Historically that doesn’t make sense. Usually by not relocating you can extract greater concessions from your fellow citizens. As an example, if you left Rancho Palos Verdes when signs showed up you could have bought an equivalent home. But if you waited for your property there to be condemned, you received money equivalent to the maximum of the price in the last three years. The latter is obviously superior to maximize your own capital with the bonus that you get to live there until it is dangerous.
Likewise, the flood plains of Texas are cheap and nice to live in when there are no floods and when floods are imminent you have sufficient warning that you can evacuate and the federal government will compensate you. You can then go back and live there. This one is harder because it is unpleasant to move and you don’t receive the inflated price but it does incentivize some on the border.
Of course the fires in Malibu are a story of going too far in the wrong time. If they’d had a sympathetic administration in the federal government likely some kind of compensation scheme could have been worked out. So you have to work on the politics and the economics.
Its probably cheaper to start buying out people now (no way this cost isn't going to be socialized) than to risk in the future ultra expensive bleeding heart projects to kick the can down the road.
At the very least a moratorium on new builds and additions should go into effect immediately.
But the National Flood Insurance Program will, with plenty of federal bailouts.
Private insurers haven’t been willing to cover large parts of the south for decades. The NFIP was the backstop and already overstretched when Katrina hit New Orleans, which is when it first got bailed out. It’s been a downward spiral ever since.
We're already seeing other states struggling with soaring house insurance rates (California and Florida) and a pattern of spikes in rates leading government mandated caps on rates leading to insurers pulling out of the states.
I've no idea what the going rate for insurance is currently in New Orleans but it has to be crazy right?
At some point you’ll have to do it without insurance or mortgages though. There are places on the island of Hawaii where neither are available due to volcano risk.
This article and the one before it are based on a paper in nature that says if the seas rise 10ft-23ft that New Orleans is screwed. Notably it does not predict this, just says that if sea levels rise the city is screwed. Which it is!
But so is lower Manhattan, Miami, 60% of the land in the Netherlands, almost all of Bangladesh, along with numerous other places.
Now 3m-7m is vastly higher than any current predictions, but hey lets scare monger about a single city!
It’s more than rising oceans. New Orleans is sinking rapidly just like Jakarta.
The southern third of LA has ground composed of spongy organic material deposited by rivers since the last ice age as opposed to solid ground largely made up of silicates and minerals covering bedrock.
Relative sea level rise = actual sea level rise + land subsidence
Cities like New Orleans are suffering a double whammy: not only are they subsiding (sinking), but the sea levels are also rising and so between the two they're in grave trouble.
I wonder why CNN have decided to highlight oceans rising and not mention land sinking anywhere in the entire article? Is it possible they have an agenda?
Common thinking is that one of these things you can influence, and the other you cannot. You don’t often read articles that mention the sunrise or seasons because they just are, and everybody is already aware of their contribution.
I generally agree with your point about it being simply emergent behavior.
But on the other hand, the timing (having seen over the past week or so several articles about the most disastrous IPCC model now having become implausible) makes me wonder if some individual actors are thinking they need something to shore up their disaster prophesying.
> I wonder why CNN have decided to highlight oceans rising and not mention land sinking anywhere in the entire article? Is it possible they have an agenda?
Because water incursion is a much more difficult thing to deal with, in terms of infrastructure and prevention.
Also, let me know when the rest of coastal land has the same sinking as N.O.
This doesn't make sense. Both land sinking and water rising contribute together to 11mm/y ground level going closer to sea level. And the sinking has >2x effect.
Isn't land sinking something to address locally where it happens, compared to water rising which we're gonna need some sort of global solution for, as it's not just because of one country? If so, one would seem more difficult than the other.
You can take your tinfoil hat off. In common parlance, ”rising seas” is about relative sea level (RSL), which is what actually matters regardless of the mix of underlying causes. This is how it’s used by e.g NOAA https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/faq.html#q1
Do you think the average CNN reader has a good grasp on the distinction of relative and eustatic sea levels?
I considered it a pretty nuanced topic, I’m surprised CNN treats it as table stakes.
Yes, but it’s not the topic of the article though. The article is about relocation. It describes the general problem and why New Orleans is particularly vulnerable. It would be nice to mention sinking land explicitly, but the idea that there’s some ”agenda” behind why they aren’t mentioning it is ridiculous.
I wish that there were a Corps of Engineers in the Army, whose job it was to build and maintain water retention structures. I think that such an organization might be our best hope for half an inch of rising water every year. Given that much of the state is already below sea level, that they have not suffered the wrath of climate change could only be a miracle. It must be the work of a merciful God who has forgiven their sins of owning Ford F150s.
This approach has already failed miserably for the city. They just need to move to where it isn't so obviously a risk, regardless the reason of the day, rather than have all of us pay to try to keep them there and then continually fail anyways.
Why would this need to be a miltary organization? Are the sinking lands/rising seas a plot from some enemy? This is a civil engineering thing if ever I saw one. Might want to look at how the Dutch deal with this. I don't think it involves any armies.
The way the Dutch deal with this is changing. The predominant view now is depolderization. Environmental concerns indicate that they should return the land to the sea.
In case you missed it, that was a joke. There is infact an Army Corps of Engineers that is responsible for exactly what the comment suggested (amongst a lot of other things).
The Army Corps of Engineers has its prominent civil engineering role because early America did not have a lot of federal resources and was born from war. So when the Federal government decided it wanted to take on large scale civil engineering works, the only ready to go resource at hand were the military engineers. And then afterwards, it's pretty much been inertia.
The Army Corps of Engineers civil works division is basically almost completely staffed by civilians. So there's a convoluted top level organization, but on the ground, it's not like they have soldiers and military engineers building levees.
Because if it were civil and paid for for centrally, it'd be Big C Communism marching in. Let the army do it and it's eagle-riding patriotism.
But also if you do declare some sort of emergency that allows this, otherwise frustrating checks and committees can be bypassed. Probably not a bad thing.
I mean hard to say. "Climate change" means that weather patterns will change on a location by location basis, it's not all for the "worse" (climate doesn't care one way or another about what humans in particular value), and so far the 2000s have had more storms hit Louisiana than the 2010s and the 2020s have been milder than the 2010s. It's entirely possible that climate change reduces the number of storms that hit new orleans
we can though? NOLA is sinking in large part because human activity has lowered the groundwater level by draining the swamps and wetlands, so the soil starts compressing.
This humors me: people still think CNN has a “liberal bias” especially as it transitions into ownership by David Ellison.
They probably should have mentioned it, yeah. But if you’re on a sinking ship in the ocean that does mean that the water level is rising relative to you and that is most of your problem.
And are we supposed to not be prepared and informed about the ocean rising at over 3mm per year? I wouldn’t exactly jump to being dismissive of sea level rise that is so dramatic. Every 10 years you’re gaining over an inch, every 100 you’re gaining about a foot. And then you’ve got the ice caps melting which is an impending climate disaster.
In reality, the right-wing criticism of the “mainstream media” has been a form of projection and justification for legitimizing its own propaganda network. Meanwhile, the right denies their own mainstream status: the “mainstream media lies” but the #1 cable news network is a right wing network, the Joe Rogan Experience is the #1 podcast that hosts political
guests but isn’t part of the “lying press,” and this is all justification for the FCC to send threatening letters to terrestrial networks for their choice of jokes on late night talk shows or their daytime talk shows not being conservative enough.
CNN misses one detail in a highly scientific story and they get accused of having an agenda, Fox News trots out an employee in a mask pretending to be antifa and nobody bats an eye.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t scrutinize all media, but this particular dynamic is something that has been noticeable.
It’s not just the one detail. They also racialized the discussion of the impact and, egads, a cardinal sin, they mentioned the “Gulf of Mexico” and made their mention of the governor’s decision a partisan jab by not including the “one detail.”
Agreed. Also, as every media organization is free to make editorial decisions on both what they cover and how they cover it, left/right is often far too simplistic and vague to actually reverse engineer a media orgs bias.
> CNN misses one detail in a highly scientific story and they get accused of having an agenda
If it's as the earlier poster said that sinking is 8mm per year, versus 3.2mm and they point out the 3.2, don't you think this news organisation has missed the main detail?
Reminds me of the famous photo showing Anderson Cooper in hip waders, standing in a flooded hole. It appears that flood waters were chest high, but if you saw the surrounding terrain you realized the water was not nearly so deep, it only seemed that way because he was standing in a hole.
Someone who was 7 during Katrina at that time is roughly 28 today.
Using the Census ACS age brackets, about 20-ish% of louisiana's population is under 15, and another 20 is between 15 and 29. Everyone 30 and older adds up to the other 60.
So a hair over 60% are were at least 7.
But that's who lives there now not who lived there then. Between 2005 and 2006 the state population dropped by 6% and most of that displaced population never returned - people coming in from elsewhere weren't there for Katrina. So the fraction who were both living there AND old enough to remember it is considerably smaller than 60%.
Why are you assuming the rapid increase in LA’s population from 2006 to 2010 did not have a significant portion of temporarily displaced people moving back?
Claiming 9 year olds don't remember Katrina is quite an abuse of the word "roughly". The percentage of Louisiana's population under 25 is 33%, we can agree they don't "remember". Anything else requires considerable stretching with a hand-waving accompaniment. I can do that part just as well as any other internet person. Let's see, how about the fact that what followed Katrina was years of rebuilding? Someone from New Orleans probably saw its aftermath around them for 4-5 years.
Oh hey, something I used to work on. The story here is coastal erosion / land subsidence much more than it is sea level rise, although that is a contributing factor. The land subsidence has been caused by Engineering works of the past, including the construction of levees and floodwalls around the city. When I worked on this a decade ago, we were already telling people outside of the city to move and spending a fortune to protect people inside the city. The most cost-effective option is often getting people to move, but good luck convincing everyone. Also this is such a shame because New Orleans is one of the most unique, charming places in the US.
New Orleans is on a river delta, and without human effects on land, and without sea level rise, wouldn't one expect this delta to expand due to silt deposition?
And would this silt deposition actually occur at a rate that would fully counteract sea level rise, just as the huge rise in sea levels at the end of the last ice age did not mean that the delta disappeared?
If so, the danger to New Orleans would be entirely avoidable by changes in local land use.
Perhaps the fundamental issue is that river deltas tend to be dynamic, with the watercourse continually changing, which isn't really compatible with a city in a fixed location. (Hence the damaging attempts at stopping this.)
Ccp central planner think like nonsense. People will just move on house boats and ponton cellar houses. New-new orleans will be right where it is now, near the river, even when the river changes course.
I hope there is some plan to thwart this, as New Orleans is my favorite city on Earth. Truly unique culture and history against the homogenization and suburbanization of America. If you’ve never visited, please go.
I wonder if they would even have to be relocated if they had the water management expertise and functional government of Denmark?
I think the article didn’t talk enough about how Louisiana is far too poor to undertake a planned relocation without a vast amount of federal help.
Then, you’ve got the fact that Louisiana’s political leadership is some of the worst in the country. The article touched on it but arguably didn’t discuss it enough. These are not people who will do anything that benefits constituents. Arguably they aren’t even benefiting their donors by burying their head in the sand, although I imagine their donors have accepted that they’ll just leave New Orleans with their profits in hand when the time comes.
Louisiana isn’t poor by almost any objective measure. They’re in the bottom half of US states by GDP per capita (not in the bottom 10), but they’d be in the top 20 countries in the world by GDP per capita if they were a country.
GDP per capita is meaningless in the US bro. It's literally a cooked number that holds up big capitalists making money "in the state" from extraction of natural resources, but that money isn't staying in LA.
Drive through LA and those places you mentioned and you'll see it.
Feels more than a bit cherrypicked. There is also not much daylight (less than $1000) between them, and, once again, dead last.
They're also, once again, dead last in economic oppurtunity.
Frankly, I call bullshit on your interpretation. Have you ever set foot in Louisiana? I've lived in the deep south my entire life.
The entire south, outside of a few cities is generally pretty poor, but Louisiana/Arkansas/Mississippi is just a different level. That's what happens when you elect a bunch of MAGA morons.
PS: The local governments are doing everything possible to NOT help their citizens.
Louisiana isn’t poor by almost any objective measure.
Uh, by the objective measure of my own two eyes? You can trot out all the fancy numbers you want, I’m not blind. The resource extraction that goes on in Louisiana does not necessarily trickle down to its residents nor even stays in the state.
That's on the other side of the river from New Orleans.
To what I think is your larger point, that project is a small part of the efforts at water control around New Orleans. But, so far they have generally been viewed as beneficial and the various governmental entities keep paying for them -- why should we expect anything different in the future ? Roads get repaved all over the country, bridges rebuilt, and the levees rebuilt. There's always an "infrastructure crisis" of the decade, the chatter is how we as a society judge the expense and confirm it's necessary.
relocation requires assistance, people living paycheck-to-paycheck cannot just up and move out of city/state
take some of that $1 BILLION PER DAY being used to bomb innocent kids and civilians in Iran, soon Cuba, and help innocent people in your own country relocate
if the current administration is in charge the week New Orleans is about to go undersea they will "solve the problem" by banning FEMA from doing anything or just defunding it to $1/day
> the city must start the relocation process now to avoid chaos.
I've no reason to doubt this is absolutely true.
that's not what they're gonna do though....
> The region has “crossed the point of no return,” the paper’s authors wrote, adding New Orleans “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century.”
Historically that doesn’t make sense. Usually by not relocating you can extract greater concessions from your fellow citizens. As an example, if you left Rancho Palos Verdes when signs showed up you could have bought an equivalent home. But if you waited for your property there to be condemned, you received money equivalent to the maximum of the price in the last three years. The latter is obviously superior to maximize your own capital with the bonus that you get to live there until it is dangerous.
Likewise, the flood plains of Texas are cheap and nice to live in when there are no floods and when floods are imminent you have sufficient warning that you can evacuate and the federal government will compensate you. You can then go back and live there. This one is harder because it is unpleasant to move and you don’t receive the inflated price but it does incentivize some on the border.
Of course the fires in Malibu are a story of going too far in the wrong time. If they’d had a sympathetic administration in the federal government likely some kind of compensation scheme could have been worked out. So you have to work on the politics and the economics.
Its probably cheaper to start buying out people now (no way this cost isn't going to be socialized) than to risk in the future ultra expensive bleeding heart projects to kick the can down the road.
At the very least a moratorium on new builds and additions should go into effect immediately.
Keep in mind, at some point, insurers simply won't pay out.
But the National Flood Insurance Program will, with plenty of federal bailouts.
Private insurers haven’t been willing to cover large parts of the south for decades. The NFIP was the backstop and already overstretched when Katrina hit New Orleans, which is when it first got bailed out. It’s been a downward spiral ever since.
The bond market will only accept this up to a point.
We're already seeing other states struggling with soaring house insurance rates (California and Florida) and a pattern of spikes in rates leading government mandated caps on rates leading to insurers pulling out of the states.
I've no idea what the going rate for insurance is currently in New Orleans but it has to be crazy right?
$6k/yr for $300k coverage in New Orleans.
at some point slightly sooner now thanks to parent comment
Wouldn’t plan it but sounds like could’ve been a solid strategy assuming trust in timely condemnations (out of homeowner control, I think).
At some point you’ll have to do it without insurance or mortgages though. There are places on the island of Hawaii where neither are available due to volcano risk.
This article and the one before it are based on a paper in nature that says if the seas rise 10ft-23ft that New Orleans is screwed. Notably it does not predict this, just says that if sea levels rise the city is screwed. Which it is!
But so is lower Manhattan, Miami, 60% of the land in the Netherlands, almost all of Bangladesh, along with numerous other places.
Now 3m-7m is vastly higher than any current predictions, but hey lets scare monger about a single city!
Link to paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-026-01820-z
It appears that if you go through the link in this Guardian article, you will get free access to the full paper:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/04/new-orleans-...
It’s more than rising oceans. New Orleans is sinking rapidly just like Jakarta.
The southern third of LA has ground composed of spongy organic material deposited by rivers since the last ice age as opposed to solid ground largely made up of silicates and minerals covering bedrock.
I think this is the point you're making:
Relative sea level rise = actual sea level rise + land subsidence
Cities like New Orleans are suffering a double whammy: not only are they subsiding (sinking), but the sea levels are also rising and so between the two they're in grave trouble.
Ocean Rise: ~3.2 mm/yr
Land Sinking: + ~8.0 mm/yr
I wonder why CNN have decided to highlight oceans rising and not mention land sinking anywhere in the entire article? Is it possible they have an agenda?
Common thinking is that one of these things you can influence, and the other you cannot. You don’t often read articles that mention the sunrise or seasons because they just are, and everybody is already aware of their contribution.
Which can we actually influence?
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/summary-for-policymakers/
Every 24hr news org has an agenda to maximize clicks/views from their ideologically captured herd.
This isn't a left/right thing either.
I generally agree with your point about it being simply emergent behavior.
But on the other hand, the timing (having seen over the past week or so several articles about the most disastrous IPCC model now having become implausible) makes me wonder if some individual actors are thinking they need something to shore up their disaster prophesying.
NOLA land sinking is also (in large part) due to human activity in draining the wetlands and swamps, so the dry soil starts compressing.
> I wonder why CNN have decided to highlight oceans rising and not mention land sinking anywhere in the entire article? Is it possible they have an agenda?
Because water incursion is a much more difficult thing to deal with, in terms of infrastructure and prevention.
Also, let me know when the rest of coastal land has the same sinking as N.O.
This doesn't make sense. Both land sinking and water rising contribute together to 11mm/y ground level going closer to sea level. And the sinking has >2x effect.
Isn't land sinking something to address locally where it happens, compared to water rising which we're gonna need some sort of global solution for, as it's not just because of one country? If so, one would seem more difficult than the other.
Also, in some places land is actually rising.
You work for cnn?
funny, i had the same thought but for "common sense" and not CNN
You can take your tinfoil hat off. In common parlance, ”rising seas” is about relative sea level (RSL), which is what actually matters regardless of the mix of underlying causes. This is how it’s used by e.g NOAA https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/faq.html#q1
Do you think the average CNN reader has a good grasp on the distinction of relative and eustatic sea levels? I considered it a pretty nuanced topic, I’m surprised CNN treats it as table stakes.
Yes, but it’s not the topic of the article though. The article is about relocation. It describes the general problem and why New Orleans is particularly vulnerable. It would be nice to mention sinking land explicitly, but the idea that there’s some ”agenda” behind why they aren’t mentioning it is ridiculous.
Relative sea level (RSL): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_sea_level
I wish that there were a Corps of Engineers in the Army, whose job it was to build and maintain water retention structures. I think that such an organization might be our best hope for half an inch of rising water every year. Given that much of the state is already below sea level, that they have not suffered the wrath of climate change could only be a miracle. It must be the work of a merciful God who has forgiven their sins of owning Ford F150s.
This approach has already failed miserably for the city. They just need to move to where it isn't so obviously a risk, regardless the reason of the day, rather than have all of us pay to try to keep them there and then continually fail anyways.
Why would this need to be a miltary organization? Are the sinking lands/rising seas a plot from some enemy? This is a civil engineering thing if ever I saw one. Might want to look at how the Dutch deal with this. I don't think it involves any armies.
The way the Dutch deal with this is changing. The predominant view now is depolderization. Environmental concerns indicate that they should return the land to the sea.
In case you missed it, that was a joke. There is infact an Army Corps of Engineers that is responsible for exactly what the comment suggested (amongst a lot of other things).
The Army Corps of Engineers has its prominent civil engineering role because early America did not have a lot of federal resources and was born from war. So when the Federal government decided it wanted to take on large scale civil engineering works, the only ready to go resource at hand were the military engineers. And then afterwards, it's pretty much been inertia.
The Army Corps of Engineers civil works division is basically almost completely staffed by civilians. So there's a convoluted top level organization, but on the ground, it's not like they have soldiers and military engineers building levees.
Congressional Research Service report: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48322
It includes a section about discussions on transferring civil works responsibility out of DoD.
Because if it were civil and paid for for centrally, it'd be Big C Communism marching in. Let the army do it and it's eagle-riding patriotism.
But also if you do declare some sort of emergency that allows this, otherwise frustrating checks and committees can be bypassed. Probably not a bad thing.
Because land sinking makes only New Orleans unlivable?
Is it possible the land is sinking because of the rising water level?
See level rise is not the relevant measure.
A single catastrophic event that causes a temporal rise of several meters can permanently alter the coastline and storms are worsening.
> storms are worsening
I mean hard to say. "Climate change" means that weather patterns will change on a location by location basis, it's not all for the "worse" (climate doesn't care one way or another about what humans in particular value), and so far the 2000s have had more storms hit Louisiana than the 2010s and the 2020s have been milder than the 2010s. It's entirely possible that climate change reduces the number of storms that hit new orleans
Sure do. People don't click on land sinking titles.
Because we can't do anything about land subsidence.
we can though? NOLA is sinking in large part because human activity has lowered the groundwater level by draining the swamps and wetlands, so the soil starts compressing.
I don’t think we have direct control over sea levels either.
This humors me: people still think CNN has a “liberal bias” especially as it transitions into ownership by David Ellison.
They probably should have mentioned it, yeah. But if you’re on a sinking ship in the ocean that does mean that the water level is rising relative to you and that is most of your problem.
And are we supposed to not be prepared and informed about the ocean rising at over 3mm per year? I wouldn’t exactly jump to being dismissive of sea level rise that is so dramatic. Every 10 years you’re gaining over an inch, every 100 you’re gaining about a foot. And then you’ve got the ice caps melting which is an impending climate disaster.
In reality, the right-wing criticism of the “mainstream media” has been a form of projection and justification for legitimizing its own propaganda network. Meanwhile, the right denies their own mainstream status: the “mainstream media lies” but the #1 cable news network is a right wing network, the Joe Rogan Experience is the #1 podcast that hosts political guests but isn’t part of the “lying press,” and this is all justification for the FCC to send threatening letters to terrestrial networks for their choice of jokes on late night talk shows or their daytime talk shows not being conservative enough.
CNN misses one detail in a highly scientific story and they get accused of having an agenda, Fox News trots out an employee in a mask pretending to be antifa and nobody bats an eye.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t scrutinize all media, but this particular dynamic is something that has been noticeable.
It’s not just the one detail. They also racialized the discussion of the impact and, egads, a cardinal sin, they mentioned the “Gulf of Mexico” and made their mention of the governor’s decision a partisan jab by not including the “one detail.”
Beverly Wright has done yeoman's work for years on a number of good causes and quoting her is not merely racializng the discussion.
Agreed. Also, as every media organization is free to make editorial decisions on both what they cover and how they cover it, left/right is often far too simplistic and vague to actually reverse engineer a media orgs bias.
> CNN misses one detail in a highly scientific story and they get accused of having an agenda
If it's as the earlier poster said that sinking is 8mm per year, versus 3.2mm and they point out the 3.2, don't you think this news organisation has missed the main detail?
The article didn’t actually discuss the specific quantity of millimeters of sea level rise, either.
Reminds me of the famous photo showing Anderson Cooper in hip waders, standing in a flooded hole. It appears that flood waters were chest high, but if you saw the surrounding terrain you realized the water was not nearly so deep, it only seemed that way because he was standing in a hole.
What, do people not remember Katrina? That was the sign to move, and it was 20 years ago.
No, they don't, because only about half of people in Louisiana are old enough to remember it.
The median age of Louisiana is 38. Hurricane Katrina occurred 21 years ago.
Someone who was 7 during Katrina at that time is roughly 28 today.
Using the Census ACS age brackets, about 20-ish% of louisiana's population is under 15, and another 20 is between 15 and 29. Everyone 30 and older adds up to the other 60.
So a hair over 60% are were at least 7.
But that's who lives there now not who lived there then. Between 2005 and 2006 the state population dropped by 6% and most of that displaced population never returned - people coming in from elsewhere weren't there for Katrina. So the fraction who were both living there AND old enough to remember it is considerably smaller than 60%.
So like I said, roughly half.
Why are you assuming the rapid increase in LA’s population from 2006 to 2010 did not have a significant portion of temporarily displaced people moving back?
because the movement of people displaced by Katrina has been extremely well documented for the last 20 years?
Like, there are entire journals and programs of study devoted to it. I’m not just guessing here.
Claiming 9 year olds don't remember Katrina is quite an abuse of the word "roughly". The percentage of Louisiana's population under 25 is 33%, we can agree they don't "remember". Anything else requires considerable stretching with a hand-waving accompaniment. I can do that part just as well as any other internet person. Let's see, how about the fact that what followed Katrina was years of rebuilding? Someone from New Orleans probably saw its aftermath around them for 4-5 years.
And most people don't remember anything from before age 5 anyway.
Exactly, humans famously have no memory until the age of 18
As the song goes: "New Orleans is sinking, man, and I don't wanna swim"
Yeah, the average Canadian has been well aware of New Orleans’ sinking problem for some decades now, thanks Canadian Content requirements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans_Is_Sinking
RIP Gord. Such an awesome songwriter.
Oh hey, something I used to work on. The story here is coastal erosion / land subsidence much more than it is sea level rise, although that is a contributing factor. The land subsidence has been caused by Engineering works of the past, including the construction of levees and floodwalls around the city. When I worked on this a decade ago, we were already telling people outside of the city to move and spending a fortune to protect people inside the city. The most cost-effective option is often getting people to move, but good luck convincing everyone. Also this is such a shame because New Orleans is one of the most unique, charming places in the US.
Didn't the governor famously cancel coastal restoration programs?
New Orleans is on a river delta, and without human effects on land, and without sea level rise, wouldn't one expect this delta to expand due to silt deposition?
And would this silt deposition actually occur at a rate that would fully counteract sea level rise, just as the huge rise in sea levels at the end of the last ice age did not mean that the delta disappeared?
If so, the danger to New Orleans would be entirely avoidable by changes in local land use.
Perhaps the fundamental issue is that river deltas tend to be dynamic, with the watercourse continually changing, which isn't really compatible with a city in a fixed location. (Hence the damaging attempts at stopping this.)
Earlier this month:
'Point of no return': New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48015218
Ccp central planner think like nonsense. People will just move on house boats and ponton cellar houses. New-new orleans will be right where it is now, near the river, even when the river changes course.
I hope there is some plan to thwart this, as New Orleans is my favorite city on Earth. Truly unique culture and history against the homogenization and suburbanization of America. If you’ve never visited, please go.
They'll wall off the tourist portions of the city that are worth the expense and let the sea take the rest.
I wonder if they would even have to be relocated if they had the water management expertise and functional government of Denmark?
I think the article didn’t talk enough about how Louisiana is far too poor to undertake a planned relocation without a vast amount of federal help.
Then, you’ve got the fact that Louisiana’s political leadership is some of the worst in the country. The article touched on it but arguably didn’t discuss it enough. These are not people who will do anything that benefits constituents. Arguably they aren’t even benefiting their donors by burying their head in the sand, although I imagine their donors have accepted that they’ll just leave New Orleans with their profits in hand when the time comes.
>too poor
Louisiana isn’t poor by almost any objective measure. They’re in the bottom half of US states by GDP per capita (not in the bottom 10), but they’d be in the top 20 countries in the world by GDP per capita if they were a country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
They’re just behind Denmark by GDP per capita and ahead of Germany, Sweden, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and the UK.
I've been to Louisiana and most of those countries. Going by the eye test, Louisiana was the poorest.
There’s a difference between “there exists people there who are poor” and the state and local governments are poor.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-col...
Louisiana is 32nd for tax revue per capita.
Then why does the state look so poor? And why do you think their governments will spend money on helping people now?
GDP per capita is meaningless in the US bro. It's literally a cooked number that holds up big capitalists making money "in the state" from extraction of natural resources, but that money isn't staying in LA.
Drive through LA and those places you mentioned and you'll see it.
Also, use PPP.
We’re talking about the state and local government not that poor people exist in Louisiana.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-col...
Louisiana is 32nd for tax revue per capita.
"A large amount of wealth is consistently and regularly extracted from Louisiana"
If we are talking about resources available to the state we can look directly at tax revenue.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-col...
Louisiana is 32nd for tax revue per capita.
Louisiana has no severance tax. There are certain arrangements with trust funds for offshore oil that were enacted in the 50s and 60s.
It's not my favorite, but US News has them dead last amongst US states overall.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/louisiana
Subscores:
* Crime 50th * Economy 50th * Education 46th
and on and on. In fact, I can't find a single top line number when they AREN'T in the bottom 10.
Those things are only correlated with available resources and income though and we can look directly at that here.
There’s a difference between “there exists people there who are poor” and the state and local governments are poor.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-col...
Louisiana is 32nd for tax revue per capita.
Feels more than a bit cherrypicked. There is also not much daylight (less than $1000) between them, and, once again, dead last.
They're also, once again, dead last in economic oppurtunity.
Frankly, I call bullshit on your interpretation. Have you ever set foot in Louisiana? I've lived in the deep south my entire life.
The entire south, outside of a few cities is generally pretty poor, but Louisiana/Arkansas/Mississippi is just a different level. That's what happens when you elect a bunch of MAGA morons.
PS: The local governments are doing everything possible to NOT help their citizens.
Louisiana isn’t poor by almost any objective measure.
Uh, by the objective measure of my own two eyes? You can trot out all the fancy numbers you want, I’m not blind. The resource extraction that goes on in Louisiana does not necessarily trickle down to its residents nor even stays in the state.
There’s a difference between “there exists people there who are poor” and the state and local governments are poor.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-col...
Louisiana is 32nd for tax revue per capita.
They've already tried the big guns. You cannot win at this game forever.
> The pump station complex, which is the largest of its type in the world, consists of 11 each 5,444 horsepower Caterpillar engines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Intracoastal_Waterway_Wes...
That's on the other side of the river from New Orleans.
To what I think is your larger point, that project is a small part of the efforts at water control around New Orleans. But, so far they have generally been viewed as beneficial and the various governmental entities keep paying for them -- why should we expect anything different in the future ? Roads get repaved all over the country, bridges rebuilt, and the levees rebuilt. There's always an "infrastructure crisis" of the decade, the chatter is how we as a society judge the expense and confirm it's necessary.
the people they refer to are certainly the least capable.
relocation requires assistance, people living paycheck-to-paycheck cannot just up and move out of city/state
take some of that $1 BILLION PER DAY being used to bomb innocent kids and civilians in Iran, soon Cuba, and help innocent people in your own country relocate
if the current administration is in charge the week New Orleans is about to go undersea they will "solve the problem" by banning FEMA from doing anything or just defunding it to $1/day
> the city must start the relocation process now to avoid chaos.
I've no reason to doubt this is absolutely true.
that's not what they're gonna do though....
> The region has “crossed the point of no return,” the paper’s authors wrote, adding New Orleans “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century.”
sorry, Gulf of what ? /s
Anyone who could afford to leave has left long ago. This is, partially, a class issue. It's very sad.
The sea level is growing because Amsterdam is stealing land from the sea