9-19-05

Ecclesiastes 3 (Part 2)
If you haven't read the first part of this rant, read it now.  Don't worry, we'll wait for you.

All done?  Good!  Now that we're all on the same page, let's get started.  So last time we discussed the question of when the time to point fingers is and is not.  Then we addressed the question of who is innocent of any blame in the Katrina crisis whatsoever.  So now we have the problem of

The Guilty
Yep, that's right.  now that it's all winding down, it's time to look at what caused this crisis, what made it worse, and what made it horrible by making it seem worse than it was.  The innocent were counted from the bottom up, because that worked better.  For the Guilty, we'll go top down, from huge overwhelming forces to individual assholes whose actions took a crappy situation and turned it into a national shame.  So, again, let's get started.
The Environment.
Big surprise, huh?  Hurricane Katrina was part of the environment.  Storms are natural occurrences, big storms, while rare, are also natural.  But still, let's be honest.  Is there anyone with three functioning brain cells who no longer believes that Global Warming is a reality?  Get a clue.  Seriously.
          Glacial recession not convincing enough?  How about this:  of the five category 5 hurricanes recorded since Atlantic hurricanes were kept, 4 were in the last half-century.  Three were in the last 20 years (Gilbert-1988, Andrew-1992, Katrina-2005).  Even a casual glance at the historical data at the National Hurricane Center shows a steady increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes.  Hurricanes are created and fueled by warm water and air in the subtropic "trade wind" zones.  More warm water means more hurricanes, and vice versa.
          Now, before you start jumping up and down shouting "Kyoto!" at me, I'd like to point out a few things.  First, I'm not entirely convinced that the current warming trend is a direct result of anything humans have done.  There is a possibility that it is simply part of the recursive cycle of the global climate.  Climatology is a new science, and has already given birth to an entire branch of mathematics which seems based on the theory that nothing can be accurately described.  So if you'll pardon my disbelief, show me something slightly more significant than a hundred-year warming trend.
          Second, even if humans and the effluvia of the industrial age are responsible for global warming, Kyoto would have no effect on conditions today.  It took two hundred years of industrial growth to get us here.  Assuming we're at fault, we'll have to tighten our belts and hunker down, because it will be a while before we get out.
          Merely as an aside, the reason President Bush withdrew the Kyoto Accords from Senate consideration is the same as the reason that President Clinton never submitted it in the first place (until he had one foot out the door).  There was no way anyone in the US Government was going to take the Kyoto accords seriously.  It was a list of demands on industrialized nations, promises of cash to developing nations, but included no way or possibility of enforcing the dictates of the agreement on any of the signatory nations.  The upshot of Kyoto would have been a significant increase in the rate of the industrial exodus from the West coupled with a decline in environmental quality because the developing nations receiving Industrial Aid would have neither the will nor the ability to enforce even the questionable standards employed here.
The Mississippi River
The Big Muddy is, and you have to understand I mean this in the nicest way possible, a psychotic bitch.  She has been known, on many occasions, to randomly jump channels.  She floods or declines whenever she wants and leaves people under water or high and dry.  She is the third longest (first if you consider the Missouri to be the main channel and the Miss to be the tributary) and the second most voluminous river in the world.  She drains more than half of the contiguous United States.
          And it all flows through New Orleans.
          I takes a whole lot of arrogance to think you can cage that beast.  Especially when you consider the huge expenditure involved in maintaining a levee system.  Billions of dollars are spent every year dredging out the channel of the Mississippi river.  You see, the thing about levees, is that they don't work.  Sediment and other products of runoff are limited to the channel instead of being allowed to spread during seasonal floods.  The river level rises.  This means that in order to maintain river depth and height at acceptable levels, the channel has to be dredged out on a regular basis. 
          But that money has been, little by little, pulled away from the massive Mississippi River and Tributaries Project (which covers over a thousand miles of river and five states).  Well goshdarn it!  Those bad oil companies and industrialists and their Republican Pawns must be behind this!
          Except they're not.  For one thing, one of the mandates of the project is to maintain the navigability of the River.  The Mississippi has, historically, shown an unfortunate tendency to alter its channel and even block it at times.  This is bad for business, and since the Big Muddy is the fastest, widest road north from the Gulf Oil Fields (and for Mexican and South American imported oil), those bad guys in Big Oil have every reason to encourage spending on the River Project, as do those evil industrialist from the Rust Belt, since the traffic down-river is just as important and simplified.
          You need to look across the aisle to find the folks behind the reductions in spending on the levees and the MRTP in general.  But they did it with the best of intentions.  Channelizing rivers is bad for the environment, especially when you do it to a river as large as the Mississippi.  Seasonal flooding, and Delta-forming alluvial flow is what creates and supports wetlands.  Wetlands serve as giant filters to clean water before it hits the ocean, they also build land.  Since the beginning of the MRTP Louisiana has lost miles of coastland to tidal erosion.  No alluvial flooding means no more silt dumped to replace the bits that get swept out to sea.  It's a trade-off, and they didn't see the environmental loss as worth the business gain.
          Others, humanitarians mostly, have been opposed to spending on the project because it diverted money from urban renewal, welfare, and other humanitarian efforts, and seemed only to benefit those nasty fellows in Big Business.  Really, why should those levees be repaired or upgraded?  In a now-famous editorial, the New York Times called the project, specifically, a new spending bill designed to reinforce the lower-river levees against catastrophe, a "boondoggle" and set forth a call to "remove the pork" from the bill, citing a planned reduction in Medicaid funding as a better place for the money to go.
          It probably wouldn't have mattered if the funding had been fully approved, anyway.  Any project begun in the last few years would not have been completed before Katrina hit.  In fact, one of the levees that gave way had just been reinforced shortly before the hurricane hit.  Some folks believe that it was battered by construction barges that had yet to be towed away.

More to come.  The whacking stick of blame isn't finished yet, and maybe the lower end of the list will feel it when they get whacked.