For at least 170 years, Isle de Jean Charles -- a narrow ridge of land lying between Bayou Terrebonne and Bayou Pointe-aux-Chene in southeastern Louisiana's Terrebonne Parish -- has been home to members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha tribe, native people related to the Choctaw and part of a larger confederation of Muskogees.

But the tribe's history is about to take a dramatic turn due to climate change.

Albert Naquin, chief of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha, recently announced that the group plans to leave its ancestral island homeland and build a new community behind levees on higher ground. He told the Associated Press the decision came because the community was flooded five times in the past six years. About 25 families now live on the island, a number that's fallen in recent years due to the constant flooding associated with global warming.

The state-recognized tribe hopes to use about $12 million in federal aid to build 60 homes in Bourg, a community about 10 miles inland, according to the AP. Officials with Terrebonne Parish and the state of Louisiana still have to approve the relocation plan.

The plight of the Biloxi-Chitimacha people of Isle de Jean Charles illustrates the suffering already being experienced worldwide due to climate disruption.

A recent report funded by the United Nations and the World Bank titled "In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement" warned that there could be as many as 250 million people displaced by 2050 unless "aggressive measures" were taken to halt global warming.

In fact, as the report pointed out, climate-related displacement is already underway. Environmental change is part of the complex mix of factors behind the world's biggest internal displacement problem in Sudan, where 4.9 million people have fled their homes. In low-lying Bangladesh, more than 5 million people live in areas vulnerable to cyclones and storm surges, and growing numbers are already coping with the danger through temporary migration to urban areas. And in the Mekong Delta of Southeast Asia, farmers are being driven off their land by intensified flooding.

Small island states are especially vulnerable to sea-level rise. This past spring marked the beginning of what's believed to be the world's first evacuation of an entire people as a result of global warming, with the first of the 2,600 people of the Carteret Islands leaving their vanishing coral atoll for the nearby island of Bougainville, part of Papua New Guinea.

The Solomon Times reported that on April 29, 2009, the fathers of the first five Carteret Island families relocated to land donated by the Catholic Church, "bringing their sons to support them in the work leading up to the time when their wives and children will eventually join them."

A matter of time before communities no longer exist

Land loss has long been a problem facing Louisiana, which has seen 1,900 square miles of land vanish since the 1930s and which continues to lose as many as 40 square miles each year to the Gulf of Mexico. With every bit of land swallowed by the sea, the loss rate speeds up, since the coastal wetlands and barrier islands act as storm buffers. If action is not taken to slow the current loss rate, the Louisiana shoreline is expected to move inland as much as 33 miles by the year 2040.

Factors behind Louisiana's escalating loss of coastal land include natural subsidence as well as the construction of flood-protection levees, which block the natural deposition of land-building sediment. Meanwhile, the dredging of access canals by the state's offshore oil industry lets in salt water that in turn kills marsh vegetation, further worsening erosion. At the same time, human-made global warming is increasing sea levels through thermal expansion of water and melting continental ice sheets.

A federal government report released earlier this year examining regional impacts of climate change noted that coastal inundation would increase as sea levels rise -- which it called "one of the most certain and most costly consequences of a warming climate."

The cost of shoring up Louisiana's coastline to better withstand storms would be considerable. In 2002, the Committee on the Future of Coastal Louisiana estimated that a comprehensive program to restore the state's coastal wetlands to a sustainable level would cost $14 billion -- and that calculation was done before hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which together wiped out 217 square miles of coastal land in 2005. But of course, that cost has to be weighed against the cost of displacement and destruction in the state's coastal parishes, which are home to more than 2 million people -- 47 percent of the state's population.

Katrina and Rita were especially hard on the Biloxi-Chitimacha of Isle de Jean Charles, with the community's one church relocated after Rita and its fire station since closed. Hurricanes Gustav and Ike in 2008 also dealt devastating blows to the community.

The tribe had hoped to get some protection from the Army Corps of Engineers' $900 million Morganza to the Gulf of Mexico Hurricane Protection Project -- a controversial plan known by its environmentalist critics as the "Great Wall of Louisiana." The project was designed to protect communities in Terrebonne and neighboring Lafourche parishes from coastal erosion, but the final design for the project did not include Isle de Jean Charles because the agencies involved decided the costs involved outweighed the benefits of protecting so few families.

Naquin reportedly considered suing the federal government for excluding his community from the levee plans but worried about how that would impact his tribe's pending application for federal recognition.

Meanwhile, the Biloxi-Chitimacha are not the only indigenous people of Louisiana to face the loss of their ancestral homelands to rising seas. In the 2007 Institute for Southern Studies report "Blueprint for Gulf Renewal," Chief Brenda Dardar-Robichaux of Louisiana's United Houma Nation described attending a conference on coastal land loss and watching a researcher draw a line across a map of the state showing the area most at risk of being submerged -- which included most of the Houma lands, some of which are already being lost to floods.

"It's just a matter of time before some of our communities no longer exist," Dardar-Robichaux said at the time. And as Houma historian Michael T. Mayheart Dardar has noted, "If settlements are abandoned and populations allowed to disperse, with them goes the cultural integrity of our people."

Though it's rarely noted in most media coverage of human-made climate disruption, the displacement of entire peoples due to a warming climate and rising seas has implications under human rights agreements such as the United Nations' Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, a set of U.S.-endorsed standards that govern the treatment of people uprooted by natural and human-made disasters. As Guiding Principle 9 says:

States are under a particular obligation to protect against the displacement of indigenous peoples, minorities, peasants, pastoralists and other groups with a special dependency on and attachment to their lands.

The situation facing the Biloxi-Chitimacha of Isle de Jean Charles raises the question: Is the United States really doing all it can to protect against climate-related displacement? It's something leaders need to think about as they craft federal climate legislation and prepare for the International Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen this December.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

Related Links:

China, India, US Commit to Seal Copenhagen Deal

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

In response to criticism that the Army Corps of Engineers has failed to take needed action, President Obama is creating a federal task force to overhaul management of coastal restoration efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi.

White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley made the announcement this week in an interview with Bloomberg News. The panel will consider options for revamping how the federal government manages environmental restoration and protection efforts in the region, which suffers from a serious coastal erosion problem.

The administration's budget and environmental offices will lead the effort, according to Sutley. The Corps will be part of the task force and continue to work on its projects in the Gulf, Sutley told Bloomberg:

"We thought it made sense to have an interagency working group on restoration that would include the Corps, but include other agencies as well," Sutley said. Discussions about how the group will be structured are in the early stages, she said.

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently wrote a letter to Obama calling on him to reform the Corps and create just such a working group to address coastal restoration and flood protection. She told Bloomberg that she was "pleased that the President has responded to my request to elevate the challenges that face coastal Louisiana to a higher level of priority within the federal government."

As Facing South reported, a coalition of 17 advocacy groups held a press conference this week calling on the Corps to honor the president's pledge to restore wetlands that provide critical protection from storms.

The coalition noted that Congress directed the Corps to come up with a comprehensive plan for closing the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet navigation channel near New Orleans and restoring adjacent wetlands by May 2008. But the agency doesn't expect to complete its draft plan until next year.

In another example of slow movement by the Corps, it was more than four years ago that the agency completed a report recognizing the severe wetland loss in coastal Louisiana and recommending five critical restoration projects. Congress authorized those projects under the Water Resources Development Act of 2007 -- but only one is scheduled to begin construction before 2012. That meant none were eligible for funding as "shovel-ready" under the recent economic stimulus.

Louisiana officials recently offered recommendations for speeding up hurricane protection efforts. Pointing out that it currently takes an average of 40 years for the Corps to complete a project, they say the state's coastal communities don't have that much time.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

Related Links:

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Louisiana's threatened wetlands provide a critical barrier to hurricanes and flooding.With the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaching, a coalition of 17 advocacy groups called on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to promptly honor President Obama's pledge "to restore nature's barriers -- the wetlands, marshes and barrier islands that can take the first blows and protect the people of the Gulf Coast."

The MRGO Must Go Coalition held a press conference and media tour in New Orleans yesterday to highlight the slow progress in restoring wetlands east of the city along the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a navigation channel the Army Corps of Engineers constructed in the 1960s as a shortcut between the Port of New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.

When Hurricane Katrina blew ashore four years ago, MRGO directed wind-driven floodwaters into New Orleans and adjacent St. Bernard Parish, contributing to the catastrophic failure of levees and flood walls. Levees along the channel were breached in approximately 20 places during Katrina.

The channel's construction, use and maintenance also caused the loss of more than 27,000 acres of surrounding wetlands, another factor that exacerbated Katrina's impact on the New Orleans area. During the storm, levees protected by wetlands remained intact while those exposed to open water -- like the ones along the MRGO's banks -- failed.

Congress ordered MRGO's closure last year, and construction of a rock dam was completed last month. But the coalition points out that the dam is only the first step to protecting communities from storm surge.

Congress directed the Corps to develop a comprehensive closure plan that includes restoring adjacent wetlands with a deadline of last May -- but the agency doesn't expect to finish its MRGO Ecosystem Restoration Plan until next year. The coalition is urging faster action.

"There are good people at the Corps and at other relevant federal agencies who are trying to get their job done and quickly move these projects forward, but we need an unequivocal commitment from the Corps, Congress and other responsible agencies that they won't let outdated bureaucratic procedures stand in the way of necessary action," said Col. David Dysart, chief administrative officer for St. Bernard Parish. "It's going to take creativity and breaking away from some long-standing ways of doing business, but the stakes call for nothing less."

(This story originally appeared at Facing South)

Related Links:

A victory for Katrina victims; a defeat for Alaskan villagers

Will EPA veto or regulate the plunder of Appalachia?

Mountaintop Removal Hearings Get Tense

While Louisiana struggles to restore coastal wetlands ravaged in large part by decades of oil and gas drilling, its senior senator is leading the effort to lift the ban on drilling off Florida's Panhandle.

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) is the lone co-sponsor of legislation sponsored by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) to open up new areas in the eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas development. Introduced last month, Senate Bill 1517 would allow drilling in federal waters 45 miles off the Panhandle's coast. Current law bans drilling any closer than 125 miles off Panhandle beaches and 235 miles off Gulf Coast beaches from Tampa south.

Opposing the Murkowski-Landrieu plan is U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), a longtime foe of offshore drilling. He joins other Florida leaders worried about drilling's impact on the state's lucrative tourism industry, which in 2008 alone generated more than $65 billion for Florida's economy and $3.9 billion for the state in tax revenue. Nelson has criticized the drilling bill as giveaway to the oil industry, McClatchy reports:

"This isn't even thinly veiled," Nelson said. "It's an oil industry bailout plan. And it's Alaska and Louisiana's senators plan to boost their own revenues in tough economic times. But even in the toughest of times, there are some things states shouldn't sell out, like Florida's economy and environment."

Why is Landrieu pushing the plan? She says it's out of concern for rising oil prices -- though the U.S. Energy Information Administration says drilling in areas that are currently restricted would result in negligible savings to consumers. Meanwhile, Landrieu and and Murkowski are among the top congressional recipients of campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org database, the industry is Landrieu's second-biggest contributor besides lawyers, investing more than $711,000 in her campaigns over the past 12 years. In the 2008 election cycle, she ranked first among all congressional recipients of oil and gas PAC contributions, receiving more than $171,600.  The oil and gas industry is Murkowski's third-biggest contributor after leadership PACs and electric utilities, donating more than $286,000 to her campaign over the past seven years; she's also the top recipient of oil and gas PAC contributions in the current election cycle.

Last year the League of Conservation Voters placed Landrieu on their "Dirty Dozen" list of lawmakers, noting that her lifetime score from the environmental advocacy group of 43 percent made her the worst Democratic senator on environmental issues among those running for re-election.

"For a Senator from Louisiana, which faces severe consequences from global warming, to fail to protect Louisiana is disappointing," LCV's Tony Massaro said at the time. "Senator Landrieu joins the [Dirty Dozen] because she acts more to protect Big Oil than the future for the people of Louisiana."

A football field lost every 38 minutes

Sen. Landrieu was among those who suffered personal losses from Hurricane Katrina four years ago, as the storm and the subsequent levee failures and flooding destroyed her lakeside home in New Orleans.

One reason the devastation to inland areas like New Orleans was so severe when the Category 3 storm hit Louisiana is because coastal wetlands that once served as storm breaks have been swallowed by the Gulf of Mexico. Over the past 75 years, Louisiana has lost more than 2,300 square miles of coastal wetlands -- an area equivalent in size to the entire state of Delaware.

Between 1990 and 2000, Louisiana lost about 24 square miles of land each year -- equivalent to about one football field lost to the sea every 38 minutes, according to the state's Department of Natural Resources.

While some of Louisiana's land loss can be blamed on natural processes, coastal experts say most of the destruction is due to human alteration of the landscape. One factor is the extensive levee system constructed along the Lower Mississippi River that prevents sediment from depositing naturally along the coast. Another key factor is the thousands of miles of oil and gas pipelines and canals cut through coastal wetlands, opening them up to saltwater intrusion that kills vegetation and leaves the land vulnerable to erosion.

In fact, between 40 and 60 percent of Louisiana's coastal wetlands loss can be traced to oil and gas activities, according to the Gulf Restoration Network. From 1983 to 2008, for example, Houston-based Shell Oil dredged 8.8 million cubic yards of coastal lands in Louisiana while laying its pipelines -- activity that GRN and other environmental advocates calculated as having caused the loss of 22,624 acres of wetlands.

Land loss is not the only environmental damage from oil and gas drilling. Last month alone, an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico contaminated several beaches along the Texas coast, while a leak from a Shell pipeline 30 miles off the Louisiana coast created a nine-mile-long slick in the Gulf.

Storms increase the risk oil and gas drilling pose to the environment. Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina and Rita together caused 124 offshore spills that dumped more than 743,000 gallons of pollution into the ocean, according to the federal Minerals Management Service [PDF]. Onshore spills from pipelines, tanks and refineries added another 9 million gallons of pollution to the mess.

Pattern of delay

If no decisive action is taken to address coastal erosion, Louisiana is expected lose another 500 square miles of land by 2050 -- and that will have enormous consequences for communities throughout the state's coastal parishes, where almost 2 million people live. And unfortunately, the current processes for addressing the problem are anything but decisive.

This past June, Steven Peyronnin, executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, testified at the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works' hearing on Louisiana's coastal restoration. Noting that scientists and engineers have the expertise to restore sustainability to the landscape and protect vulnerable communities, he said what is lacking is a sense of urgency.

Peyronnin pointed out that it's been more than four years now since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers submitted a final report recognizing the severe wetland loss in coastal Louisiana and recommending five critical restoration projects for the near term. While Congress authorized these projects under the Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA) section of the Water Resources Development Act of 2007, only one is scheduled to begin construction before 2012. That meant none were eligible for funding under the recent economic stimulus package.

"Not only is the lack of progress a troubling obstacle to restoring a sustainable coast, but it has also negated the ability to leverage federal opportunities that could provide desperately needed funding streams and a strong sense of urgency," Peyronnin told the committee. "Without a single project ready for construction, LCA projects were not considered in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 because they fell far short of the shovel ready requirement intended to urgently move projects forward."

In authorizing the LCA, Congress also directed the Secretary of the Army to come up with a comprehensive long-term restoration plan, but this still has not been done. Instead, the Corps is relying on an older document -- the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Technical Report -- that has shortcomings. For example, it provides no framework for how restoration efforts work with navigation activities, which currently focus on dumping sediment too far offshore to maintain coastal wetlands.

Peyronnin testified that the delay of LCA projects and the Corps' failure to comply with congressional mandates show that the traditional model for carrying out coastal restoration projects is "ill-suited" to respond to the crisis.

"If this pattern of delay continues," he warned, "it will eliminate any chance of success."

Earlier this month, Louisiana officials released recommendations for speeding up Corps projects, which currently take an average of 40 years to complete. But the recommendations remain in the discussion stages.

A starker choice for Florida

Sen. Landrieu has long been an advocate for coastal restoration efforts. For example, the annual energy and water appropriations bill recently passed by the Senate contained hundreds of millions of dollars for Army Corps projects in Louisiana that she championed, including coastal restoration initiatives.

But her push to allow the oil and gas industry to expand its operations in the Gulf of Mexico while federal processes to address land loss remain in disarray would inevitably mean putting other areas of the Gulf Coast at risk of the same drilling-related wetlands destruction experienced by Louisiana.

Unlike Louisiana, Florida has long opposed drilling off its coast, seeing it as a threat to the state's $65 billion annual tourist economy. When Chevron discovered natural gas deposits in Florida waters in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for example, the state objected to plans to tap them, leading the Bush administration to buy back leases from Chevron, Conoco and Murphy Oil for $115 million.

This past April, amid concern about rising energy prices, the Florida House passed a bill allowing offshore drilling in state waters -- but the measure died in the Senate.

Then along came Murkowski's and Landrieu's bill, which resembles an amendment in a Senate energy bill written by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) that would also permit oil and gas rigs within 45 miles of Florida's Gulf coast, McClatchy reports. But unlike Dorgan's proposal, the Murkowski-Landrieu plan includes a revenue-sharing provision to sweeten the deal.

In 2006, another piece of legislation sponsored by Landrieu gave Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas 37.5 percent of proceeds from fuel production in the Gulf -- returning to the states an estimated total of $6 billion a year that previously went to the federal government. The arrangement aimed to compensate them for the environmental cost of pipelines and other infrastructure.

Florida wanted no part of that earlier deal, but Landrieu hopes the revenue-sharing provision will hold appeal because of the state's fiscal crunch. As she wrote in a June op-ed that ran in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call:

Had revenue sharing been a part of the bargain, Floridians would have faced a choice involving rewards and not just risks. Given Florida’s current $6 billion budget deficit, such a choice would be starker today.

But as Sen. Nelson has pointed out, the proposal is hardly a panacea for Florida's financial woes, since the money states raise from offshore drilling in federal waters can be used only to repair damages caused by drilling, such as coastal restoration and pollution cleanup.

The question facing the Senate is whether that makes drilling worth the environmental damage that Florida will inevitably suffer.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South)

Related Links:

Toward a medically defensible energy policy

The tar sands blow

Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers!

Mary Landrieu

Sen. Mary Landrieu has been a thorn in the side of enviros for most of her 12 years in the Senate representing Louisiana, a big oil and gas state. Last year, the League of Conservation Voters added her to its Dirty Dozen list of the worst environmental offenders in Congress. During her bid for reelection last year, her website proudly touted a quote from the Baton Rouge Advocate calling her "the most fervent pro-drilling Democrat in the Senate."

Landrieu has maintained her claim to that title this year, voting against the energy bill approved by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in June because she wanted a larger share of offshore-drilling revenues for coastal states and more support for nuclear power.

She may well vote against a climate bill too. Last year, she was one of only four Democrats who opposed letting the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act go to the Senate floor for a vote. This year, she said she hasn't ruled out filibustering climate legislation. "I’m going to keep an open mind, but I am not committing to any procedural straitjackets one way or another," she said.

A spokesperson for Landrieu said recently that the senator isn't too keen on cap-and-trade. "Sen. Landrieu recognizes that we need to address the problem of climate change,” the spokesperson told Roll Call. “But she doesn’t necessarily think that cap-and-trade is the most efficient or most cost-effective way of addressing climate change.”

Track the debate and take action >>>

Landrieu didn't like the cap-and-trade bill that the House passed in June, but might be swayed to support a Senate version if it incorporates more support for oil and gas drilling. "I just generally don't like many things about the House bill," she said recently. "But I'm open to discuss how we can move forward to make our energy grid greener, how we can move to the next generation of energy supply, and most importantly how to get American energy secure. That goal cannot be done without increasing traditional oil and gas production."

Do you know more about this senator's stance on climate legislation? Tell us.

Find out about other senators by clicking on their names in the right column.

Related Links:

Climate Denial Crock of the Week: The big mist take

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

What to make of the new climate poll

Related Links:

What Do Coal and Dirty Dorm Rooms Have in Common?

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

Photo: Marni Rosen

Children who moved into FEMA trailers after losing their homes in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have alarming rates of sickness and mental health problems, according to an in-depth review of medical records. Forty-two percent of the children studied suffer from respiratory troubles that may be linked to formaldehyde in the trailers.

Related Links:

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

Related Links:

Will EPA veto or regulate the plunder of Appalachia?

Mountaintop Removal Hearings Get Tense

Should the Department of Justice investigate Big Coal bedlam?

Related Links:

As the land disappears, an Indian tribe plans to abandon its ancestral Louisiana home

White House announces Gulf restoration task force amid criticism of Army Corps

Army Corps urged to honor Obama’s priority of restoring New Orleans area wetlands

Nearly two months after Hurricane Ike reared its head on the Texas and Louisiana coast, workers are still cleaning up what may be a record amount of debris. The wee bright side: only some 15 percent of the wreckage is headed to the landfill, while the rest is reused or recycled.

Related Links:

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

Ask Umbra’s video advice on composting

Related Links:

Inhofe to Boxer: “We Won, You Lost, Now Get a Life!”

Merkley wants Senate jobs bill to help finance building efficiency retrofits

Reflecting on the lameness of my profession

Related Links:

Global boiling declares war on Thanksgiving

Will EPA veto or regulate the plunder of Appalachia?

Mountaintop Removal Hearings Get Tense

Louisiana's people and property fared better under Hurricane Gustav than had been feared, but acres of valuable wetlands were likely irrevocably destroyed. "The last thing on anyone's mind during a hurricane is how the wetlands are going to do," says activist Aaron Giles. But since happy and healthy wetlands act as storm barriers, "wetlands are a critical piece of keeping coastal Louisiana safe." Heavy storms toss around fauna in marshes and deposit saltwater where it ain't supposed to be. Louisiana's wetlands have been severely eroded by natural disaster and development; some estimates hold that healthier wetlands could have knocked Gustav's 12-foot tidal surge down by three feet. The hurricane shut down oil production in the Gulf of Mexico but caused no structural damage or spills on offshore platforms, leading President Bush to reiterate Tuesday, "This storm should not cause members of the Congress to say, 'Well, we don't need to address our energy independence.' We need more domestic energy. One place to find it is offshore America.''

sources:

Related Links:

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science

Related Links:

Global boiling declares war on Thanksgiving

Disappearing slave history

New interactive map shows devastating effects of global temperature rise

Related Links:

Global boiling declares war on Thanksgiving

As the land disappears, an Indian tribe plans to abandon its ancestral Louisiana home

Ask Umbra on combating climate denial

Louisiana wildlife have so far largely escaped harm from the oil spill that shut down 100 miles of the Mississippi River last week. But biologists remain nervous as the oil slick heads downstream toward the Delta National Wildlife Refuge and neighboring marshy areas, where nearly 100,000 migratory birds will alight in the fall. Barriers are being erected to keep oil away from marshes, and folks are keeping fingers crossed that currents will push the grease to the banks of the river before it reaches the wetlands. Meanwhile, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has set up propane cannons designed to scare animals away from oily areas. The agency has so far found nearly 60 oil-coated ducks and other birds, as well as a beaver and a muskrat; nearly all of the animals were weakened but still quick enough to elude capture by biologists trying to get 'em cleaned up.

sources:

Related Links:

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science

Some 420,000 gallons of fuel oil spilled into the Mississippi River early Wednesday, after a 600-foot chemical tanker collided with a fuel barge. The collision split the barge in half; thick, slow-to-evaporate fuel has traveled at least 12 miles downriver. The Coast Guard closed a 29-mile stretch of the river around New Orleans, and residents have been asked to conserve water as drinking-water intakes are closed or diverted. Cleanup is expected to take days. Full environmental impact is yet unclear, but, notes a spokesperson for the Louisiana environmental agency: "We have a lot of wildlife in the southern delta." To look on the bright side, the spill pales in comparison to the millions of gallons of oil that the Coast Guard estimates were dumped in the river following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Yes, folks, millions -- not zero.

sources:

Related Links:

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science

Related Links:

Ask Umbra on trash, toxics, and tots

Top 25 reasons to give a damn about climate change

One doctor’s quest to sound the alarm on ‘wind turbine syndrome’

Here's the good news: The Army Corps of Engineers is "racing" to complete a comprehensive levee system for metropolitan New Orleans by 2011 that actually takes into account global warming, at least in terms of sea-level rise.

Here's the bad news: the levee system under development is wildly insufficient to the growing climate problem, according to many informed critics.

That's because the vast and flat Louisiana coastal area -- sometimes called the "Bangladesh of America" because it could disappear due to sea-level rise alone -- cannot be saved just by building levees. It's the one area of America which, to survive the rising water and bigger hurricanes of a warming world, must develop human-made barrier islands and coastal marshes as an additional emergency defense. These landforms, which can be crafted using the voluminous sediments of the Mississippi River itself, would create a vital buffer that complements the levees, according to a wide range of engineers.

"It all comes down to this: You simply can't build the levees high enough under any scenario in Louisiana," said Clifford Smith, a member of the prestigious Mississippi River Commission, a seven-member panel created by Congress to advise the corps on works projects. "That the corps still doesn't act on this fact, doesn't commit to building wetlands and barrier islands immediately, leaves me so depressed you can't imagine it. I'm in depression over this."

Ironically, many Americans still point to Hurricane Katrina as the event that finally got their attention on global warming. It's impossible to definitively prove or disprove the connection of any single weather event to global warming. But it was Katrina and the record hurricane season of 2005 that left many folks wondering what was up with the weather. Nearly three years later, global warming practically dominates the daily news in dozens of different ways. Author Bill McKibben describes the change in our national awareness this way: "Katrina opened the door and Al Gore walked through it."

Oliver Houck.

Photo: tulane.edu

But even after a Nobel Prize last fall for Gore, who shared it with the world's leading climate scientists, and even after new studies showing hurricanes are getting bigger and more frequent due to warming oceans, the Army Corps can't seem to commit to a protection plan that matches the global climate reality as it pertains to New Orleans.

"The number one thing protecting New Orleans right now is not the corps, it's chance," says Tulane University law professor and coastal protection activist Oliver Houck. "The historical odds show Katrina doesn't come every day. That's all that's really protecting us right now. The odds."

To the corps' credit, its massive "Task Force Hope" levee construction project, costing nearly $15 billion and slated for completion by 2011, will anticipate sea-level rise from global warming roughly equal to what has already been observed in recent decades. The plan also anticipates the natural sinking of the fragile Louisiana coast. Both factors affect how high a hurricane surge tide will be as it moves onto land. The levees, in theory, will also be built wide enough to allow engineers to add at least marginally to their height later on, creating so-called "lifts," according to several spokespeople at the corps.

Dr. Lewis "Ed" Link.

Photo: usace.army.mil

"We know we have warming, and the corps is taking that in as a factor," says Dr. Lewis "Ed" Link, former director of Research and Development at the corps and a chief contributor to the risk assessment modeling underlying the planned levee improvements. "Different [levee] segments will have different improvements based on land contours, but the range is 12 to 15 percent higher levees being planned for."

The problem, according to a growing number of concerned observers, is that past warming rates and impacts are almost certainly no indication of the future now that NASA satellite imagery shows a rapidly deteriorating Greenland ice sheet.

How high will sea level go? Two feet by 2100? Ten feet? How big will hurricanes get? How frequently will they come? It's uncertain, of course, but the observed trends and scientific forecasts keep getting worse. And if there's one region of America that should plan for something akin to "the worst," it's the flat alluvial region of south Louisiana, home to one-third of America's domestic seafood catch, lots and lots of oil and gas infrastructure, and the critically important port of New Orleans.

Both the deepening risks of climate change as well as the range of possible impacts argue for the abandonment of a de facto "levees only" approach, say Houck and others. What's needed with an urgency and commitment equal to the levee plan is a program to build "nature's levees," also known as barrier islands and coastal marshes. These landforms have historically served to greatly lessen the impacts of past hurricanes on New Orleans and the rest of the Louisiana coast. But it's the Army Corps' efforts to control Mississippi River flooding over the past century and a half that have caused these very land forms to erode and vanish.

Corps employees scope out damage caused by Hurricane Rita, a month after Katrina.

Photo: usace.army.mil

More than a million acres of land has turned to water in coastal Louisiana just since World War II. And if the coast has any hope of surviving the next Katrina (whose astonishing surge tide was up to 30 feet as she hit land in Louisiana), then much of this protective coastal terrain must be rebuilt -- literally turning water back to land -- and at a rate that outpaces sea-level rise and the expected growth in storm intensity.

Here's where the planning truly breaks down within the Army Corps process, according to Smith and others. Ambitious initiatives to build new barrier islands and wetlands were expected to emerge from the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration bill passed by Congress in 2006. It called on the corps to present a comprehensive protection plan for coastal Louisiana -- i.e., more than just levees -- by December 2007. The corps missed the deadline, but now expects to deliver the plan this fall.

Unfortunately, no one privy to deliberations within the corps believes an adequate commitment to rapid land building will be forthcoming, no matter how clear the need.

"The problem is it's not in the corps' nature to ask Congress for new problems to solve," said Mark Davis, recent past director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. "This is an organization that historically has been a levee-building organization. That's what it knows how to do. Using levees alone now is like asking a Revolutionary War soldier to fight in Iraq. You don't have the right weapons."

The missing weapon, according to Davis and others, is the Mississippi River itself. Carefully diverting part of the river's muddy water away from the main stem and toward rapidly eroding coastal areas would allow sediments to build up and create land in the ancient delta-forming fashion. Special pipelines and canals could be used to surgically deliver the sediment-rich water to exactly the spots where land is needed most to protect against hurricane surges made worse by sea-level rise. With sufficient planning and funding -- at least $28 billion -- and a willingness to relocate at least some of the coastal population, there's little doubt among engineers and coastal geologists that the process will succeed in making land.

"We could build entire barrier islands in 12 months or less," says Davis, who now directs Tulane's Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy.

There's just no sign so far that the corps is ready to commit to the process. Without it, however, most serious observers view New Orleans as flat-out doomed.

The ultimate problem, according to Davis, is that the corps takes its orders directly from Congress, a body that has only recently begun to discuss climate change seriously, much less act on it. Congress has told the corps to build bigger and better levees as a result of Katrina, and it's obeying. But there have been no direct orders pertaining to global warming. Indeed, just last May, a Senate bill that would require the corps to consider the impact of climate change in designing all its water resources projects nationwide fell nine votes short of the 60 needed to beat a filibuster. In that context, the corps' decision to plan for even modest future sea-level rise in New Orleans might seem a minor miracle.

Will a new U.S. president and larger Democratic majorities in Congress change the nation's approach to saving coastal Louisiana? Maybe. But what's really needed is a realization among a majority of American voters that life without New Orleans will be one of the biggest and most painful -- and perhaps earliest -- casualties of global warming.

And if we can't save New Orleans, is there really any hope for Miami, Charleston, New York, Annapolis, and all the other low-lying coastal cities in the queue?

Related Links:

Global boiling declares war on Thanksgiving

Global climate pact may hinge on EU summit

Will EPA veto or regulate the plunder of Appalachia?

Related Links:

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success