An Opportunity Cost of Hyper-Partisanship

By 1978, this had become an obvious problem.  Thirty-nine years later, it's a lot worse.

I just heard about the Politico piece Why America Still Hasn’t Learned the Lessons of Katrina. How might that be good news? Because in one of the reddest states of the them all, where you can find entire communities that, according to CNN give little credence to anthropogenic climate change.

Congressman (Republican) Garret Graves, who served for six years as the head of Louisiana's coastal protection and restoration efforts in the wake of Katrina, and is now Chairman of the Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee that sets policy for the Army Corps and holds the power to investigate the agency.

What's more, Politico goes on to say that Louisiana’s approach is seen as a model for states facing looming coastal crises, and its experts regularly host visitors from around the world seeking to learn from its resiliency efforts. And that the most powerful industry in the state, the energy industry, is on Graves side.

It's timely, given that the former Hurricane Harvey is still pounding Houston, promising record or near-record damages, and it reminds everyone of the fear in with Hurricane Ike, in 2008:

While meteorologists have described Harvey’s dynamics as a “worst-case scenario,” with the potential to dump massive amounts of rain for days, it’s not the storm that Texas leaders fear the most. Emergency managers in the Lone Star State got a hint of what their worst-case scenario could look like in 2008, before Hurricane Ike shifted course. That storm still rang in as the third-costliest disaster in U.S. history, but had it shoved the predicted, massive storm surge through Galveston Bay and up the Houston ship channel, hitting the country’s fourth-largest city and the nation’s largest petrochemical and refining complex, it would have been far worse.

Many years ago, I lived in Louisiana. I'm no fan of the place (except for the food!), and I am a life-long believer in science. But neither am I fan of political wing-nuts, on either end of the spectrum. Oregon is fortunate in being one of the states least affected by changes in sea level -- or climate change in general. I live in a conservative county, but just a few miles from one of the most liberal areas of the state. I hear intolerance and wing-nuttery from both sides, and used to occasionally indulge in it myself, particularly when stoked by some particularly heart-felt bit of lunacy. It's possible that I still do it; nobody is always aware of how they come across to others. OK, that's wrong, and it's on me.

Until the general population learns to stop shouting past each other, find common ground, and just possibly rediscover civility, we will continue to pay opportunity costs in the billions of dollars, and in too many lives lost or irreparably damaged.

Can that actually happen? I have no idea, and most days, I doubt it.  But I also wonder how many more encouraging stories, such as this Politico piece, are out there, but never draw an audience.

So, what's with that barrier island image? It wasn't in the Politco Piece.

Why no. It wasn't. Politico supplied an image of disappearing wetlands, but in one of the rare weak bits of the piece, there nothing that plainly stated that it was a before-and-after image of the same place, much less mentioning the dates. And they do cover ballooning costs "to protect highly vulnerable bayou communities and a major oil and gas hub in Terrebonne Parish".

The image I supplied is about barrier islands, which are also part of the Army Corps of Engineers palette of solutions, part of the reason for that Terrebonne Parish problem, and it came from The United States Geological Survey, which I have long regarded as one of the most science-based organizations in all of government. Including the loss of barrier islands adds information, so it's a win. Especially since now I can point to more information by giving the source as Louisiana Coastal Wetlands: A Resource At Risk.