isn't real . . . well maybe when half the red leaning states are under water they'll open their eyes. Probably be way too late by that point though.
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
No, it's pretty much just New Orleans that sits below sea level.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Don't worry, carbon taxes will fix it. Carbon taxes can fix all environmental problems.
But how many libraries of congress of land every hour is that?
Decades of saltwater intrusion, subsidence and rising sea levels
No, that's not why the delta's disappearing. Here are the reasons why:
1) Levees and flood protections prevent silt from the Mississippi from depositing into the delta to maintain it, and
2) Oil drilling required dredging up the delta to permit pipelines and shipping lanes, destroying wetlands that help capture and build-up the silt.
Basically anything south of Alexandria (which sits dead center of Louisiana) is consistently flooding. This includes many major cities (New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette).
There is really no way to stop this, the state is literally sinking.
"more than 1,800 square miles of land between 1932 and 2010, including 300 square miles of marshland between 2004 and 2008 alone."
In the first case that's 1800 sq miles over 78 years or 23 sq miles per year.
In the second case that's 300 sq miles over 4 years or 75 sq miles per year.
Whichever number you use (and if you include the year in the range, so the numbers may be +/- 1 year) it's still greater than 5 sq miles per year.
The problem with your explanation is that it's fact-based, and stands on good science. This is the post-truth era. Thus, the counter to your argument will be:
Bruce Perens.
Good for you! I hope your "land" ends up being Territorial Waters.
At the current rate of carbon emissions pumping energy into storms and glacial melt in Greenland, along with sad attempts to stop flood plains from renewing decaying soil mass by siltration deposit of alluvial soils, four fifths of Lousiana will be under water for part of the year.
Look, flood plains are supposed to flood. Stopping the river deposits is why it's getting worse. Destroying the biomass buildup from salt infiltration from Gulf storms.
Florida is way worse off, quite frankly. And it's all the fault of people sticking their heads in the sands (which will also disappear).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"Might have had?" Your ignorance is showing.
The whole point of carbon taxes is to set a price for CO2 emissions, with the baseline assumption that the market will produce solutions based on creating a sort of "artificial scarcity". If you're a free market advocate, carbon taxes are the way to go, because they are far easier to administer than regulatory regimes, carbon credits, and other regulation-style structures. Upping the price of carbon means alternatives become more attractive, and isn't that the name of the game?
Unless, of course, you don't believe in free markets.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
CNN has a similar article about disappearing Louisiana coastline. One of the people interviewed has been shrimping for 54 years. His best comment, "It doesn't concern me.What is science? Science is an educated guess," Dotson says defiantly. "What if they guess wrong? There's just as much chance as them to be wrong as there is for them to be right."
Mind you, Louisiana is the top most uneducated state in the nation and this particular area of Louisiana, Cameron county, has the highest percentage of people who do not believe climate change has an effect on plants or animals. Not man-made climate change, but any climate change.
Another person in the article says he likes his AC and gas at reasonable prices so therefore, why, based on a prediction alone, should humans try to limit CO2 production?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Yes, the government will have to set the price, so it won't be a truly free market. But seeing as leaving it to the market to actually set the price means oil is obscenely cheap and it's use continues, until costs in other parts of the economy hit damaging levels (ie. how much do you want to spend on house insurance, flood remediation, and rising food costs, etc.) I did say "artificial scarcity".
The fact is that CO2 emissions are trapping more heat in the lower atmosphere, the oceans and the surface of the planet. If you have some alternative solution, explain how it will solve this problem without creating an extremely intrusive regulatory regime, which everyone is going to hate a helluva lot more than simply setting a price on CO2 emissions.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
From a 2005 post https://pesn.com/archive/2005/...
Summary... the City of New Orleans is sinking, and sliding off the continental shelf. It's doomed even if sea levels did *NOT* rise.
> The river is moving away from the city. The city is sinking because of its
> weight, because no upbuilding by new muck for many decades, because of
> being cut off from the fresh water, because it is sliding off a cliff (the Continental Shelf),
> and because the Oil and Gas Industry is extracting oil out from under it.
> It is a city that for all intents and purposes is now Sea domain.
And, oh yeah, the very fact that ships can navigate from the Gulf of Mexico, up the Mississippi River is an anthropogenic artifact.
> To understand the City of New Orleans one must first understand the
> massive Mississippi River delta. New Orleans was built at the site of the old
> "French Quarter" on the high ground adjacent to the Mississippi river.
> This location was picked because the Mississippi River didn't have a mouth
> into the ocean. The river simply went into the "Black Swamp" and disappeared.
> This was where ships headed down river had to stop and unload their
> goods to be transshipped across Lake Pontchartrain to the sea. This was
> done by unloading the goods at the docks and then hauling them to the
> lake where shallow draft boats would take the goods to the seagoing ships.
>
> By using some ingenious methods, Henry Shreve -- after whom
> Shreveport, La., is named -- forced the river to dig its own channel out to
> the sea where it now goes. This allowed the ocean-going boats access to
> the enormous Mississippi river. This, together with the work of the US Army
> Corps of Engineers, produced what is functionally the largest ocean port on earth.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
"What is the ground composed of and what does the water table underneath look like?"
That entire area is in the Mississippi Delta Floodplains. Everything from Memphis to the Gulf of Mexico is practically FLOATING on a giant aquifer. All it takes is for New Madrid to go 7.5 or higher to put most of everything from Memphis down to Hattiesburg underwater. A large influx of water on the floodplains further south would probably cause a quicksand effect (and in fact there's tons of that in Louisiana) and simply wash everything away or drag much of it under the ground (as we witnessed with Katrina and New Orleans.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
A few problems with that...
1) So who sets the prices? Any governmental price controls on any commodity (which carbon credits are) means there is no free market involvement.
Only if you think like a Sith.
The government charging you rent to store you carbon in public air is rather a lot more free market than "we're annexing all coal, natural gas, and petroleum related industryis under eminent domain and will be shutting them down.
The fact is that many people have dearly held religious beliefs. These beliefs are held with a bond that is far more than any combination of logic or emotion; such conviction in any human is not to be trifled with.
You can't attack people on such a personal, intimate, foundational level and expect people to follow you, or your ideas.
Unfortunately, for decades, many claiming to represent science have been loudly proclaiming (without evidence, as it's unprovable either way) that "science" says that religion, and by extension the listener's very being, is false. It's a normal human reaction that, provided a choice between dismissing dearly held, foundational beliefs, and unprovable claims made by a "scientist", that the unprovable claims will be rejected wholesale - and religion is retained.
Consequently, whenever there is a real, insight with multiple independent lines of evidence all pointing to a very similar conclusion (ie. good science), it is immediately discarded with prejudice -- all because of the asshat making unprovable claims about religion, often in an entirely different subject.
There are a few assclowns that need to realize that human beings are not logical, rational creatures, never have been, and it's important to work within that constraint.
It's harmful to both science and the world to evangelize science against religion (and by extension, saying that somebody who has a religion cannot be scientific), the result is exactly what we see in Louisiana: "What is science? Science is an educated guess" -- ie. contempt for science.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Any governmental price controls on any commodity (which carbon credits are)
GP is talking about a carbon tax, not carbon credits. A tax has many benefits and doesn't have the pitfalls you describe above. Best of all, a revenue neutral carbon tax would allow government to lower tax on things they ought to be encouraging like income and sales.
Louisiana consistently elects small-government, anti-EPA, anti-climate Representatives and Senators. Now they want an environmental conservation bailout? They decry federal handouts, and then they turn around begging for help. How about "No".
They cite:
"Decades of saltwater intrusion, subsidence and rising sea levels"
Yet, they ousted their only politician who even pretended to care about the environment and replaced her with Cassidy, whose policies will only hasten that outcome.
New Orleans couldn't be arsed to maintain their levees, then Hurricane Katrina happened. Now this. Louisiana should change their motto to "The No Foresight State".
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
I've long mused that despite the climate deniers howls, at some point we're going to hit an impasse. Due to historical reasons, we'll save New Orleans and other big name towns on the gulf coast in regions that sit at or below the water line.
However, if you're from some town nobody's ever heard of that's on the coast, you're pretty much fucked. If we believe the models and so far they've been spot on, every year some percentage of these towns are going to get flooded and/or walloped by hurricanes.
Each year the federal government and insurance agencies swoop in (for some value of swooping) and rebuild these towns. At some point insurance companies are going to cry uncle. They'll boost rates so high that literally nobody will be able to afford to rebuild. I could even see a situation where after a federal government has to step in and say "We're moving your entire community 50 miles in land and combining it with this other community" Why? Money and resources. At some point as wasteful as the government is, they're going to see the folly of rebuilding a town over and over and as the tide rises it's going to become less and less financially tenantable and take more and more resources.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Can I ask why you left off the third reason that the article you link to very clearly explains: sea level rise?
"All of this results from three processes that reinforce and amplify each other’s effects: levee construction, oil and gas exploration and sea level rise."
I don't respond to AC's.
Companies do not own the atmosphere. Citizens do. If they want to put things in our property we have every right to charge them rent by means of a tax.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
carbon tax and cap and trade systems are both valid, free market solutions to the CO2 problem
what is NOT a free market solution is incentives such as electric cars subsidies.
Well, with a carbon tax the government would set the taxation rate, and it would be like any other tax... and that's the problem with carbon taxes: regulatory capture. In the US people who pay a lot of taxes have outsized influence on tax policy.
This is why some environmentalists prefer cap and trade. In that system the government sets limits based on overall carbon emission goals. You'd first try to meet those caps by developing emission reduction technology, and if you reduced more than necessary you could sell the credit for the extra reduction to someone who was having trouble meeting their cap at a price mutually agreed upon without regulatory oversight. In other words the market would determine carbon credit trading prices.
The economic advantage of this system over carbon taxation is that it is more flexible. Imagine that an overall reduction of, say, 50% in CO2 emissions is technologically feasible, but that doesn't mean every industry can feasibly achieve 50%. Under cap and trade if the airlines have trouble meeting their cap they could buy credits from the industries that can find ways that will save more than 50%.
This leads to the environmental benefit: more carbon reduction. You can tell the airlines they've got to reduce CO2 by 50% but they physically can't do it, they can't. But if the electricity generators could cut their carbon by 75%, they aren't going to do so unless they have a financial reason -- either carbon taxes or the ability to sell the extra reduction. Cap and trade has the same effect as carbon taxes, but it uses a carrot and stick approach.
This leads to the political benefit: carbon reduction will be someone's rice bowl. In a system where money talks loudest, that's important.
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