Posted on 01/07/2006 2:32:07 PM PST by RWR8189
GIVEN THE PASTING PRESIDENT BUSH has taken over the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, one might have assumed the president's critics were in agreement about how to prevent such disasters. But for years now, the left has been deeply ambivalent about the most logical and time-tested mitigator against the threat of city-wide and regional floods: dams.
How could dams, embraced by everyone from beavers to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, be a source of contention? Ask the environmentalists. Their campaign against dams has gained influence and stalled, decommissioned, or otherwise limited the construction of many dams and levees, including one project that could have made a significant difference during Katrina's pounding of New Orleans. This animus against dams also continues to skew spending and construction priorities to make such disasters more likely in the future.
Until recently, dams were the pride of the left, and for good reason: They provide electricity, irrigation, and, of course, bulwarks against flooding. In 1964, presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was thought to have committed campaign suicide when he proposed privatizing the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had been built with New Deal dollars. Local voters, grateful to the TVA for providing power and controlling wild rivers, didn't much like Goldwater's argument.
Now a position far more radical has become respectable. In Deep Water: The Epic Struggle over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment, a new book receiving rave reviews from the mainstream press, Jacques Leslie assails all dams as "loaded weapons aimed down rivers" and calls for rivers to be allowed to return to their natural flows. Leslie, who was a Vietnam war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and has written for magazines such as Harper's and the Washington Monthly, takes on what he calls the "Rooseveltian vision, arising out of the New Deal, built into the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority, enthralled with its seeming capacity to foster prosperity by subjugating nature." He concludes by inveighing against dams as "relics of the twentieth century, like Stalinism and gasoline-powered cars, symbols of the allure of technology and its transience . . . of the delusion that humans are exempt from nature's dominion."
Most New Deal programs are considered sacred on the left, as George Bush learned recently when he tried to reform Social Security. But liberals conveniently forget Roosevelt's no-nonsense views on dealing with nature. At the 1935 dedication of Hoover Dam, FDR hailed the taming of a "turbulent, dangerous river" and the "completion of the greatest dam in the world." He proudly noted that the dam on the Colorado River was "altering the geography of a whole region," calling what had existed before "cactus-covered waste" and "an unpeopled, forbidding desert."
Roosevelt also defended public works such as dams on the now-discredited Keynesian ground that they create jobs (the New Deal did not bring down overall unemployment, which only returned to pre-Depression levels with World War II), but he was generally pragmatic about nature in its pristine state. About the river he said bluntly that "the Colorado added little of value to the region this dam serves." In the spring, he said, farmers "awaited with dread the coming of a flood, and at the end of nearly every summer they feared a shortage of water that would destroy their crops."
But to Leslie, damming the Colorado River was a damn shame, and he pushes for returning it "to its virgin state: tempestuous, fickle, and in some stretches astonishing." He acknowledges that if you took away the dams and the hydroelectric power they provide, you would also "take away modern Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix" as well as the nearby former desert outpost known as Las Vegas. But in exchange for this major subtraction from civilization as we know it, Americans would be able to marvel at a "free-flowing river" and "an unparalleled depository of marine life."
What does the left-wing website Salon, a consistent defender of New Deal programs, have to say about Leslie's savaging of Roosevelt's achievement? (And what does a West Coast webzine make of a book that proposes cutting off a major power source for Los Angeles?) Salon heaps praise on Leslie, stating in a September article that "the modern dam, in short, has come to signify both the majesty and folly of our age's drive to conquer nature."
Leslie and Salon aren't alone. Support for dam removal and opposition to new dams have become a staple among modern environmentalists, giving rise to organizations whose only agenda is to stop dams. American Rivers, for example, brags about how many dams have been decommissioned and has as its slogan "Rivers Unplugged." The Berkeley-based International Rivers Network does similar work in Third World countries, where dams are even more crucial for power and flood control. This sea change on dams illustrates a larger shift of the left concerning technology and the nature of man.
The same weekend that Salon ran its glowing notice for Jacques Leslie's rants against artificial barriers on natural rivers, it also ran an article about a recent antiwar protest in Washington under the headline "'Make Levees, Not War.'" This was a popular trope at the time, with leftie antiwar spokesmen charging that money for the war in Iraq could have gone to building levees as well as their favorite social programs. Yet one of the main obstacles, before Katrina, to building and fortifying levees, as well as creating more innovative flood barriers, was put up by environmentalists.
In 1977, the group Save Our Wetlands successfully sued the Army Corps of Engineers to halt the construction of large floodgates intended to prevent Gulf of Mexico storms from overwhelming Lake Pontchartrain and flooding New Orleans. The gates, the environmentalists said, would have hurt wetlands and marine life, although the Corps had already done an environmental assessment to the satisfaction of environmental regulators. Many experts believe the gates could have greatly reduced the impact of Katrina. "It probably would have given [the people of New Orleans] a better shot," says Daniel Canfield, a renowned professor of aquatic sciences at the University of Florida.
Then, in the 1990s, the Army Corps of Engineers tried to upgrade 303 miles of levees along the Mississippi River, telling the Baton Rouge Advocate in 1996 that a levee "failure could wreak catastrophic consequences on Louisiana and Mississippi." But the anti-dam American Rivers, along with eco-groups such as the Sierra Club and state chapters of the National Wildlife Federation, sued, alleging harm to "bottomland hardwood wetlands." This resulted in the Corps doing another environmental impact study and holding off some work for two years.
The Corps compromised with the anti-dam activists in other ways. As Ron Utt notes in a Heritage Foundation study, the Corps began spending hundreds of millions of dollars on environmentally correct projects like "aquatic ecosystems" instead of flood control. The distraction from the Corps's mission continued from the Clinton to the Bush administration and is something Bush can legitimately be blamed for.
Even now, with Katrina a recent memory, efforts to protect New Orleans are being turned into eco-boondoggles, though the media seems not to have noticed. Bills from Louisiana senators Mary Landrieu, Democrat, and David Vitter, Republican, couple money to fortify levees with millions of dollars to restore a vast swath of "coastal wetlands." These were not wetlands destroyed by Katrina, but land that started disappearing, from both natural and manmade causes, in the 1930s. The argument is made that the wetlands (which used to be called swamps) can help absorb floodwater before it gets to the city. But the University of Florida's Canfield says that while wetlands are valuable for marine life, they are vastly overrated for flood protection. "If they're already wet, and filled with water, they provide no extra protection," he says.
Leslie and other dam opponents say land-sinking and the buildup of sediment caused by dams show the futility of attempts to artificially control rivers. It's true that engineering isn't perfect, and there are always new challenges that require upkeep. But to refute the claim that dams are "dinosaurs," all we have to do is look to Western Europe, usually a favorite reference point for liberal activists and the media. There has, however, been a good deal of silence about European efforts on flood control, while the few reports that have addressed this subject largely focused on the amount of money Europe spends.
But what the countries spend it on is more important: dams, walls, and gates. After a North Sea storm in 1953, the Netherlands, half of which is below sea level, set out to dam every last major body of water. The last of these were ultramodern dams built in the 1980s. In the United States, The Weekly Standard was virtually alone in suggesting that Lake Pontchartrain could be dammed along Dutch lines. (See James R. Stoner Jr., "Love in the Ruins," September 26, 2005.) London, which sits below the high tide of the Atlantic waterways, has also had severe problems with the flooding of the Thames River. So, in the '80s, gates were built that can rise as high as five stories. The Dutch and the British are sensitive to the environment, but only to a point. They try to regulate water levels to accommodate the native fish. But neither country is undertaking massive projects to restore swamps or, in the eco parlance, "wetlands."
The environmentalist crusade against dams is curious for other reasons. The same activists who campaign for hydrogen-powered cars, for example, rail against the hydroelectricity produced by dams. As environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook pointed out in his 1995 book A Moment on the Earth, a dam "burns no fossil fuel and emits no greenhouse gases, smog or toxic or solid wastes." Take away dams, and folks will have to rely on other energy sources such as coal, which, as we know from the recent tragedy in West Virginia, has its own environmental and safety concerns.
Citing the Dutch and British experience, Canfield says the anti-dam movement is not mainly about science, but rather philosophy, or even theology. "It's a belief structure," he says. What motivates anti-dam activists is abstract talk about man not interfering in the "ecosystem" or leaving a "footprint" on the planet. But without humans asserting themselves, nature will leave plenty of its own footprints, like Katrina, as it stomps at will over human beings and wildlife alike.
John Berlau, a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is writing a book on the health risks of environmentalism.
The problem is government and insurance company subsidies for those who choose to built in floodplains and along coasts.
If these properties had to bear the true risk management cost of their location, very few would choose to build there.
In FL, where I presently live, what this means is that the 95% who cannot afford to live on the waterfront provide enormous subsidies to the 5% who do.
I haven't seen or heard anything in the last few years that would indicate whether this "program" actually worked..
I would guess that environmentalists would be touting this as a great success for the natural estuary ecosystem but I have never heard a word about it..
Just Dam.
Just before christmas this Montana Architect sent this solution to 22 coastal states governors : a flood road. Picture 20'x20' steel road panels as a roadway, slide-bolted at the transverse edges, buoyancy chambers below, piano-hinged atop a concrete wall on the landward side, deep set/angled dead man anchors on the sea side. Along comes your hurricane storm surge of 20' high water, or tsunami wave or river flood; and the panels float up naturally as a vertical seawall : a series of doors horizontally hinged. No sand bagging or any other human effort required, nature does all the heavy lifting for you. Then when the waters go down the panels float back down into a roadway again, which is 99.99% of its life-usefulness(w/rubber-like surfacing). I thought of this solution 4+ years ago, no interest...now it's 1/7/6 and again it looks like another 4 years of no interest...and people/property being swept away by floods that could have been stopped by FLOOD ROADS...
Enviros Kill
You gotta love modern leftist writing - it isn't necessary for their assumptions to hang together, even in the same sentence!
1) Stalinism may have been a relic of the twentieth century, but the last time I checked, gasoline powered cars were immensely more popular than the battery powered versions....even here in "green" Seattle.
2) "the delusion that humans are exempt from natures dominion". But, but....how then was Bush responsible for Katrina?
They do! Just ask the Africans who have died of malaria as of late.
Many of the flooded homes in NO were built long before the government ever became involved in flood insurance. The older levees held, but all of the canal breaks were at points reengineered by the Army Corp within the past decade. Surely we had a right to expect the levees paid for by our tax dollars to be soundly built.
Perhaps there should be a larger premium differential than there is for high risk areas, but shouldn't the same apply to other types of risk (mudslides, tornados, fires, etc.)? And shame on the people who lived without insurance inside the floodplain.
I'm not looking for a handout from FEMA or anyone else to recover my losses. But I do hold the engineers accountable and want a fair shake from my insurance co. for the storm (not flood) damage. Their view is that if you had ANY flood damage they are off the hook and they don't have to honor their coverage - even when you had (as we did) storm damage before the levees broke.
If you think the homeowners of NO haven't borne the risk of loss, you are mistaken.
For each dam that you blow, you will have millions of tons of sediment containing who knows what exposed and washing downstream, not to mention thousands of acres of formerly submerged land with nothing growing on it to check erosion. The environmental damage caused by tearing down a dam will be much greater than the damage caused when it was built.
And it is the ONLY power source that can put power on the line almost instantly on demand!!!
Too bad they left the tragic stoppage of the 2/3rds complete Auburn Dam on the American River in 1977!!!
Another monument to the stupidity and absurdity of EnvironMentalists!!!
That's ok. You lie down with those dogs, you're gonna come up with their fleas!!!
My objection is that it winds up using my tax dollars. Its always a lot cheaper to not build dams and build on high ground.
I think I once told you about the DEIS comments I was responding to for a new power plant on the Kona Coast of Hawaii.
They had rolling brown-outs in the area due to lack of power and high load growth of new tourist developments.
I was a consultant work on a new combined cycle combustion turbine project that we could get constructed within 18 months of the permits.
The Sierra Club of Hawaii, objected to solar photovoltaic, they objected to ocean thermal, they objected to ocean wave power, they objected to coal fired plant, they objected to wind turbines, the objected to biomass (bagasse), they objected to geothermal, they objected to nuclear, they objected to diesels, they objected to diesel fueled combined cycle combustion turbines, .......
They said the only viable and acceptable alternative to the 56 MW we were proposing initially, was a conservation program. They then outlined a 20 year conservation program that would shave off about 3 MW of load every year by doing things gradually to various homes and businesses in the area.
The utility would add 56 MW in 18 months, the Sierra Club would add 60 MW after 20 years and only 6 after 2 years. They needed about 20 to 30 MW to stop the brown-outs and the remainder to provide adequate reserves.
It was after seeing that in writing and having to take it seriously and respond in writing that I gave up on the environmentalists as anything but obstructionists and kooks.
Quite correct. IMHO, these attempts to avoid paying claims that are plainly valid constitute insurance fraud, every bit as much as when a policyholder files a fraudulent claim. I wish a few execs would go to jail for it, but it won't happen.
Just throw money in the hole that was New Orleans--keep throwing it in until it's filled up. (There are plenty standing in that hole to catch the money. See if you can get them to hold it for you.)
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