Re: Is New Orleans finished ?

On 3 Sep 2005 09:05:21 -0700, Winfield Hill
<Winfield_member@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> I read that the cost to have built the levees to cat-5 level, as opposed
> to the cat-3 level it was built to, would have been only $2.5B, which is
> about 1/10 of what's going to be spent now by insurers, government, etc.
>

Cool. All you would have had to know in advance is exactly where,
among the 3000-miles or so of levees and seawalls in six or seven
states, it would break. Bush should have known this. I'm sure Clinton
did, and would have fixed it all up if he'd been elected to a third
term, as he suggested he should have been. I'm certain that fixing all
the levees was on Jimmy Carter's second-term agenda.

Of course, the prople of New Orleans and of Louisiana had no
responsibility to pay for their own safety, or even to lobby hard to
have anybody else pay for it. The mayor and Jesse Jackson certainly
know who's to blame.

It's also morbidly funny: the mayor of NOLA ordered everybody
evacuated. And had hundreds of school busses parked in neat rows. So
now the school busses are under water, and so are the people who
couldn't get out.

The problem now isn't busses; it's that there's nowhere to *take* the
refugees. Maybe the kids in the MIT dorms would volunteer to double
up?

I expect a few in my house.


>>> Geez Win, do you blame Bush for everything, including a couple
>>> thousand years of C02 creation?
>
> You know I don't blame Bush for a hundred years of high industrial
> energy consumption and pollution, but I strongly blame him for being
> on the WRONG side of the solutions, and for that I have a long list
> of specifics.

Bill Clinton praised the Kyoto accords, but made zero effort to get
them ratified in the Senate, or to fix the CAFE loopholes. He was all
talk but knew where the money is really buried. What Gore did about
Kyoto was to burn a half million gallons of jet fuel to go to the
conference, and a lot more to fly around the US giving speeches about
it.

Why do you prefer people who say "yes" and act "no" to those who just
say "no" up front? Is hypocracy prefereble to honesty when the actions
will be the same? Clinton's relationship with Ken Lay was to beat him
at golf (he cheated); Bush is prosecuting him.



>
>>> You sure are sticking to it.
>>>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/national/30cycle.html?ei=5065&en=9e0e24b0c5ee1d90&ex=1125979200&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print
>
> I recognize that any one storm may be more part of a natural cycle
> then a trend, because I have to respect the scientists who say that.
> One was this fellow, who I have heard in several long interviews:
> To quote from your reference, "In an article this month in the journal
> Nature, Kerry A. Emanuel, a hurricane expert at MIT, wrote that global
> warming might have already had some effect. The total power dissipated
> by tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic and North Pacific increased
> 70 to 80 percent in the last 30 years, he wrote."

Yup; there's a natural 30-year cycle.


> But in his interviews, Emanuel says that, based on his research, he is
> a strong believer in global warming. He asserted that the increased
> CO2 has had a HUGE effect, easily seen in the decades of measurements
> he's accumulated, as a steady global increase in total integrated power
> dissipated by all the tropical storms, and seen in individual seasons
> by stronger swings and specific more powerful storms. Such as Katrina,
> we can now add. How anyone can read "increased 70 to 80 percent in the
> last 30 years" and argue this is natural beats me. Anyway, John, please
> go read the Nature article. Given its importance, I'll take the liberty
> of posting it to s.e.d., where it will have a short life in the servers.
>
> Getting back to Bush, again I do strongly blame him and his party for
> being on the wrong side of the equation, for completely letting off
> the hook a multitude of the responsible parties (some of whom are now
> messing up Massachusetts),

You don't have politicians in Massachusetts?

> for diverting our country's resources to
> Iraq, for draining more in tax cuts, for taking money and critical
> resources from the Army Corps of Engineers for Iraq, and for taking
> critical resources from the National Guard for Iraq instead of using
> it here at home. He has his own agenda, and he does *not* cared about
> us, of that I'm convinced.

Face it: all the oil in the ground is going to be pumped up and burned
at the maximum practical rate; it's only a question of who does it.
After that, China will go 100% to coal, and you know the CO2
consequences of that. However much global warming is due to CO2,
there's virtually nothing we can or will do to change things much.
We'll just have to get used to it. Some places will get better, and
some will get worse. But Earth's climate has always been various and
erratic on scales enormously greater than what's likely here.

As far as the tax cuts go, I guess we differ as to where we are on the
Laffer curve. I do know that if the city and state and the Feds didn't
grab 50% of the profit of my company (and define a piece of equipment
or building improvements as "profit") I could create a bunch more USA
jobs and products and probably pay more absolute tax dollars in the
end. And an estate tax would absolutely destroy my business and kill
20 jobs or so; The Brat would have to liquidate, to *make* the assets
worthless, to avoid having to write a tax check for a million or so
dollars for the value of "goodwill."

OK, you don't like W. I couldn't stand Clinton. But that's all about
personality. The outcome of this hurricane, or the economy, or the
climate, wouldn't be much different no matter who was President. A
President isn't king and he's not God.


John

.

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