As Coastal Flooding Worsens, Some Cities Are Retreating From The Water

Remember when a recent hurricane had NY authorities talking about multi billion dollar sea walls to protect the city from long term destruction…? Yeah, the threat is still looming and right now,the price tag they were kicking around would be a bargain…if we believe this is real …gulp…delaying action to address this inevitability is a fools game.

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Been saying for years, " Invest in gondolas!"

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Private insurance stopped covering flood losses in the late 1920s. For 50 years the Army Corps of Engineers tried to concrete away the nation’s flood risk. When that failed The National Flood Insurance Program was developed. If you want to know more about how it works and the perverse incentives in our nation’s flood policy, check out The association of state floodplain managers.

One nugget that’s appropriate to this article: the feds prohibit the use of FEMA money to buy people out as described in this article unless the purchase is not just voluntary, but the homeowner is first offered the opportunity to have the taxpayer elevate or rebuild their house. Once a municipality buys them out with local money, it has to use money from it’s diminished tax base to maintain the property in short grass. Just the fight to allow re-vegetation of riverbanks with native vegetation has been going on for years.

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Managed retreat is certainly the least painful adaptation for low-lying coastal areas. Where there is high-value infrastructure, a more active defensive strategy might be appropriate. The biggest challenge is equity. impacted communities range from Native Americans (losing important cultural areas), to low-moderate income areas (like Staten Island and New Orleans), to high-income & speculative investments in resort areas. And who pays? We can’t simply socialize losses and create moral hazard. History matters, in a positive way. Speculation matters, in a negative way. And culpability matters. Costs need to fall on the fossil fuel companies and industries that depend on cheap fossil fuels. Where those companies are out of reach - ultimately due to economic failure - then the costs must fall on those who have received the greatest benefit from poisoning the environment: Stockholders in these companies. Is this possible in our current economic and political framework? Maybe not - in which case the framework, not the impact, needs to change.

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It’s worth noting that even pre-reform, some properties have flood insurance bills of over $3k per year.

It’s entirely possible for premiums to be vastly under the actuarial risk but also vastly beyond the homeowners’ ability to pay. Our national flood policy is broken.

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Welcome to humanity: short-sighted fools eager for our own obliteration.

I hope whoever survives all this has learns from our time’s failure. They’ll probably be living alright on the Manitoba plains.

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