Why We Need To Think About Voting Rights During Hurricane Relief

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This piece is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1246887
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I wish we’d think about how these hurricanes seem to happen every year. I would be thinking about moving.

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Better prepared? How in the hell could you possibly prepare for a hurricane with 185 mph winds that hit the Bahamas?
I know, this is mostly about the US, but the true disaster this year is the Bahamas.

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Once you know where and when the disaster is going to be, you start moving emergency equipment (in this case naval vessels) as close as you can without going into the area of destruction. Then you wait and go in. It takes having the supplies and people ready, which seems to be too expensive for modern democracies these days.

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It’s sorta like the snow removal budget in New England (probably other parts of the snow belt – basically anywhere snowfall is likely, but not certain).

Every year, it’s a funding fight. If the prior year snow was light and there was more set aside for salt and plowing than was needed, that year the city council always wants to cut it. If they did cut it and the next year there is more heavy snow, everybody blames the folks responsible for the crews – not the folks who cut the budget.

(I used to know a public works director who went to the annual snowplow budget meetings with a detailed map of the streets, specifically including the homes and offices of every member of the city council, including the routes they’d take to work. He’d calculate exactly what it would cost to prioritize plowing so it included the roads that were important enough to include how the city council members themselves got to work, their kids to school, etc. That worked.)

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The atmosphere and seas are changing, so we face new weather challenges. Humans have not chosen to mitigate our impacts and indeed we’ve been making things worse a rate faster than projected 20 years ago. Even if they pay the dearest, 400,000 Bahamanians cannot be expected to reverse global climate change. However, it is also not excusable that the central government in Nassau was caught so flat-footed on this. A start might be to change the national motto from “Forward Upward Onward Together” to something like “Mitigation, Adaptation and Resilience”. “Be Prepared” would be a start.

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The earth will be here long, long after the surface nuisance (humans) is extinct. It’s already too late to do anything about global warming, thanks to the refusal by past generations to do anything regarding fossil fuels and other carbon emissions. Frank Fenner, esteemed scientist and discoverer of the small pox vaccination predicts humans will be extinct in 100 years. The universe will rejoice, other life forms will take over this planet, and our brief stint as the apex predator will be history.

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The Bahamian government can do little in the face of the United States and our grotesque carbon culture. We in this country have to accept that we, more than other any country, have destroyed the habitability of the planet and that it’s our responsibility to put it right.

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To be on par with the rest of the world, Americans would have to cut their carbon emissions by 80%. This is uncomfortable, but not impossible. A lot of simple changes such as less flying, less meat, bike paths, land-value tax policy that would reward small farmers, improvements in public transport infrastructure and preservation of wilderness. We should not see this shift simply as a cost. Cancer rates now exceed heart disease as the leading cause of death in some advanced economies and obesity is common.

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One of the most serious disasters that we have, on a public policy front, is the Flood Insurance that is covered by the Feds. No private insurer could offer flood insurance at the cost offered by the Feds, because it is subsidized by all taxpayers - including me in South Dakota. In addition, there is no provision for terminating coverage for houses, and many have been damaged over and over, for huge cumulative payouts. This is also politically protected, as all coastal states support the program. Huge amounts of money are sucked up in places that should be abandoned or considerably renovated to handle flooding/storms - parts of Houston, Miami, Savannah, NY City, on and on and on.

I’d love to hear a solution for this terrible program which has led to the over-development of huge coastal areas - the Outer Banks (absolutely wild in 1975, today covered in huge “cottages”). In addition to the “moral hazard” of this insurance policy on siting houses in inappropriate places, to the best of my knowledge, it does not require the kind of construction which will be either hurricane-proof (concrete shell building with pylon support) or hurricane-resistant. My uncle’s concrete shell house on San Padre Island in S Texas successfully survived a Cat 3 hurricane 2 years ago, while other less durable houses were damaged severely.

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People have been complaining about the moral and practical hazards of federal flood insurance for decades, but there’s enormous money involved. IIRC we briefly stopped insuring new development on barrier islands, but then some campaign contributions…

Ideally, what you would want is a phaseout of insurance with buyouts of dead house walking, and liability for developers. Once the developers have sold to ordinary people there are too many tear-jerking stories to just tell them all to pound sand.

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Regrettably, that is the case. The sunk investments are huge. They will not even cap rebuilds.