We haven't even factored in the cost associated with the release of CO2. Price that in and you might even get to $20 depending on the effects we see*.
And if you wait for the effects to be actually 'seen', double it since then you'll be paying both the high prices AND the Manhattan project equivalent to getting new tech rolled out to the entire planet in a decade or less.
1. Economical, large capacity electricity storage (which we don't have, nor do we really have a clue about the technology to use for that).
Obviously anything tough we've never done and we just can't do it so just sit still. Vegas is already experimenting with molten salt storage for solar power energy storage.
2. Gigantic electricity grids to economically transport electricity over thousands of miles (which are hugely expensive). [emphasis mine]
As opposed to $4/gallon gas? get ready for double and triple that rate within 20-30 years.
See #1. Add recent possible advances into room temp super-conductors and pretty soon you have 0% transmission loss over distances.
3. Give up the notion of electricity supply being reliable. (which we don't want)
See #1. It's already proven that adding enough wind turbines actually creates a usable base load since the wind is always blowing somewhere. Put a solar collector in space and microwave it down gives you solar power at night too.
Try thinking big rather than thinking about next week sometime.
I appreciate the civil disagreement...I'm not so good at that myself sometimes;-)
My thought on the leaking was if water from a less than clean pool ended up in the water table and the neighbor's well was just 3 feet away (remember we're talking about no rules wild west here) that could contaminate the well.
On a larger scale it's like the 'fracking' that is causing natural gas to end up in people's wells during and after exploration. fire water
You may only see one road, but unless we start down a different one we will have problems. Nuclear fuel is finite, it won't last more than 100 years especially if we ramp up to full base load use.
Solar and renewable sources are great when available, but we will never get anywhere enough energy from them to run a modern civilization
You do realize that Solar and Wind each alone already provide multiple times the current worlds energy output right? Now combine them. Literally hundreds of times more energy than we currently use over the entire planet. We just aren't harvesting it. But there's *plenty* of energy there.
Renewables' current Achilles heel is the variability and that still needs research into storing the energy and transporting it. That's all oil/coal is, just a battery with energy in it to be discharged when needed.
I commend people making such efforts and their willingness to relocate to chase their goals.
Seriously, I do.
There are far far more people who just complain without any effort at all to remedy the problems they are complaining about.
I also look forward to Libertarianism's downfall as it simply isn't sustainable. Laws exist because someone was encroaching on something someone else felt they deserved. At some point those two forces intersect and that's where laws are made to set the rules. I see Libertarianism as the willingness to say, and to accept, 'tough deal with it' as an answer to your perceived being wronged. Not a lot of people share that view me thinks...
We can argue about where the line of intersection falls, but it will always be there.
I've never commented on whether the town's use of Google Earth is right or wrong. I'm simply answering people asking 'why do we have these laws' with simple and extremely plausible cases of possible damage. Even the article mentions other cases of concern; bad wiring, plumbing, inadequate fencing. If someone's own child *dies* because they got electrocuted, is that fair to the child? that's called negligence and/or abuse. Or a neighbor's child drowns in the pool because a fence wasn't up. Lots of jurisdictions would call that negligence if you put up a hazard and don't properly secure it even if it is on your own property.
If you read further, I mention in ground pools leeching into the water supply and contaminating a nearby well.
Does the article state that the city *isn't* going after the contractors?
Besides, the rules are the rules, you can complain about them, but they existed when these people built the pools in question.
Let me guess, when internet purchases are taxed, you're going to complain about that right? Except that you (& damned near everybody else including me) are likely violating the law unless you actually report and pay sales tax for your online purchases. Just because it isn't easily enforced now, doesn't mean it shouldn't be enforced once the ability becomes available.
Never said the HOA's were perfect. But if you aren't actively participating in HOA activities (meetings, bonds, review boards) you can't really complain too much.
I've lived under HOA's where they would complain about what door knocker you had, yet wouldn't fine people for putting trash out in the same plastic bags they brought it home in (i.e. flimsy and easily picked apart by animals).
I'm not saying it should be like that, I'm saying get involved and fix the problems because they are far less than what *could* be done to you and your property without them.
You are welcome to your opinion and to try and convince a majority of your neighbors of those opinions.
It's funny though, as you say many places and people seem to like rules that protect the value of their single largest investment against the random 'taste' of other individuals.
Comparing the character of New Orleans to anywhere else just plain isn't fair. You have it, we don't;-) So we need to make sure things stay nice and calm and ordinary:)
Of course as a rule nobody is subjected to these rules involuntarily. You buy into the area and have right of refusal and subsequently don't buy the property. If you lived there prior to the rules generally you are exempt from them.
why is it the self professed 'defenders of liberty' don't seem motivated enough to actually exercise their liberty and work to change the laws that they seem to detest so much?
Maybe, just maybe, you really are a crackpot and are 'wrong'? just sayin
I do have fantasies about spelling and grammar...so you're safe there - zippo interest;-)
If the pool is right next to your house, remember they aren't required to do any planning, and it fails, a 3-6 foot wall of water will do some damage.
Or if it leaks into the water table and now you're drinking it because it contaminates your well?
There's a big reason why rural communities don't generally have such restrictions and suburban/urban communities do. It's proximity. If you have 4 acres of land it's a lot harder to affect your neighbors. If you have a 1/4 acre and the other house is literally 3 feet away from yours, it's pretty easy. Shoehorning a pool into a city block residential plot would be a major undertaking that you want regulated.
HOA's also prevent your neighbor from putting in a auto shop or painting their houses with pink polka dots..
Neither of which will do wonders for your home value. As was said before, it's an all or nothing thing - either take the restrictions or deal with the fact that anyone can do anything they want on their property.
And finally, unless you've lived on the property prior to any local ordinances going into effect (and even then some are retroactive), you agreed to the HOA or other restrictions are part of the purchase. It's a perfectly reasonable case to back out of a purchase because you don't like the HOA restrictions. I *think* they are required to notify you and provide the HOA contract; I know they gave me mine prior to sale.
Because a pool, above or below ground, couldn't leak and cause damage to neighbors?
Personal ownership comes with personal responsibility, something many of the proponents of your 'crackpot' theories seem to try and weasel out of when the bills come home to roost.
Sure renewable is great.. but the problem is that the third world isn't going to want to foot that bill as they rise in affluence. Heck it's tough to sell Americans on it.
Forgot the cost factor, people expect the cost of renewable sources to come down over time. Frankly they really won't, at least not appreciably.
However, the cost of non-renewable sources is only going up as supplies and the environmental costs of their use are tallied. So in the long run renewables are going to be much much cheaper than the other options.
The question is, do you want to pay really high energy costs while also then paying the high cost of rapid renewable development then, or do you want to take our relatively cheap energy costs now and use this time to invest in renewables over a longer period so we aren't paying both high costs and high development (i.e. rapid) costs later?
If we convert to nuclear, we still have waste/emissions issues, since as you say there still are emissions from nuclear plants in the form of the waste. We'll need to deal with the waste at some point and so far there isn't a plan to deal with it. Just put it somewhere and hope it doesn't leak/leech into the environment.
My choice is more short term pollution from coal with the goal of renewable sources completely (or at least most) down the road.
You don't get down the road until you start driving, so why take a different road that doesn't get you where you are going?
You call it a 'small chance'. The 9/11 attacks were even less than a 'small chance'; it simply wasn't a credible threat. That is my point. We simply don't know what the 'next threat' is going to be so claiming we're safe from it isn't good enough.
And renewable cant respond to increases in load, a coal plant can increase the feed rate of fuel. Solar, wind, tide cant change mother nature, Geothermal can operate below peak which is similar to a normal plant.
Too funny, you don't even understand that this issue is the same for both. Just like you don't build a coal plant to max out at average load, you don't build renewable to only handle average. You simply build a bigger plant [more mirrors/windmills/etc], just like you do with a coal plant. Every plant has a maximum output, you build enough supply to handle all the peaks.
And for the record, coal doesn't react quickly at all to demand changes. That's why coal plants have gas fired generators on site to handle the peaks in demand.
Solar and wind however, come online at the flick of a switch. Or a reorientation of the mirrors or blades etc.
As for nuclear plants, a dozen planes could fly into a modern nuclear plant and do all of nothing much
Which is why I didn't suggest the plant itself is the problem, but the pretty much open air (water) storage of the waste. It sits on site at the reactors for years with little in the way of hardened shielding.
You misunderstand what's growing. He's assuming current growth in energy demand, and zero growth in the fuel supply.
Google 'Uranium shortage'. Given that we're talking orders of magnitude increase in power to reach base load levels, it's perfectly reasonable to question whether we have enough or not. Especially when the OP (and everybody else saying we have enough) doesn't specify what they mean.
The cost of waste storage is factored into the cost of modern nuclear plants.
Please show me where the local utility plants are paying for 100+ years of storage. The Fed gov't is the one footing the bill, i.e. Yucca mountain (yes I know it's dead). That's not including the cost of storage, that's passing the buck to the gov't to do it for you.
The best the plants can say is that they paying the gov't to figure out what to do with it. That doesn't mean its done. When the bill comes due, the utility customers won't pay the it, the gov't will.
modern nuclear plants don't produce the kind of waste that ancient plants (e.g. Chernobyl & American plants) produced.
Breeder reactors produce significantly less waste, but I believe they also produce weapons grade material, hence why some countries are less than wild about using them.
I don't want to argue the merits of this nuclear plant or that one. My point is that no nuclear plant is as safe as a non-nuclear solution. We can build out nuclear only to have to find something else when that fuel runs out. Or we can spend the money now to switch to renewable sources and only switch it once.
Nothing like that can happen in a modern reactor, and even if it could, the way they are run absolutely precludes anything like Chernobyl happening.
It's not the 'expected' stuff that's troublesome. re: 9/11 and the Towers. It wasn't considered reasonable that someone would purposely fly fully loaded aircraft into them. Oops. Now imagine if that had been a radioactive waste storage pond next to a working reactor.
Nuclear is the only clean power source that we can deploy right now and get all our baseline energy needs from. The known reserves are enough to last for hundreds of years assuming current growth
This is the one thing that gets glossed over. You talk about deploying base load 'right now' and then say the fuel will last hundreds of years at current growth rates. You just said growth rates would have to increase way more than it is currently growing. So current growth rates aren't relevant. How many years at base load amounts in fuel do we have? That's the relevant question.
Thorium is an interesting alternative to uranium, but still I wonder about the first scenario above.
Even if we go nuclear in the interim, we still have the waste storage issue to deal with for hundreds of years...not anything we've even considered in terms of cost.
This is why renewable sources combined with energy storage tech is the wave of the future. The fuel is completely free. Added benefit that flying a plane into a power plant doesn't have massively disastrous consequences. (dams are localized to just the flood plain and not 'massive' in effect)
The point is that without Net Neutrality, your ISP could decide to load Fox News faster instead of Daily Kos. Much like your cable company gets to 'choose' which channels to show you. Or just decides to include a really crappy signal from Daily Kos, but a pristine HD signal for Fox News. It's a subtle (or not so subtle) tilting of the playing field because they are the access provider.
Net Neutrality is simply to prevent access providers from putting their own (or favored) content ahead of a 3rd party's content.
The argument that lack of regulation allowed the internet to grow is valid but back then access providers weren't generally also content providers. Now thanks to massive mergers they are one and the same.
“You can’t just take one data point and extrapolate sea level rise from that,” he said. “It’s been done, but it’s not acceptable.”
Again, I've been living with this same level of sea level for fifty years and I'm still waiting for the rise.
Your 'single' data point is your location.
I referenced those very sentences in my reply. My point being that an individual reading is unreliable. The article doesn't say there has been *no* sea level rise, just that it is possible some of the reported increase is from the land sinking.
From article the person pointing out the unreliable nature of the 2.1 foot rise said "The world’s best scientists agree the sea level is rising at half that rate, he said.". So even the people saying this isn't a good measure are saying it has been rising.
As for the Louisiana delta, it is sinking under the weight of thousands of years of sediment buildup. The erosion is a combination of both the sinking and man's involvement. The sinking is theoretically offset by the deposit of additional sediment though.
Facts are, sea levels rise evenly just like all water does in the same container
I suspect you know as well as I do that this is a wildly simplistic example. So lets say you start adding water to the system and while slowly tipping it to one side. The side going up might see their water level drop even though overall levels are going up.
Similarly if your beaches are experiencing localized sand deposits you won't necessarily see the water level go up.
Most data points show sea levels have been increasing for as long as we've kept records. This can be explained pretty easily due to the process of erosion as well as plate tectonic uplifts and subsidence.
The danger issue is that we are now adding water to the system from formerly land bound ice. This is why the predictions are for much faster increase in the coming decades.
You don't specify which beach so this is a general response. Individual shorelines can be quite difficult to separate subtle water level changes from natural erosion and build up of material.
or the coastline itself could be rising or dropping because of plate tectonics. A small scale example is actually in Yellowstone national park. There's a lake that is being tilted due to the uplift of the crust. One end of the lake is flooding things, the other is seeing retreat of the water.
Local observations are highly unreliable when discussing global changes such as sea level.
Slashdot Mirror
We haven't even factored in the cost associated with the release of CO2. Price that in and you might even get to $20 depending on the effects we see*.
And if you wait for the effects to be actually 'seen', double it since then you'll be paying both the high prices AND the Manhattan project equivalent to getting new tech rolled out to the entire planet in a decade or less.
If two people have a claim on the same property, then they must seek arbitration for a fair solution.
And if one party isn't capable of affording the legal costs associated with defending their rights in arbitration?
1. Economical, large capacity electricity storage (which we don't have, nor do we really have a clue about the technology to use for that).
Obviously anything tough we've never done and we just can't do it so just sit still. Vegas is already experimenting with molten salt storage for solar power energy storage.
2. Gigantic electricity grids to economically transport electricity over thousands of miles (which are hugely expensive). [emphasis mine]
As opposed to $4/gallon gas? get ready for double and triple that rate within 20-30 years. See #1. Add recent possible advances into room temp super-conductors and pretty soon you have 0% transmission loss over distances.
3. Give up the notion of electricity supply being reliable. (which we don't want)
See #1. It's already proven that adding enough wind turbines actually creates a usable base load since the wind is always blowing somewhere. Put a solar collector in space and microwave it down gives you solar power at night too.
Try thinking big rather than thinking about next week sometime.
Only the energy we can actually harness matters.
I laughed pretty hard at this. Especially since you just finished saying that we need to work harder to get more uranium.
Why not just work a little harder and harness renewable sources?
And you don't end up with trashed environments when the mines are emptied to boot.
And what pray tell happens when 2 people's freedoms conflict with each other?
I appreciate the civil disagreement...I'm not so good at that myself sometimes ;-)
My thought on the leaking was if water from a less than clean pool ended up in the water table and the neighbor's well was just 3 feet away (remember we're talking about no rules wild west here) that could contaminate the well.
On a larger scale it's like the 'fracking' that is causing natural gas to end up in people's wells during and after exploration. fire water
Because there's only one road
You may only see one road, but unless we start down a different one we will have problems. Nuclear fuel is finite, it won't last more than 100 years especially if we ramp up to full base load use.
Solar and renewable sources are great when available, but we will never get anywhere enough energy from them to run a modern civilization
You do realize that Solar and Wind each alone already provide multiple times the current worlds energy output right? Now combine them. Literally hundreds of times more energy than we currently use over the entire planet. We just aren't harvesting it. But there's *plenty* of energy there.
Renewables' current Achilles heel is the variability and that still needs research into storing the energy and transporting it. That's all oil/coal is, just a battery with energy in it to be discharged when needed.
Fine and dandy, but the large majority of people are subject to those type of taxes - and don't generally pay them.
Does that mean that enforcing the tax is wrong?
I commend people making such efforts and their willingness to relocate to chase their goals.
Seriously, I do.
There are far far more people who just complain without any effort at all to remedy the problems they are complaining about.
I also look forward to Libertarianism's downfall as it simply isn't sustainable. Laws exist because someone was encroaching on something someone else felt they deserved. At some point those two forces intersect and that's where laws are made to set the rules. I see Libertarianism as the willingness to say, and to accept, 'tough deal with it' as an answer to your perceived being wronged. Not a lot of people share that view me thinks...
We can argue about where the line of intersection falls, but it will always be there.
I've never commented on whether the town's use of Google Earth is right or wrong. I'm simply answering people asking 'why do we have these laws' with simple and extremely plausible cases of possible damage. Even the article mentions other cases of concern; bad wiring, plumbing, inadequate fencing. If someone's own child *dies* because they got electrocuted, is that fair to the child? that's called negligence and/or abuse. Or a neighbor's child drowns in the pool because a fence wasn't up. Lots of jurisdictions would call that negligence if you put up a hazard and don't properly secure it even if it is on your own property.
If you read further, I mention in ground pools leeching into the water supply and contaminating a nearby well.
Does the article state that the city *isn't* going after the contractors?
Besides, the rules are the rules, you can complain about them, but they existed when these people built the pools in question.
Let me guess, when internet purchases are taxed, you're going to complain about that right? Except that you (& damned near everybody else including me) are likely violating the law unless you actually report and pay sales tax for your online purchases. Just because it isn't easily enforced now, doesn't mean it shouldn't be enforced once the ability becomes available.
Never said the HOA's were perfect. But if you aren't actively participating in HOA activities (meetings, bonds, review boards) you can't really complain too much.
I've lived under HOA's where they would complain about what door knocker you had, yet wouldn't fine people for putting trash out in the same plastic bags they brought it home in (i.e. flimsy and easily picked apart by animals).
I'm not saying it should be like that, I'm saying get involved and fix the problems because they are far less than what *could* be done to you and your property without them.
You are welcome to your opinion and to try and convince a majority of your neighbors of those opinions.
;-) So we need to make sure things stay nice and calm and ordinary :)
It's funny though, as you say many places and people seem to like rules that protect the value of their single largest investment against the random 'taste' of other individuals.
Comparing the character of New Orleans to anywhere else just plain isn't fair. You have it, we don't
Of course as a rule nobody is subjected to these rules involuntarily. You buy into the area and have right of refusal and subsequently don't buy the property. If you lived there prior to the rules generally you are exempt from them.
why is it the self professed 'defenders of liberty' don't seem motivated enough to actually exercise their liberty and work to change the laws that they seem to detest so much?
Maybe, just maybe, you really are a crackpot and are 'wrong'? just sayin
I do have fantasies about spelling and grammar...so you're safe there - zippo interest ;-)
If the pool is right next to your house, remember they aren't required to do any planning, and it fails, a 3-6 foot wall of water will do some damage.
Or if it leaks into the water table and now you're drinking it because it contaminates your well?
There's a big reason why rural communities don't generally have such restrictions and suburban/urban communities do. It's proximity. If you have 4 acres of land it's a lot harder to affect your neighbors. If you have a 1/4 acre and the other house is literally 3 feet away from yours, it's pretty easy. Shoehorning a pool into a city block residential plot would be a major undertaking that you want regulated.
HOA's also prevent your neighbor from putting in a auto shop or painting their houses with pink polka dots..
Neither of which will do wonders for your home value. As was said before, it's an all or nothing thing - either take the restrictions or deal with the fact that anyone can do anything they want on their property.
And finally, unless you've lived on the property prior to any local ordinances going into effect (and even then some are retroactive), you agreed to the HOA or other restrictions are part of the purchase. It's a perfectly reasonable case to back out of a purchase because you don't like the HOA restrictions. I *think* they are required to notify you and provide the HOA contract; I know they gave me mine prior to sale.
Because a pool, above or below ground, couldn't leak and cause damage to neighbors?
Personal ownership comes with personal responsibility, something many of the proponents of your 'crackpot' theories seem to try and weasel out of when the bills come home to roost.
Sure renewable is great.. but the problem is that the third world isn't going to want to foot that bill as they rise in affluence. Heck it's tough to sell Americans on it.
Forgot the cost factor, people expect the cost of renewable sources to come down over time. Frankly they really won't, at least not appreciably.
However, the cost of non-renewable sources is only going up as supplies and the environmental costs of their use are tallied. So in the long run renewables are going to be much much cheaper than the other options.
The question is, do you want to pay really high energy costs while also then paying the high cost of rapid renewable development then, or do you want to take our relatively cheap energy costs now and use this time to invest in renewables over a longer period so we aren't paying both high costs and high development (i.e. rapid) costs later?
If we convert to nuclear, we still have waste/emissions issues, since as you say there still are emissions from nuclear plants in the form of the waste. We'll need to deal with the waste at some point and so far there isn't a plan to deal with it. Just put it somewhere and hope it doesn't leak/leech into the environment.
My choice is more short term pollution from coal with the goal of renewable sources completely (or at least most) down the road.
You don't get down the road until you start driving, so why take a different road that doesn't get you where you are going?
And renewable cant respond to increases in load, a coal plant can increase the feed rate of fuel. Solar, wind, tide cant change mother nature, Geothermal can operate below peak which is similar to a normal plant.
Too funny, you don't even understand that this issue is the same for both. Just like you don't build a coal plant to max out at average load, you don't build renewable to only handle average. You simply build a bigger plant [more mirrors/windmills/etc], just like you do with a coal plant. Every plant has a maximum output, you build enough supply to handle all the peaks.
And for the record, coal doesn't react quickly at all to demand changes. That's why coal plants have gas fired generators on site to handle the peaks in demand.
Solar and wind however, come online at the flick of a switch. Or a reorientation of the mirrors or blades etc.
As for nuclear plants, a dozen planes could fly into a modern nuclear plant and do all of nothing much
Which is why I didn't suggest the plant itself is the problem, but the pretty much open air (water) storage of the waste. It sits on site at the reactors for years with little in the way of hardened shielding.
You misunderstand what's growing. He's assuming current growth in energy demand, and zero growth in the fuel supply.
Google 'Uranium shortage'. Given that we're talking orders of magnitude increase in power to reach base load levels, it's perfectly reasonable to question whether we have enough or not. Especially when the OP (and everybody else saying we have enough) doesn't specify what they mean.
The cost of waste storage is factored into the cost of modern nuclear plants.
Please show me where the local utility plants are paying for 100+ years of storage. The Fed gov't is the one footing the bill, i.e. Yucca mountain (yes I know it's dead). That's not including the cost of storage, that's passing the buck to the gov't to do it for you.
The best the plants can say is that they paying the gov't to figure out what to do with it. That doesn't mean its done. When the bill comes due, the utility customers won't pay the it, the gov't will.
modern nuclear plants don't produce the kind of waste that ancient plants (e.g. Chernobyl & American plants) produced.
Breeder reactors produce significantly less waste, but I believe they also produce weapons grade material, hence why some countries are less than wild about using them.
I don't want to argue the merits of this nuclear plant or that one. My point is that no nuclear plant is as safe as a non-nuclear solution. We can build out nuclear only to have to find something else when that fuel runs out. Or we can spend the money now to switch to renewable sources and only switch it once.
Nothing like that can happen in a modern reactor, and even if it could, the way they are run absolutely precludes anything like Chernobyl happening.
It's not the 'expected' stuff that's troublesome. re: 9/11 and the Towers. It wasn't considered reasonable that someone would purposely fly fully loaded aircraft into them. Oops. Now imagine if that had been a radioactive waste storage pond next to a working reactor.
Nuclear is the only clean power source that we can deploy right now and get all our baseline energy needs from. The known reserves are enough to last for hundreds of years assuming current growth
This is the one thing that gets glossed over. You talk about deploying base load 'right now' and then say the fuel will last hundreds of years at current growth rates. You just said growth rates would have to increase way more than it is currently growing. So current growth rates aren't relevant. How many years at base load amounts in fuel do we have? That's the relevant question.
Thorium is an interesting alternative to uranium, but still I wonder about the first scenario above.
Even if we go nuclear in the interim, we still have the waste storage issue to deal with for hundreds of years...not anything we've even considered in terms of cost.
This is why renewable sources combined with energy storage tech is the wave of the future. The fuel is completely free. Added benefit that flying a plane into a power plant doesn't have massively disastrous consequences. (dams are localized to just the flood plain and not 'massive' in effect)
The point is that without Net Neutrality, your ISP could decide to load Fox News faster instead of Daily Kos. Much like your cable company gets to 'choose' which channels to show you. Or just decides to include a really crappy signal from Daily Kos, but a pristine HD signal for Fox News. It's a subtle (or not so subtle) tilting of the playing field because they are the access provider.
Net Neutrality is simply to prevent access providers from putting their own (or favored) content ahead of a 3rd party's content.
The argument that lack of regulation allowed the internet to grow is valid but back then access providers weren't generally also content providers. Now thanks to massive mergers they are one and the same.
“You can’t just take one data point and extrapolate sea level rise from that,” he said. “It’s been done, but it’s not acceptable.” Again, I've been living with this same level of sea level for fifty years and I'm still waiting for the rise.
Your 'single' data point is your location.
I referenced those very sentences in my reply. My point being that an individual reading is unreliable. The article doesn't say there has been *no* sea level rise, just that it is possible some of the reported increase is from the land sinking.
From article the person pointing out the unreliable nature of the 2.1 foot rise said "The world’s best scientists agree the sea level is rising at half that rate, he said.". So even the people saying this isn't a good measure are saying it has been rising.
As for the Louisiana delta, it is sinking under the weight of thousands of years of sediment buildup. The erosion is a combination of both the sinking and man's involvement. The sinking is theoretically offset by the deposit of additional sediment though.
Facts are, sea levels rise evenly just like all water does in the same container
I suspect you know as well as I do that this is a wildly simplistic example. So lets say you start adding water to the system and while slowly tipping it to one side. The side going up might see their water level drop even though overall levels are going up.
Similarly if your beaches are experiencing localized sand deposits you won't necessarily see the water level go up.
Most data points show sea levels have been increasing for as long as we've kept records. This can be explained pretty easily due to the process of erosion as well as plate tectonic uplifts and subsidence.
The danger issue is that we are now adding water to the system from formerly land bound ice. This is why the predictions are for much faster increase in the coming decades.
Galveston, TX, 2.1 feet rise since 1909.
The article describes what I've said, the 2.1 feet reading may be related to localized subsidence of the land the pier sits on.
Even within the Gulf there are differences. Louisiana is sinking due to deposit of sediment, Florida has remained relatively stable.
Just because it isn't happening where *you* are doesn't mean it isn't. And lots of science, if you bother to look for it, backs this up.
You don't specify which beach so this is a general response. Individual shorelines can be quite difficult to separate subtle water level changes from natural erosion and build up of material.
or the coastline itself could be rising or dropping because of plate tectonics. A small scale example is actually in Yellowstone national park. There's a lake that is being tilted due to the uplift of the crust. One end of the lake is flooding things, the other is seeing retreat of the water.
Local observations are highly unreliable when discussing global changes such as sea level.
linky