As the Seas Around Them Rise, Louisiana Fisherman Deny Climate Change
as I remember, and i am willing to be corrected, your "acknowledgement is usually fairly hedged and you don't see much reason for drastic action to combat climate change"
when I taught at Tulane in the early 2000s, i worked closely with the Center for Bio-Environmental Research - we did a lot of public outreach/advocacy about not only coastal erosion but also about things like the types of lubricant that container ships use which causes all sorts of environmental damage when it leeches off the ships and settles in the river floor
i recognize fully that this needs to be a multi-pronged attack and that supporting any prong helps the others
No, it's quite the opposite.
I believe we should do everything we can within reason to clean up the environment because worst case scenario is we are living in a cleaner environment.
What I don't believe we should do is force US companies to these very high standards then allow consumers to go around all of these standards and by the far cheaper import items made around the globe from companies that do not have to honor those standards. Force the rest of the world to becoming green through import tariffs. It's not fair to our economy, it's not fair to American workers, it's not fair to American companies and it's not fair to anyone to allow the rest of the world to pollute us into extinction.
In regards to the marshes and wetlands in South La, man made climate change is damn near a non-issue because by the time the sea level rises enough to make a drastic impact we wont have any wetlands left. Another 20 years and we'll be back in the 40 year peak hurricane cycle. At that point, it'll just take one or two more big hurricanes and it'll finish it off. The more wetlands we lose, the more prone they are to erosion, the faster they will disappear.
I honestly don't see a way to fix it. knocking down the levee systems is probably the easiest route but to do that half of south La would have to ****. We could reroute the Ms every 50 or so years and let it distribute silt all over the place but that would be an infrastructure nightmare. We could spend trillions to rebuild the wetlands.
Truth is, the battle was probably lost after the last island hurricane of 1856 when it split the barrier island in two and left several places just a few meters across. Those barrier islands were a huge natural barrier protecting the wetlands. If we had that now, we could probably fix it all pretty easily but we don't.
Legislation hasn't worked, laws were passed that would force oil companies to fix the canals and be held liable but any attempt to hold them liable ran into a giant wall of corruption. Not too long ago, Bobby Jindal sold out Louisiana and helped pass legislation making it almost impossible to hold oil companies accountable leaving us the only hope of a Supreme Court decision to overturn.
Many politicians have come and gone promising real action to fix the wetlands but they quickly realized it was way too expensive to turn down massive amounts of bribe money and failed to deliver on those promises.
It's the perfect storm (pun somewhat intended) between nature taking what it wants, people destroying what they want and politicians selling out people for money. It's three things Louisiana has struggled stopping most all rolled into one. So, we can worry about a global problem that will destroy what is left of the wetlands many years from now or we can fix the problems in our own backyard that we haven't been able to fix for many years. I honestly don't know if the latter is worth the investment. I honestly don't know how long it will take the former to take hold to even begin to reverse impacts. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
As for my opinions on Climate Change, I've laid it all out. Pretty sure I've covered just about every aspect of it with great detail. Have even illustrated a plan that would go a long way to help fix man's part of it in a short amount of time. If you feel like reading all of it, it can be found in this thread. It's a long read though.
http://saintsreport.com/forums/f3/theoretical-applied-climatology-344630/index5.html#.WPxNpNIrKUk