6 ms·

A Louisiana gas plant sea wall shows challenges of flooding, energy demand

52 points by howard941 2y ago

munificent 2y ago
I grew up along the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas. Louisiana is, frankly, a shitshow when it comes to making smart long-term decisions. Corruption is rampant and businesses generally have politicians in their pockets. Those businesses are able to effectively offload their externalities, so they are incentivized to destroy the environment while reaping the short-term profits. If you want any prediction as to how things will go in Louisiana, the easy answer is "poorly" and you'll be right most of the time. It's honestly hard to expect better from a place whose largest city's motto is "Let the good times roll". The local culture is just deeply broken. At the same time, I'm really disappointed that this article almost completely glossed over one of the major challenges facing Louisiana that has absolutely nothing to do with climate change. The only tangential mention is: > Last November, Louisiana broke ground on a $2.3 billion project to shunt some of the muddy flows of Mississippi under and past Ironton into degraded wetlands to the west. The project is being financed largely with settlement money from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, and aims to halt losses of wetlands by mimicking the Mississippi River’s historic path. When the article notes: > Since 1932, the state has lost more than 1,900 square miles of land, an area equal to the state of Delaware It implies that the loss was primarily climate change, but that's not true at all. Most of this loss was driven by the way the Army Corps of Engineers has managed the Mississippi River. For millions of years, the Mississippi River went through periodic oscillations. As the river dumped more and more sediment into the delta, the delta would build up until eventually it started blocking the flow. The majority of the flow would then shift to the Atchafalaya river. That river would empty into the Gulf and its delta would build up sediment. Eventually, it would reach a level where the Mississippi was again the easiest route to the Gulf and flow would change again. That periodic meandering route to the Gulf is what created the entire southern half of Louisiana and is why it is such astonishingly fertile land (well, not so much "land" now). But for the past hundred years, the Army Corps of Engineers has been instructed to build floodwalls along the Mississippi to avoid floods in the midwest. Those floodwalls increase the overall flow rate so that by the time the river reaches southern Louisiana, it's moving too fast to deposit sediment in the delta like it used to and instead it gets washed farther out into the Gulf. At the same time, the Corps has been responsible for keeping most of the water flowing into the Gulf going through the Mississippi side instead of the Atchafalaya so that the Port of New Orleans doesn't get hurt economically. That also means that the river isn't allowed to meander and build up sediment across the southern edge of the state. If you think of Louisiana as a boot, this is why the "toe" (where the Mississippi dumps into the Gulf) is getting longer while the instep (the middle of the state where the Atchafalaya) is disappearing. All of this was true and has been happening for decades before any significant climate change occurred. It's still 100% human-caused, and known, and preventable. But it's not from carbon in the atmosphere and sea level rise, though those are now exacerbating it. If you want to learn more about engineering the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers, read John McPhee's Atchfalaya, written almost 40 years ago: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya If you want to learn more about Louisiana's paradoxical culture around the environment, read Arlie Russell Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Land".
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  Hochschild mostly interviewed people outside New Orleans.
  - jeromegv 2y ago
    Anything more you can say on the topic? Does it make it a poor book? Where was the author wrong?
    - selimthegrim 2y ago
      She’s not wrong just don’t judge Orleans Parish by it.
      - munificent 2y ago
        I grew up in St. Charles Parish and spent plenty of time in New Orleans and for what it's worth, everything in the book rang true of New Orleans to me too.
  - munificent 2y ago
    This is true, but I'm not sure how it's relevant. The article and my comment are about southern Louisiana as a whole (aside from me mentioning "laissez les bons temps rouler").
- jwagenet 2y ago
  Wow the Atchfalaya article is incredible. I’m sure much has changed in the 40 years since, but the amount of work done by man (even before the army corp) to tweak the river for various economic reasons, only to intensify the ecological issues is illuminating.
  - munificent 2y ago
    Yeah, everything by John McPhee is amazing. One of my favorite nonfiction writers.
tda 2y ago
Concrete seawalls are almost always inferior to well engineered earth structures. Only when space is at a premium it may be better to use concrete, but in roughly all other cases a concrete structure is more expensive and more likely to fail catastrophically. But somehow a lot of people have the "something substantial needs to be done" mindset and just don't think moving earth is substantial enough. Or at least that is my tale when I see the pictures. Maybe someone knowledgeable on the local situation can chime in on why concrete was chosen?
- pjot 2y ago
  New Orleanian here - the areas in the article are generally on top of swampland and structures sink/erode quite substantially. They’re also outside of the levee protection zone which are primarily earthen levees. When following the road all the way to the end[0] roughly halfway it’s a real trip when you pass the massive concrete structure with a flood gate and suddenly see water bordering each side of the road. It’s also quite dystopian the amount of giant oil facilities that you pass by. There are non-earthen levees in the city as well. For instance in the 9th ward. These are the levees that failed during Katrina. It’s the Army Corps of Engineers that constructs these levees and have become more complex (better?) over time; imagine an upside-down “T” structure buried in the ground. If I had to guess, I suppose the reason may be that it’s because they’re outside the protection zone, and so, when it floods (not if) their infrastructure would be surrounded regardless. Also, a concrete structure surrounding only their plant I assume is orders of magnitude cheaper than moving the amount of earth it would take to build 100+ miles of earthen levees. [0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venice,_Southernmost_Point_In_Louisiana.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venice,_Southernmost...
  - gerdesj 2y ago
    I had the privilege of rocking up in NOLA in a sodding huge cruise ship some years ago after whizzing across the Atlantic. I am well aware that it wasn't the "greenest" action I have ever performed. It takes nearly a day to crawl up the river M from the Gulf of Mexico. A 18 deck monster at around 180,000 tonnes has to take it easy to avoid damaging the levees with its wash, scouring out the river bed etc. At one point, over the course of 45 minutes, our captain decided to overtake a tanker (showboating). A few minutes later we had to park up in a herringbone formation to wait our turn to dock, which took several hours. I think it is around 70-80 miles from the sea to NOLA. From 18 storeys up a river as huge as the Mississippi still looks huge. The levees don't look very large though from up there though, they look very flat and fragile. I studied Civil Engineering in Plymouth (Devon, not MA) and that trip on a cruise ship gave me quite a perspective on engineering works and nature. @pjot - if you get a chance, take a run up the Mississippi on a really big ship. Its quite an eye opener.
metaphor 2y ago
https://archive.is/16ugr https://archive.is/16ugr
KennyBlanken 2y ago
A reminder that the federal government still showers the fossil fuel industry with money and favorable tax regulations in almost every form imaginable. * Name-your-price expenses for drilling costs * Superfund-cleanup-excise-tax exemptions for crude extracted from certain kinds of fields * A tax rate of 21% thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (it was 35%) * Explicit subsidies * Underpricing the environmental, health, and economic damage/expenses/losses caused by fossil fuel burning (versus renewable energy) * Near-freezing of sales taxes on fossil fuels, resulting in them falling dramatically when adjusted for inflation despite growing evidence of how widespread their harm is, and obvious growing costs from their continued use In 2021, the federal government gave the coal industry alone half a billion dollars in "R&D" funding. Meanwhile there's a myth that we need all this for "energy independence." We've gone well beyond "energy independence" to "fourth largest exporter of oil" and "#1 in oil extraction in the world." We extract twice as much oil as the Saudis. One of the reasons "green" tech was so expensive for so long: the massive handouts being given to the fossil fuel industry. The next time you're filling up your gas tank and grumbling about high gas prices, think about how they receive at least twenty billion dollars a year from the feds - not counting state and local stuff. Only in the last 2-3 years has funding for renewable energy technology started to approach that being given the (heavily established, dominating) fossil fuel industry. What's wild is that despite those huge handouts for fossil fuel industries, solar and wind dropped below fossil fuel costs (per GWhr) well before the funding increase, and have continued to drop. Don't even get me started on the handouts the nuclear (fission) industry gets, including free training for thousands of nuclear plant techs thanks to the navy...while the cost of nuclear power has only gone up despite being only a decade or two shy of a century worth of development.
- gruez 2y ago
  >* Name-your-price expenses for drilling costs >* Explicit subsidies >In 2021, the federal government gave the coal industry alone half a billion dollars in "R&D" funding. source? >* Near-freezing of sales taxes on fossil fuels, resulting in them falling dramatically when adjusted for inflation despite growing evidence of how widespread their harm is, and obvious growing costs from their continued use Given that there's no sales taxes at the federal level, and there's an excise tax specifically for fuels, it's a bit baffling to say that's "favorable tax regulations". It might not be indexed to inflation, but it's still less favorable tax treatment than for most other goods.
crote 2y ago
> While Venture Global declined to make officials available for interviews, it has insisted its steel wall is designed to withstand a once-in-500 years storm. The problem with those "once-in-500 years" figures is that they are based on historical data - and climate change is rapidly invalidating that data. Climate change doesn't mean it's 1.5°C warmer year-round, or the sea level is 20cm higher worldwide: it means weather becomes more more extreme. What was a "once-in-500" event a few decades ago might turn into a "once-in-25" event a few years from now. We are already noticing those changes in day-to-day life!
- pjot 2y ago
  And considering weather in the US has been recorded for only about 250 years it’s hard to say what a 500-year storm even looks like.
  - nwiswell 2y ago
    This is like saying that if you've only seen 250 people in your life, it's hard to imagine someone who is at the 99.8th percentile of height.
    - lmm 2y ago
      It is though? You probably wouldn't be aware that hormonal disorders can exist and affect height, so you'd massively underestimate how tall people can actually get.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        Now I want to know how those people fit in a distribution. It could still be a continuous function.
        lmm 2y ago
        Of course it's continuous, but (guessing) it's closer to power-law than normal - the tails are fatter than you'd think, and when you try to estimate variance from a sample you get an underestimate.
skybrian 2y ago
It seems the question is whether a 26-foot-high steel wall is enough. I would have liked more engineering detail. It's quoting experts instead of describing what studies that have been done.
trhway 2y ago
Judging by the freely trafficked drone footage there is no "Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act" style protection for the fossil fuel industry in LA. Seems like the industry's lobbyists are just a waste of money :) One can also wonder whether it is a pure sea wall or a security measure against protesters or say people seeking refuge when displaced by some future flooding, etc. I mean it looks like a setting from some cataclismic movie.
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  Oh there very much is it just hasn’t specifically been worded for drones. They probably expect the feds and Homeland Security to handle that part.
cbb330 2y ago
> How far will the fossil fuel industry go to protect itself from climate impacts it helped cause? As far as their customers take them :) - sent from my iPhone which was delivered to me via fossil fuels
- DaoVeles 2y ago
  One of the silliest things I have seen them doing is trying to refreeze parts of the tundra to stop oil pipeline issues. Literally trying to solve the issue they have a hand in causing. But so long as it is profitable combined with globalized game theory of resources, this will continue far longer than seems rational. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thawing-permafrost-is-artificially-chilled-to-stabilize-alaska-oil-pipeline/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thawing-permafros... >To safeguard the pipeline from possible collapse, the pipeline operator, Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, was granted permission earlier this year by the natural resources department to construct the passive cooling system to arrest the thaw of permafrost that is essential to locking the supports in the ground and keeping the slope from slumping or sliding. Alyeska is installing approximately 100 free-standing thermosyphons 40 to 60 feet into the ground. Construction is expected to take 120 days and will also include a three-foot layer of insulating wood chips atop the permafrost.
- asdff 2y ago
  I wouldn't blame the customer. If you put a pile of meth all over the food in a cage for a rat, its not like its the rats fault for becoming an addict or that they have any choice in the matter not to consume that meth. And if the rats start demanding meth are you going to point to the rats and blame them for being addicted or are you going to wise up and realize its inevitable given the setup? To put it more simply in the words of Henry Ford, you can buy a car in "any color the customer wants, as long as its black." You don't get choice in the market place.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    Humans have agency and self control IMO. People can and do regulate their behavior all the time. I Feel like viewing them as rats without agency is extremely cynical, but also self contradictory. If we are all rats then let's act like rats and simply act on our most base desire. If you think people should try to do anything otherwise, then you admit that they have agency. The market doesn't force you to buy a black Ford any more than it forces you to buy an F-350 with a lift kit and update the engine to roll coal. People choose to buy a car because it offers convenience, prestige, and they think it'll be better than not buying a car
Straw 2y ago
It's funny how the article portrays this as a key driver of climate change, when in fact natural gas displacing coal has significantly _reduced_ US carbon emissions over the last 20 years!
- jeromegv 2y ago
  It’s the least worse option of the two options. And yes it’s been useful to reduce coal. But it’s still not good enough. Countries who don’t rely on methane gas (there’s no need to call it natural gas) have substantially lower co2 emissions. So yes methane gas is a big driver of climate change.
  - Straw 2y ago
    Natural gas has about 5% impurities other than methane. There's no need to change standard terminology when discussing energy. Countries who use coal have even more emissions. 20% of US power generation comes from coal even now. More natural gas now, displacing coal, means less total emissions, even ignoring the particulate and mercury pollution from coal. So right now, natural gas reduces CO2 emissions!
belorn 2y ago
Maybe this article can help highlighting the current trend of seeing natural gas as a solution to global warming. Germany and the green political movement there has been defining natural gas as green investment for years, and new natural gas power plants are being scaled up to match increase energy demands. The general rationalization is that cheap natural gas is seen as required for grid stability and as reserve energy. With the current political climate in Europe, there seems to also be a general view among current climate activists that the US should export more LNG as gas consumption in EU rises.
bob1029 2y ago
Louisiana is also home of the largest pumping station on earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Intracoastal_Waterway_West_Closure_Complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Intracoastal_Waterway_Wes...
AnarchismIsCool 2y ago
Nobody can get homeowners insurance anymore but the garden variety big dick money men are chill with building a 11 figure investment below sea level in a flood plain surrounded by a half assed wall? The older I get the more I realize the rich and powerful running the worlds corporations are probably significantly dumber than the average person.
jasinjames 2y ago
If you're interested in the dynamic in this area of the country, I highly recommend the 2022 game Norco[1]. It's really more of a piece of literature than a game, and it tries to capture the dynamic of the folks who rely upon a similar plant in LA for their livelihoods. (At the risk of overselling a point-and-click game, I'll literally buy it for you if you're on the fence about it. I thought it was that good). [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1221250/NORCO/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1221250/NORCO/
- munificent 2y ago
  I really need to play this game. I kept an eye on it while it was in development. It is so surreal to see a game named after the shithole town I grew up next to.

52 points by howard941 2y ago

I grew up along the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas. Louisiana is, frankly, a shitshow when it comes to making smart long-term decisions. Corruption is rampant and businesses generally have politicians in their pockets. Those businesses are able to effectively offload their externalities, so they are incentivized to destroy the environment while reaping the short-term profits. If you want any prediction as to how things will go in Louisiana, the easy answer is "poorly" and you'll be right most of the time. It's honestly hard to expect better from a place whose largest city's motto is "Let the good times roll". The local culture is just deeply broken. At the same time, I'm really disappointed that this article almost completely glossed over one of the major challenges facing Louisiana that has absolutely nothing to do with climate change. The only tangential mention is: > Last November, Louisiana broke ground on a $2.3 billion project to shunt some of the muddy flows of Mississippi under and past Ironton into degraded wetlands to the west. The project is being financed largely with settlement money from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, and aims to halt losses of wetlands by mimicking the Mississippi River’s historic path. When the article notes: > Since 1932, the state has lost more than 1,900 square miles of land, an area equal to the state of Delaware It implies that the loss was primarily climate change, but that's not true at all. Most of this loss was driven by the way the Army Corps of Engineers has managed the Mississippi River. For millions of years, the Mississippi River went through periodic oscillations. As the river dumped more and more sediment into the delta, the delta would build up until eventually it started blocking the flow. The majority of the flow would then shift to the Atchafalaya river. That river would empty into the Gulf and its delta would build up sediment. Eventually, it would reach a level where the Mississippi was again the easiest route to the Gulf and flow would change again. That periodic meandering route to the Gulf is what created the entire southern half of Louisiana and is why it is such astonishingly fertile land (well, not so much "land" now). But for the past hundred years, the Army Corps of Engineers has been instructed to build floodwalls along the Mississippi to avoid floods in the midwest. Those floodwalls increase the overall flow rate so that by the time the river reaches southern Louisiana, it's moving too fast to deposit sediment in the delta like it used to and instead it gets washed farther out into the Gulf. At the same time, the Corps has been responsible for keeping most of the water flowing into the Gulf going through the Mississippi side instead of the Atchafalaya so that the Port of New Orleans doesn't get hurt economically. That also means that the river isn't allowed to meander and build up sediment across the southern edge of the state. If you think of Louisiana as a boot, this is why the "toe" (where the Mississippi dumps into the Gulf) is getting longer while the instep (the middle of the state where the Atchafalaya) is disappearing. All of this was true and has been happening for decades before any significant climate change occurred. It's still 100% human-caused, and known, and preventable. But it's not from carbon in the atmosphere and sea level rise, though those are now exacerbating it. If you want to learn more about engineering the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers, read John McPhee's Atchfalaya, written almost 40 years ago: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya If you want to learn more about Louisiana's paradoxical culture around the environment, read Arlie Russell Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Land".

selimthegrim 2y ago
Hochschild mostly interviewed people outside New Orleans.
- jeromegv 2y ago
  Anything more you can say on the topic? Does it make it a poor book? Where was the author wrong?
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    She’s not wrong just don’t judge Orleans Parish by it.
    - munificent 2y ago
      I grew up in St. Charles Parish and spent plenty of time in New Orleans and for what it's worth, everything in the book rang true of New Orleans to me too.
- munificent 2y ago
  This is true, but I'm not sure how it's relevant. The article and my comment are about southern Louisiana as a whole (aside from me mentioning "laissez les bons temps rouler").
jwagenet 2y ago
Wow the Atchfalaya article is incredible. I’m sure much has changed in the 40 years since, but the amount of work done by man (even before the army corp) to tweak the river for various economic reasons, only to intensify the ecological issues is illuminating.
- munificent 2y ago
  Yeah, everything by John McPhee is amazing. One of my favorite nonfiction writers.

tda 2y ago

Concrete seawalls are almost always inferior to well engineered earth structures. Only when space is at a premium it may be better to use concrete, but in roughly all other cases a concrete structure is more expensive and more likely to fail catastrophically. But somehow a lot of people have the "something substantial needs to be done" mindset and just don't think moving earth is substantial enough. Or at least that is my tale when I see the pictures. Maybe someone knowledgeable on the local situation can chime in on why concrete was chosen?

pjot 2y ago
New Orleanian here - the areas in the article are generally on top of swampland and structures sink/erode quite substantially. They’re also outside of the levee protection zone which are primarily earthen levees. When following the road all the way to the end[0] roughly halfway it’s a real trip when you pass the massive concrete structure with a flood gate and suddenly see water bordering each side of the road. It’s also quite dystopian the amount of giant oil facilities that you pass by. There are non-earthen levees in the city as well. For instance in the 9th ward. These are the levees that failed during Katrina. It’s the Army Corps of Engineers that constructs these levees and have become more complex (better?) over time; imagine an upside-down “T” structure buried in the ground. If I had to guess, I suppose the reason may be that it’s because they’re outside the protection zone, and so, when it floods (not if) their infrastructure would be surrounded regardless. Also, a concrete structure surrounding only their plant I assume is orders of magnitude cheaper than moving the amount of earth it would take to build 100+ miles of earthen levees. [0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venice,_Southernmost_Point_In_Louisiana.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venice,_Southernmost...
- gerdesj 2y ago
  I had the privilege of rocking up in NOLA in a sodding huge cruise ship some years ago after whizzing across the Atlantic. I am well aware that it wasn't the "greenest" action I have ever performed. It takes nearly a day to crawl up the river M from the Gulf of Mexico. A 18 deck monster at around 180,000 tonnes has to take it easy to avoid damaging the levees with its wash, scouring out the river bed etc. At one point, over the course of 45 minutes, our captain decided to overtake a tanker (showboating). A few minutes later we had to park up in a herringbone formation to wait our turn to dock, which took several hours. I think it is around 70-80 miles from the sea to NOLA. From 18 storeys up a river as huge as the Mississippi still looks huge. The levees don't look very large though from up there though, they look very flat and fragile. I studied Civil Engineering in Plymouth (Devon, not MA) and that trip on a cruise ship gave me quite a perspective on engineering works and nature. @pjot - if you get a chance, take a run up the Mississippi on a really big ship. Its quite an eye opener.

metaphor 2y ago

https://archive.is/16ugr https://archive.is/16ugr

KennyBlanken 2y ago

A reminder that the federal government still showers the fossil fuel industry with money and favorable tax regulations in almost every form imaginable. * Name-your-price expenses for drilling costs * Superfund-cleanup-excise-tax exemptions for crude extracted from certain kinds of fields * A tax rate of 21% thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (it was 35%) * Explicit subsidies * Underpricing the environmental, health, and economic damage/expenses/losses caused by fossil fuel burning (versus renewable energy) * Near-freezing of sales taxes on fossil fuels, resulting in them falling dramatically when adjusted for inflation despite growing evidence of how widespread their harm is, and obvious growing costs from their continued use In 2021, the federal government gave the coal industry alone half a billion dollars in "R&D" funding. Meanwhile there's a myth that we need all this for "energy independence." We've gone well beyond "energy independence" to "fourth largest exporter of oil" and "#1 in oil extraction in the world." We extract twice as much oil as the Saudis. One of the reasons "green" tech was so expensive for so long: the massive handouts being given to the fossil fuel industry. The next time you're filling up your gas tank and grumbling about high gas prices, think about how they receive at least twenty billion dollars a year from the feds - not counting state and local stuff. Only in the last 2-3 years has funding for renewable energy technology started to approach that being given the (heavily established, dominating) fossil fuel industry. What's wild is that despite those huge handouts for fossil fuel industries, solar and wind dropped below fossil fuel costs (per GWhr) well before the funding increase, and have continued to drop. Don't even get me started on the handouts the nuclear (fission) industry gets, including free training for thousands of nuclear plant techs thanks to the navy...while the cost of nuclear power has only gone up despite being only a decade or two shy of a century worth of development.

gruez 2y ago
>* Name-your-price expenses for drilling costs >* Explicit subsidies >In 2021, the federal government gave the coal industry alone half a billion dollars in "R&D" funding. source? >* Near-freezing of sales taxes on fossil fuels, resulting in them falling dramatically when adjusted for inflation despite growing evidence of how widespread their harm is, and obvious growing costs from their continued use Given that there's no sales taxes at the federal level, and there's an excise tax specifically for fuels, it's a bit baffling to say that's "favorable tax regulations". It might not be indexed to inflation, but it's still less favorable tax treatment than for most other goods.

crote 2y ago

> While Venture Global declined to make officials available for interviews, it has insisted its steel wall is designed to withstand a once-in-500 years storm. The problem with those "once-in-500 years" figures is that they are based on historical data - and climate change is rapidly invalidating that data. Climate change doesn't mean it's 1.5°C warmer year-round, or the sea level is 20cm higher worldwide: it means weather becomes more more extreme. What was a "once-in-500" event a few decades ago might turn into a "once-in-25" event a few years from now. We are already noticing those changes in day-to-day life!

pjot 2y ago
And considering weather in the US has been recorded for only about 250 years it’s hard to say what a 500-year storm even looks like.
- nwiswell 2y ago
  This is like saying that if you've only seen 250 people in your life, it's hard to imagine someone who is at the 99.8th percentile of height.
  - lmm 2y ago
    It is though? You probably wouldn't be aware that hormonal disorders can exist and affect height, so you'd massively underestimate how tall people can actually get.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Now I want to know how those people fit in a distribution. It could still be a continuous function.
      - lmm 2y ago
        Of course it's continuous, but (guessing) it's closer to power-law than normal - the tails are fatter than you'd think, and when you try to estimate variance from a sample you get an underestimate.

skybrian 2y ago

It seems the question is whether a 26-foot-high steel wall is enough. I would have liked more engineering detail. It's quoting experts instead of describing what studies that have been done.

trhway 2y ago

Judging by the freely trafficked drone footage there is no "Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act" style protection for the fossil fuel industry in LA. Seems like the industry's lobbyists are just a waste of money :) One can also wonder whether it is a pure sea wall or a security measure against protesters or say people seeking refuge when displaced by some future flooding, etc. I mean it looks like a setting from some cataclismic movie.

selimthegrim 2y ago
Oh there very much is it just hasn’t specifically been worded for drones. They probably expect the feds and Homeland Security to handle that part.

cbb330 2y ago

> How far will the fossil fuel industry go to protect itself from climate impacts it helped cause? As far as their customers take them :) - sent from my iPhone which was delivered to me via fossil fuels

DaoVeles 2y ago
One of the silliest things I have seen them doing is trying to refreeze parts of the tundra to stop oil pipeline issues. Literally trying to solve the issue they have a hand in causing. But so long as it is profitable combined with globalized game theory of resources, this will continue far longer than seems rational. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thawing-permafrost-is-artificially-chilled-to-stabilize-alaska-oil-pipeline/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thawing-permafros... >To safeguard the pipeline from possible collapse, the pipeline operator, Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, was granted permission earlier this year by the natural resources department to construct the passive cooling system to arrest the thaw of permafrost that is essential to locking the supports in the ground and keeping the slope from slumping or sliding. Alyeska is installing approximately 100 free-standing thermosyphons 40 to 60 feet into the ground. Construction is expected to take 120 days and will also include a three-foot layer of insulating wood chips atop the permafrost.
asdff 2y ago
I wouldn't blame the customer. If you put a pile of meth all over the food in a cage for a rat, its not like its the rats fault for becoming an addict or that they have any choice in the matter not to consume that meth. And if the rats start demanding meth are you going to point to the rats and blame them for being addicted or are you going to wise up and realize its inevitable given the setup? To put it more simply in the words of Henry Ford, you can buy a car in "any color the customer wants, as long as its black." You don't get choice in the market place.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  Humans have agency and self control IMO. People can and do regulate their behavior all the time. I Feel like viewing them as rats without agency is extremely cynical, but also self contradictory. If we are all rats then let's act like rats and simply act on our most base desire. If you think people should try to do anything otherwise, then you admit that they have agency. The market doesn't force you to buy a black Ford any more than it forces you to buy an F-350 with a lift kit and update the engine to roll coal. People choose to buy a car because it offers convenience, prestige, and they think it'll be better than not buying a car

Straw 2y ago

It's funny how the article portrays this as a key driver of climate change, when in fact natural gas displacing coal has significantly _reduced_ US carbon emissions over the last 20 years!

jeromegv 2y ago
It’s the least worse option of the two options. And yes it’s been useful to reduce coal. But it’s still not good enough. Countries who don’t rely on methane gas (there’s no need to call it natural gas) have substantially lower co2 emissions. So yes methane gas is a big driver of climate change.
- Straw 2y ago
  Natural gas has about 5% impurities other than methane. There's no need to change standard terminology when discussing energy. Countries who use coal have even more emissions. 20% of US power generation comes from coal even now. More natural gas now, displacing coal, means less total emissions, even ignoring the particulate and mercury pollution from coal. So right now, natural gas reduces CO2 emissions!

belorn 2y ago

Maybe this article can help highlighting the current trend of seeing natural gas as a solution to global warming. Germany and the green political movement there has been defining natural gas as green investment for years, and new natural gas power plants are being scaled up to match increase energy demands. The general rationalization is that cheap natural gas is seen as required for grid stability and as reserve energy. With the current political climate in Europe, there seems to also be a general view among current climate activists that the US should export more LNG as gas consumption in EU rises.

bob1029 2y ago

Louisiana is also home of the largest pumping station on earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Intracoastal_Waterway_West_Closure_Complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Intracoastal_Waterway_Wes...

AnarchismIsCool 2y ago

Nobody can get homeowners insurance anymore but the garden variety big dick money men are chill with building a 11 figure investment below sea level in a flood plain surrounded by a half assed wall? The older I get the more I realize the rich and powerful running the worlds corporations are probably significantly dumber than the average person.

jasinjames 2y ago

If you're interested in the dynamic in this area of the country, I highly recommend the 2022 game Norco[1]. It's really more of a piece of literature than a game, and it tries to capture the dynamic of the folks who rely upon a similar plant in LA for their livelihoods. (At the risk of overselling a point-and-click game, I'll literally buy it for you if you're on the fence about it. I thought it was that good). [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1221250/NORCO/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1221250/NORCO/

munificent 2y ago
I really need to play this game. I kept an eye on it while it was in development. It is so surreal to see a game named after the shithole town I grew up next to.