His comparison of wetland absorption and rainfall is comparing apples to oranges - if his numbers are accurate in the first place; which given the lack of citat

His comparison of wetland absorption and rainfall is comparing apples to oranges - if his numbers are accurate in the first place; which given the lack of citations and a piece that clearly is trying to prove a point, I think is an unreasonably optimistic assumption. His scaling of the costs to a personal budget is also misleading (not terribly so, but still). Individuals have buffers that are proportionally much larger than those of large organisations; and if indeed you encounter a setback that's larger than you can absord you usually have a whole network of contacts to help you mitigate the effects. Conceptually: relying on your neighbors doesn't work so well when your neighbors were hit too. The comparison isn't crazy, but it's a little misleading nevertheless. If the core premise of this piece really had value, then city of houston should be comfortably able to cover the bill without undue burden, and not need support from texas or the federal government. That does not appear to be the case. Also: note that the estimates of damage almost certainly only include straightforward economic damage. That's of course an absurd proposition; much will have been damaged in houston that has value to various people but simply isn't trivially measurable. Losing family heirlooms, pictures... your house... does damage beyond the trivial value of the object. Finally: even if it turns out the damage is merely 10s of billions and not hundreds (as he's implying), then it's still reasonable to assume it's worthwhile to mitigate that damage. Just because you can deal with the setback doesn't mean it's best to ignore the risk.