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."

Comments

The problem with your explanation

[Bruce Perens]

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:

• Evidence for a human cause of erosion is thin and controversial, and is being pushed by loony liberals.
• We need those oil and shipping jobs, and jobs building and maintaining levees, not more regulation that stifles them!
• Cause and effect is not a real thing, except for one cause, God is behind everything.
• This is part of God's plan for us. The end time is coming, and when the Rapture arrives it will not matter that Louisiana's coast has eroded. Cease your pursuit of unholy science and pray to save your soul!

Re:Its pretty important...

[Orgasmatron]

This has nothing to do with climate. It has nothing to do with "rising sea levels". It has everything to do with 150 years of engineering the Mississippi river. That river flows an ungodly amount of water, and that water picks stuff up and drops it off. Every geographical feature in that area was (mostly) the result of a dynamic equilibrium between sediment deposits and erosion. We've changed the river, and now the land is adjusting to a new equilibrium.

Old news: New Orleans is artificial and a mistake

[knorthern knight]

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.