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Comment by dfee | Hacker News Reader

> Emily Vuxton, policy director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, an environmental group ... said repair costs could be “hundreds of millions” of dollars, with 75% paid by federal taxpayers. “I think this work is necessary. We have to protect the population of New Orleans,” Vuxton said.

Summed up as: “I think our unsustainable way of life should be subsidized by the rest of the country at a 3:1 rate”.

I enjoy NOLA, but how are we going to deal with this at any kind of scale?

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Hundreds of millions of dollars is barely a blip on the federal government's budget.

Federal dollars subsidize all kinds of local and regional infrastructure.

What else could be funded with hundreds of millions of dollars? Opportunity cost.

moot point when you consider that military spending takes up more than half of the budget

Nope. It takes up about a third of the budget and is itself in large part a social program.

a "social" program for defense contractors. I m sure they are hurting, and need to make more money.

A social program for able bodied men and women willing to work for a living. It's how my father escaped poverty.

A social program would be building schools, bridges, improving access to education, funding research for medicines to be put in public domain so it’s affordable. Adding a 12th aircraft carrier or developing an unnecessary fighter plane is not a social program.

Not everyone joins the military because the alternative is absolute shit, but it often is, and they often do. It is absolutely a social program in that sense, and if you cut it, your other social programs are going to have to take up the slack. You have to de-rate the "win" from cutting it accordingly.

It's far lower than that. There's a fake pie chart floating around the internet showing Defense at 57% of the federal budget. For 2019, the real number was 12%. In previous years it was about 15%.

It depends on how you categorize things. The 50% numbers come from discretionary budgets & are accurate. But ‘most’ federal spending is not discretionary. It’s old people care.

Discretionary spending is about 1/3 of the budget, and, yeah, defense is half of that, but when the GP wrote that "military spending takes up more than half of the budget" it paints a misleading picture.

There really isn't any non-discretionary spending. The closest we have is payments specified in international treaties, and even that can simply not be paid. All the rest is just a couple congressional votes and a presidential signature away from being eliminated.

Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are considered mandatory spending because politicians tend to like being reelected.

That and it doesn’t go through the standard appropriations process.

~16%: https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

Wasteful spending is wasteful spending. Buy the land, condemn it, and call it a day.

The price to buy and condemn New Orleans > hundreds of millions of dollars.

Not if you defer additional infrastructure spending until the land has declined in value from water intrusion. To pay more today is a transfer to those whose land is expected to lose value in the future from sea levels rising.

It cost $100 million already (with an additional $400 million planned) just to keep the water out of Miami Beach (with another ~$3 billion in expected costs due to septic and well failures in Miami proper), some of the most valuable real estate in the country. NOLA is not Miami Beach/Miami (value-wise).

At some point, we have to stop throwing good money after bad.

Not if you defer additional infrastructure spending until the land has declined in value from water intrusion.

Insurance is going to pick up some of this until the land is declared un-insured. so, some parts of the relocation cost will be socialized if you like it or not, because premiums will rise in the market to offset this cost.

Policies will be outright cancelled before that happens, except through the national flood insurance program, which could be used to slowly migrate folks out over time. But let's not think that some sort of twisted Manifest Destiny requires we pour hundreds of millions or billions of dollars into New Orleans when there are other options available.

The only thing that is constant is change. We must be willing to adapt.

So? At this rate they will need another $14B soon.

The key to my comment was the last clause “at any kind of scale”.

If the community living there can’t support the costs of environmental maintenance, at a certain point it becomes like a superfund site: people will need to move to higher ground. In NOLA, in Houston, in Miami and beyond.

What about the forest fires in the West and even places like NC? Overflowing rivers throughout the US? Tornadoes from the mid-West to the mid-Atlantic? Hurricanes? Where in the US is safe as climate change induces more frequent and more extreme weather-related disasters?

Ohio seems reasonably safe. Maybe Cleveland will see real estate prices go up for the first time in 20 years?

Depends on where...

I have family in southern/central Ohio and, while they've always been a risk, there has been a marked uptick in the occurrence of tornadoes. Xenia, OH very famously has been hit multiple times by serious tornadoes. Where my parents are, where I did most of my growing up, in southeastern Ohio, is a little safer because of the Appalachian foothills, but I fondly remember the tornado sirens blaring every Wednesday at noon during the spring, summer, and fall.

A friend of mine from high school, who is a meteorologist and storm chaser today, was telling me the last time that we spoke that tornado alley is potentially / actually shifting eastward over time. I haven't tried to verify what he was saying, because I trust him given his career choices, but it does seem to bear out from the anecdata that I have available.

Tornados cut a narrow swath, compared to a hurricane. I’d wager all the tornados in the last 100 years cause less total economic damage than a single hurricane hitting a coastal city.

Well, I believe that the point is that as tornado alley shifts east that these natural disasters will come closer to larger or perhaps denser metropolitan areas. I do agree with your point. Though, if / as torando alley shifts eastward there could be some significant overlap between the areas that could be impacted by both torandos and hurricanes. I'm reminded of the tornados that hit Alabama last year.

No, even if they hit denser metropolitan areas, they do nothing compared to a hurricane in aggregate damage.

I never said they did.

It's still seeing a net population decline though, both in the Metropolitan and suburban areas. A recent post on the Columbus subreddit showed Cleveland has one of the lowest average internet speeds in the country, and this story from Ars [0] shows actual redlining in how new cable was (not) being laid down. The apartment I lived in growing up was using dial-up until my freshman year of high school a decade or so ago.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/att-a...

How much federal aid is given to California wild fires vs. east coast hurricanes vs. New Orleans floods? How valuable are those regions to the financial health of the country?

This evaluation kind of fails though. Even if (for example) California is worth lots of aid because of its massive economic value, who's to say it will still be massively valuable economically after a decade of storms? That could decimate agriculture and other infrastructure, undermining its ability to host businesses.

It seems pretty hard to account for this in advance.

It’s called actuary science, and it turns out to be so good overall that a nearly trillion dollar business model runs quite well on it.

I'm not disputing the idea of actuary science here (I have relatives who work as actuaries), I'm disputing the idea of 'we should abandon this entire city because it's not worth the cost of saving the residents from hurricanes based on some economic projections', which seems to be a recurring theme here.

It's one matter to make insurance really expensive due to very obvious risk or make other pricing adjustments based on projections and quite another to axe a city.

Get rid of the government subsidized insurance and it will effectively axe the city as no new mortgages will be offered since no private companies are willing to offer insurance for it. No one is going to offer you insurance for a sure loss.

Non-term life insurance seems a good counterpoint. The price of the insurance may equal effectively a second mortgage over some timeframe but it can be priced.

In reality the risk of loss across the region is not nearly as high as implied.

Non term life insurance is a waste of money ignoring any tax advantages that don’t apply for most people since you can just directly invest the premiums in a low fee index fund and not pay the overhead costs of the life insurance company.

If the price of the insurance was so high that it was a second mortgage, then that would still devastate real estate prices and still cause economic decline in the region.

A lot of the land in California and western states are federally owned so I would not consider those portions aid.

If you don't get federal disaster money for the tide rising, you shouldn't get it for forests historically managed by fire.

What if it is federally owned land?

Fighting the entire USA coastline against rising oceans is batshit crazy and would bankrupt the country if we tried.

I always found it crazy that flood insurance would pay people to rebuild... on a flood plain. I've read stories where people rebuild once a decade or so. Seems clearly irrational and people living outside of floodplains should subsidize those that don't.

Similarly if you are high risk of fires or earthquakes you should pay a premium on insurance and that insurance should depend on reasonable mitigations. A friend moved into high risk area and they required a clear area near the house and a rooftop watering system to get the insurance that was required to get the home loan.

So yes, the country should either pay for mitigation (levees, fire control, earthquake resistant building costs etc) where it makes sense or ban developments in high risk areas. Paying for people to live below ocean level makes no sense.

> Similarly if you are high risk of fires or earthquakes you should pay a premium on insurance

You do for fire risk and standard homeowners insurance doesn't cover earthquakes, you need a separate policy, which is non-free, so you are clearly paying a premium for it.

I used to sell insurance, including homeowners. As part of selling a homeowners policy, I was supposed to ensure that a home was not ridiculously vulnerable to catching fire. An example would be making sure the owner hadn't stuffed the house full of canisters of gasoline, or that the exterior of the house wasn't in direct contact with an abundance of dry vegetation.

Any insurance company that is willing to be represented by agents too lazy too verify a home is a fire waiting to happen is gonna lose money big time. It seems the logical approach to handling house in a wildfire prone area orvavflood plain would be to simply charge stupid high rates or not offer the insurance at all.

It seems the logical approach to handling house in a wildfire prone area orvavflood plain would be to simply charge stupid high rates or not offer the insurance at all.

Which is exactly what insurance companies do. It is usually very difficult to get flood insurance in a flood plain. Rather than taking that as a clue that people shouldn't live there, all too often, the government steps in to subsidise the risk. I don't want to over simplify, things are complicated and sometimes it is appropriate to subsidise such risk, but sometimes it is not.

Private companies don’t offer flood insurance in those areas, that cost is spread around federal taxpayers via the Nationals Flood Insurance Program.

If Insurance is priced right who cares. Your insurance factors in the risk of loosing the home, and should ensure the insurance company always wins long term.

Normally I agree with you, but I am told in the US flood insurance is basically a government fund and doesn't operate like a private profit-seeking insurance at all. This leads to weird cases where people just rebuild in the same place in full knowledge that they will rebuild again in a few years, with flood insurance covering the expense.

The premiums for flood insurance can be pretty steep, and I would be extremely surprised if the fund operated at a loss. In my case, the annual premium is a little over 1% of the covered value, even though the historical record high (back in the 1960's) would probably only require about 10% of the total coverage purchased to replace (in this case, mostly from a few out buildings that are a little lower than the house itself).

Then you're extremely surprised.

"Currently, the NFIP’s debt totals $24.6 billion, nearly six times the program’s total annual receipts of $4.3 billion"

https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/115th-congress-2017-2018/re...

And Planet Money, as always, has a great take:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/09/29/554603161/epis...

After doing some more digging, it turns out that roughly 20% of NFIP policies are subsidized, and the up-to $30b debt was authorized by Congress in 2012 due to the shortfalls.

80% of the policies (the non-subsidized ones) are thought to be actuarially sound, barring unintended consequences of out-of-date flood maps.

So, I'm not terribly surprised. Were it operating like a traditional insurer, it might even be doing fine (especially if it had some other reforms such as eliminating or having better oversight over WYO policies).

"If insurance is priced right..."

Aka if we priced insurance at the right level. You'd likely see people stop buying homes on some of these flood plains. As insruance would cost too much.

>Paying for people to live below ocean level makes no sense.

Well, Amsterdam is currently 2 meters below sea level already and it will be pretty interesting to see what happens to New Amsterdam, I mean, York. For one thing, Manhatten is essentially floating already, they have to pump it out continuously otherwise it sinks.

edit - ok, around sea level, it isn't at 2 meters below. I stupidly thought google would be correct.

Amsterdam is an interesting example. Is Amsterdam asking anyone else to subsidize them? From what I've read they made a conscious decision that the pumping, levees and related was worth the cost of the extra acres of land they provided.

New Orleans seems to be arguing that it only makes sense if 75% of it is paid by someone else... forever.

>Is Amsterdam asking anyone else to subsidize them?

Depending on your point of view maybe half the world did, one way or another. Though I really shouldn't point fingers, being British.

a lot of of economic activity in NL is below sea level. No, Amsterdam did not directly pay for it. But yes, the most profitable regions contributed the most.

> Is Amsterdam asking anyone else to subsidize them?

Nowadays, mostly tourists. But, they come willingly to be fleeced, being priggish.

Thats because most of the countries goods pass through New Orleans.

As usual, it's complicated. It's a system, part of which is centuries old. Amsterdam is just 1 city.

Diverse responsibilities are divided between county, water board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands) , province, and the "federal" government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate-General_for_Public... .

>Amsterdam is currently 2 meters below sea level alread

Small parts of Amsterdam are that low. Most of the city is above sea level and the main parts are several to 10s of meters higher.

You are right, I trusted google and I repent. Most of it is pretty much at sea level though and they still have to spend a hell if a lot of effort in keeping the sea away.

People rebuild all sorts of stuff all the time. Look around your average city or drive around and tell me how old all the buildings are. You’ll notice most of them are less than 20-40 years old. And the ones that aren’t have almost certainly been essentially rebuilt recently in practice.

We knock stuff down and change or rebuild it all the time, there’s no such thing as permanent against the weather. Or just changing tastes and technology, I mean indoor plumbing is less than 100 years old. Shit changes.

> indoor plumbing is less than 100 years old

Huh? The house I grew up in was built in 1895 and had plumbing from the start.

It looks like rich people started getting indoor plumbing in the early 1800s (the White House got it in 1833) and it was widespread in new construction by the end of the century.

I mean it existed before that of course. But it wasn’t widespread until the 1930s.

Cities had indoor plumbing, electricity, and teliphones fairly early.

Isolated rural houses often much later.

Being alive does involve a level of risk. My understanding is the number of hurricanes, for example, are expected to a little-less-than-double [0]. So, if you experience a hurricane it is still probably not due to global warming. Probably broadly true of the others, too.

We have words for these things because they've been threats since the dawn of time - nowhere has ever been especially safe safe from things going horribly wrong. The biggest problem always has been and will remain a lack of preparedness by communities for disasters.

[0] https://www.c2es.org/content/hurricanes-and-climate-change/

Tornadoes do so little damage the insurance market actually works. The complain is insurance markets that need to be subsidized by federal funds because they don't raise enough money on their own (see florida, Louisiana, etc.).

A LOT of the forest that burned in the CA Camp fire isn't going to come back. Thanks to warming winters, the pine bark beetles are making their way up the Sierras and laying waste to entire mountains of pine trees. The folks who want to live in the burned out areas will now likely be surrounded by chaparral instead of pine forest.

Sure, it’s small in the singular. But what happens after you get yours, and I get mine, and so one. That’s not affordable.

> Hundreds of millions of dollars is barely a blip on the federal government's budget.

That doesn’t mean that’s how it should be.

When you listen to old radio, you get the impression people actually cared about how money was spent and didn’t casually write off millions of dollars, just because “that’s the budget.” Why are people these days willing to let the government drop millions of dollars so casually?

Take for example this episode of Johnny Dollar: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PXa86HJ49iE (1956). The way the people in this episode are pissed off about their money being wasted, you’d think it was some other country.

When did people become OK with wasting money like this?

NOLA brings in $8 billion a year in tourist money alone. The metropolitan region had a GDP of $235 billion in 2017. Investing a few hundreds of millions of dollars to preserve hundreds of billions of dollars in productivity seems like a smart investment.

Maybe the people of 2018 are just better at math than the ones in in 1956.

Thank you for injecting some sanity into the conversation.

The NPV of the region is such that the cost of the levees would have to increase 3 orders of magnitude before most of the comments that amount to “let it flood” would even begin to make any sense economically, despite being entirely morally bankrupt to begin with.

Hey didn’t say anything about NOLA or whether it “should be saved” or anything like that, just the attitude of not caring about millions of dollars just because... it’s in the budget or whatever.

NOLA can't even fix the damn potholes with that revenue. It's not that NOLA residents own Marriott Inc and that good part of money stays in the city. City's budget main contributor is sadly - traffic cameras.

NOLA is spending $2 billion in FEMA money right now to actually repave roads properly, including some in Deisre and Algiers that haven’t been worked over since the mid-90s. Roads in this Parish cost $10 million a mile to do right due to underlying soil geology. Do you even do research before you run your mouth? The contractor takes at least 40% of traffic camera revenue.

Its not robbery if its a small part of the budget after all

Off the coast of Louisiana is the Mad Dog spar oil platform, installed in 2005, which at maximum production is pumping 100,000 barrels of oil a day. Louisiana receives no tax revenue from it.

I'm not totally sure what point you're trying to make... I don't have a particularly strong opinion on how to allocate tax revenue in this situation, but it seems relevant to mention that the platform is 150 miles off the coast.

That's 138 miles into international waters. Percentage-wise, it's... a little closer to Louisiana than Texas? Florida and Mexico are't all that far away either.

>how are we going to deal with this at any kind of scale?

Get the Army Corps of Engineers to hire the Dutch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands)

Is the Netherlands sinking though?

Most of the Netherlands only exists due to sheer bloodymindedness. Nearly 20% of it is actually below sea level.

I understand that. But New Orleans is subsiding. It's sinking every year. It's easier to maintain levees if the land beneath them isn't sinking. I don't know why my comment is getting downvoted.

The Netherlands has always been sinking. They just don't seem to care and just keep making more of it. Here's their latest plans - https://www.thestructuralengineer.info/news-center/news/item...

Wouldn't that be nice. Sadly, levees actually contribute to the problem due to several factors (IIRC 2 factors were the blocking of silt deposition and the lowering of ground water levels). The ground water levels are something that can be managed, the silt deposition is something you need to learn to live without.

Thing is, if the land wasn't sinking to begin with, exactly why were you considering levees in the first place? ;-)

Whatever the case may be, if you're building levees, you need to factor in the sink rate of the land around you, among the many factors. And you need to factor in the cost to maintain them indefinitely.

It's an expensive proposition; but by the simple fact that you're alive, standing there, and considering it already, chances are the ROI is worth it.

Yes the Netherlands is sinking. Hilariously enough its because of draught. The entire country is basically man made and a natural disaster. Luckily there is virtually unlimited budget and good engineering to keep things going.

Nola is built on silt. Due to waterway controls etc., the delta isn’t getting the silt it historically received to keep erosion/subsidence at bay. Cost benefit would say keep the farming/irrigation, diversion due to economics and sacrifice a sinking delta. Not much different from Alexandria+Nile.

Nola should have taken the opportunity to move and rebuild on higher ground.

And where would that be? Hammond? Baton Rouge? Morgan City? Watford Gap service station?

That’s something for geologists to answer. All I can say is the place we know has historically sunk and we know is sinking and will continue sinking in the future due to soil, hydrology, etc., is not the place to rebuild.

Alternatively, it is excellent practice that we all are really going to need. Also, again, go explain that point of view to the Dutch - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_control_in_the_Netherlan...

The Dutch have a lot less land to retreat to than those of us in the states.

Retreat is still very expensive though. Why retreat when you can control the landscape and make it your own?

Maintaining a constant war on water is still a lot cheaper than colonizing the moon or mars; and the ROI is pretty decent.

Oh clearly none of you downvoters watch Yes, Prime Minister

How much do the Feds collect in taxes from the city each year? How much more will they collect in the future because the city floods less? A few hundred million dollars to protect a major city sounds like an incredible bargain with a great ROI.

New Orleans is a pretty great place, but in no way is it a major city.

Whatever you want to call a metro area of over a million people with a GDP approaching $80 billion, a few hundred million to protect it seems cheap.

Where’s the $80B number coming from?

From the sources I found (from 2017) GDP per capita is $52,536 (from Open Data Network), and population is 393,292 (US Census Bureau), giving a GDP of right around $20B.

We’ve already spent 14 on it, and will continue to need to spend indefinitely, so the numbers really aren’t great.

Metro area, not just the city proper. https://www.frbatlanta.org/economy-matters/2015/08/20/new-or...

As of 2017 Louisiana has a Balance of Payments of $17.7B, meaning they receive that much more in federal funding than they pay in taxes [1]

I say it’s time to move people to somewhere above sea level and let NOLA return to being the river delta it is so desperately trying to be.

[1] https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...

What is the figure for New Orleans specifically? Looking at the entire state isn’t terribly informative.

New Orleans only has about 300,000 people. There's high ground a few miles north. Relocation, not levees.

Florida is worse off. Florida doesn't have much high ground.

Indeed. This was totally predictable. New Orleans has been sinking for centuries. And sea level rise is inevitably occurring at an increasing rate.

So yes, just move everybody. There can be boat tours. Same for Florida. With porous limestone, it's a lost cause. Even New York City will be a challenge. Lots of Manhattan is built on old garbage.

New Orleans isn't the most unsustainable place around. The intractable swampy surroundings have prevented it from becoming as suburbanized as most American cities; if you look at it from a satellite, there is a sharp boundary between the city and the swamp. The situation is much worse in, say, Miami. Many other coastal cities will also need levees and have uglier boundaries.

>New Orleans isn't the most unsustainable place around

You can't really treat New Orleans as a single entity. The French Quarter and where the high rises are is (relatively) comfortably above sea level. The sprawl that stretches towards Lake Ponchartrain isn't. That area is well and truly screwed. They keep sinking, the sea keeps rising, and the hurricanes get stronger.

There's no real solution. You can keep building the levees higher, but that's sort of like paying off a credit card with anotehr credit card. It's a temporary solution that makes the reckoning a lot worse when the piper comes calling.

Nola has the highest port tonnage in the country. The impact on GDP is estimated in the hundreds of billions. There's also billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure here. Most goods that pass through to the midwest and many through the rest of the country come through here.

Without Nola, hundreds of billions of dollars of the economy will go away. Gas prices set a record after Katrina.

14 billion is a bargain to keep this city going.

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