Uncategorized

Rebuilding: what to do with New Orleans

I hope to write quite a bit on issues around the rebuilding of New Orleans. It's a bit overwhelming in two ways, the first logistical and the second political:

• The issues involved are just incredibly complex, in terms of social and physical engineering.
• The Bush administration is almost certain to run this the same way they ran the rebuilding of Iraq: badly, with maximum inefficiency, graft, and cronyism. Resistance is futile.

But just as a teaser, check out a couple of intriguing ideas, both via City Comforts. Both start from the basic problem that much of New Orleans is built beneath sea level, and is sinking (and oh yeah, sea level is rising). So there's two things you could do:

• Rebuild the city as another Venice, with deep canals and elevated buildings.
• Fill it up until it's above sea level, the way they did with Galveston, Texas in the early 1900s.

Crazy, maybe, but then, razing wetlands to build a major seaport beneath sea level is crazy to begin with.

(See also: 5-point plan for sustainable rebuilding.)

Republicans want to pay for Gulf Coast rebuilding with cuts to enviro and social programs

You may have heard, President Bush is trying to bolster his sagging poll numbers by throwing money at the Gulf Coast -- or rather, throwing money at politically connected contributors in the Gulf Coast while cutting wages for the poor saps who work there.

$200 billion. How are we going to pay for that? Well, Think Progress points out that you could get most of it from rolling back the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the rich.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

No, seriously, we have to "cut unnecessary spending." And the House Republicans are ready, with their "Operation Offset," a list of cuts (PDF) they say could squeeze $500 billion in 10 years out of the federal budget.

Unsurprisingly, the cuts impose pain almost exclusively on programs meant to help the environment and the less fortunate. Here are a few of the cuts:

• Eliminate the EnergyStar program;
• eliminate state and community grants for energy conservation;
• eliminate National Parks Heritage Areas;
• reduce Amtrak subsidies (how come they never call highway spending "subsidies"?);
• eliminate the high-speed rail and light-rail programs;
• reduce fish and wildlife habitat construction;
• reduce Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management;
• eliminate the Applied Research for Renewable Energy Sources program;
• eliminate the FreedomCar program; and
• eliminate the Hydrogen Fuel Initiative.

Note that, as Brad Plumer points out, almost every federal program to encourage clean energy is cut, while the energy bill's recent billions in subsidies to oil and gas companies remain untouched.

There are more -- these are just the most salient environmental cuts. Some 30% of the cuts come from Medicaid. Others would eliminate a variety of foreign aid programs. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be de-funded, along with the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Many of the cuts are trivial in terms of the money they save. It's just a chance for House Republicans to take out some of their longtime enemies. It's really a stunning look into their priorities.

If you want to avoid cuts like this, get on the phone with your Congressional representatives.

(There are many, many blogs writing about this. Read around.)

(See also E.J. Dionne on the subject.)

Expert testimony

This Wednesday, the Senate Environment Committee is holding a hearing on global warming.

The lead witness? Michael Crichton.

You really can't make this stuff up.

Now he tells us …

Well I'll be damned. Did our president just encourage us to conserve? He really has lost his swagger!

Matt Yglesias says what needs to be said about this wan little gesture.

(See also Pascal Riche on European conservation programs.)

Another case of copyright infringement?

Riding public transit is a good thing, right? And you would think that easily accessible maps would encourage more people to ride the bus or subway, or current customers to ride them more often. And you would also think that transit authorities would be thrilled to hear that their maps are now available to millions of iPod users. There, you'd be wrong.

From Wired we learn that William Bright, creator of IPodSubwayMaps.com, was asked to remove maps of the New York City subway system as well as San Francisco's BART. Both New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority and Bay Area Rapid Transit claim that William was guilty of copyright infringement.

After complying, William produced his own map of each system. The one for BART is now available on his site, while he is awaiting legal advice on the one for NYC since his map used the same fonts and colors of the MTA.

And unlike BART, William is "offering it up there for anyone to use and modify."

Update [2005-9-26 13:55:44 by Chris Schults]: I'm not sure why, but you get "This Account Has Been Suspended" when you try to visit IPodSubwayMaps.com. Hopefully William simply forgot to pay his web or domain hosting bill while fending off the MTA and BART.

Update [2005-9-26 15:18:45 by Chris Schults]: The site seems to be working fine now.

Revkin on uncertainty

Okay, let's get to it.

Via Pielke, a brief but interesting account of a talk given by Andrew Revkin, esteemed environment reporter for The New York Times. Here's the nut:

In his lecture, Revkin said that after covering global warming for almost 20 years, he is convinced that there will never be a time when he can write a story that states clearly that global warming "happened today."

"It is never going to be the kind of story that will give you the level of certainty that everyone seems to crave," he said. "We are assaulted with complexity and uncertainty. Somehow, we need to convey that in all that information, with those question marks, there is a trajectory to knowledge."

American society is uneasy with the equivocal answers that often are the best environmental scientists can provide, said Revkin. Newspapers are uncomfortable with "murk," and politicians and Congress "hate it," he said.

Yet, despite the lack of crystal clarity, "you can still make decisions. Uncertainties don't let you off the hook," he said, even though some people in politics have used the uncertainties for that purpose.

Unfortunately for, um, everybody, it seems to me that the American public is growing less, not more, tolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity. This is partly a reaction to troubling and confusing times, I suppose, but it's not helped by a ruling political party that traffics almost exclusively in slogans and nostrums.

Reporting for duty

Hi. I'm back. For those who care: the kid is healthy and cute -- eating, sleeping, and pooping per his genetic programming. Oh yeah, and consuming the earth's precious resources. Bad baby! Bad, bad baby!

For two weeks I've been on a total news blackout, and let me tell you friends, it's been nice. Prior to my paternity leave, I was sinking into a malaise, depressed about the racism, incompetence, and short-sightedness exposed by Katrina. Browsing the headlines today, I see that ... nothing's changed. But I, at least, am recharged, and shall forthwith resume bringing you all the earth's grim tidings. Whee!

Penguin sexuality is not always black and white

For those of you who thought March of the Penguins was the only drama about our tuxedo-sporting friends, you may want to read up on Silo and Roy.

From The New York Times:

And Silo and Roy looked so happy together.

The two male chinstrap penguins had found each other in the big city. They had remained faithful. They had even raised a child. But then, not too long ago, they lost their home. Silo's eye began to wander, and last spring he forsook his partner of six years at the Central Park Zoo and took up with a female from California named Scrappy. Of late, Roy has been seen alone, in a corner, staring at a wall.

My heart goes out to you, Roy.

Rattle the Cajun

Post-Rita Louisiana deals with another round of environmental problems An already-battered Louisiana is beset with new environmental crises in the wake of Hurricane Rita, which sent a wall of water up to 15 feet high surging into the state’s coastal bayous and canals on Saturday. In New Orleans, officials are scrambling to assess whether the […]

Back home in Indiana … not

Conservation in Indiana is synonymous with pheasant, duck, and every other kind of hunting you can think of. Having grown up there, I used to do some hunting myself. I gave it up shortly after watching one of my friends use a barn owl for target practice. Things like that happen a lot when people go hunting. A few years later another hunting buddy (my girlfriend's brother) was involved in a fatal shooting accident and had been carried out of the woods by his father.

So anyway, Sprol has recently listed an area of Northern Indiana as one of the worst places in the world.