He is all too American.

Most of my family is there, and I spent much of my childhood there. I have the same feeling as you. It’s such a beautiful, unique place, and I don’t think the locals will ever abandon it. City park with those beautiful oak trees will always be one of my favorite places on earth.

it has more character that SF

Hackernews progresses one carmudgeon funeral at a time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

Yup.

No, that's a healer.

Yes, it is a question of magnitude and also of planning for those specific threats. To catch storm surges you'd use catch areas, dry basins and some sacrificial areas - parks come to mind - where storm surge water can be temporarily held until the pumps catch up. There should be extra pump capacity held in spare for these occurrences, both regular pumps as well as mobile units which can be placed where the need is highest. You also don't just use one dike around the whole area but divide it into sections with 'sleeper dikes' - dikes which normally do not border flooded areas but which can catch water which somehow makes it past the main dikes - behind the main ones. There are reams of literature on the subject to be had from places like the Netherlands where all this has been daily life for centuries, it is not a new problem.

That can be solved using desalination of seawater, an energy-intensive process which is tailor-made for the abundance of solar power in the area. If for some reason desalination is not deemed sufficient it may be possible to slow the seepage by creating deep barriers between coast and land [1]. If this results in groundwater emergence so much the better, just pump it out and send it to the water treatment plant. Excess water can be pumped elsewhere, either over the dikes or into the ground outside the dikes or wherever else it may be needed or beneficial. Since pumps are needed anyway the criticism in the article - reliance on pumps is costly and can lead to a point of failure in flood mitigation plans - is negated. Also, pumps have been used as part of flood mitigation plans for centuries in places like the Netherlands so there is a lot of data to be found for those who need it.

[1] https://coastalscience.noaa.gov/news/hardening-shorelines-ma...

No, it is a realistic approach to a problem which has been facing many places elsewhere in the world where it has been solved using engineering. It is far more apt to call climate doom predictions statements of religious faith given the history of engineering solutions to climate-related problems and the close resemblance of climate doom preachers to those deriving their prophecies from scripture.

Here's a few books on the subject which might be of interest for those who want to widen their view on the ever-changing climate. All of them have in common that they do not deny the climate is changing nor that human activities influence how it changes. Where they differ from the doom narrative is that they approach climate change in the way humans have dealt with other environmental problems to lessen or negate their impact instead of by preaching some grand narrative on how society should be run to avoid catastrophe.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Never-Environmental-Alarmi...

False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet by Bjorn Lomborg

https://www.amazon.com/False-Alarm-Climate-Change-Trillions/...

Unsettled (Updated and Expanded Edition): What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters by Steven E. Koonin

https://www.amazon.com/Unsettled-Updated-Expanded-Climate-Sc...

You talk about "blame". Were they the ones that made the decisions causing the current ecological disaster?

Society fucked up, and that fuck up is gonna affect a lot of people who are not able to move out. Some sort of bailout will be needed.

stick to software, you have no career in comedy.

No he was saying he doesn't care that creating a backdoor for encryption means anyone can use that backdoor and that you must both follow the law by being secure but also follow the law by being insecure. People arguing that that creating encryption that both did and didn't have a backdoor was impossible got that little gem in return.

He was effectively saying this: https://xkcd.com/538/

The Jones act doesn't prohibit anything about bringing ships into the US to construct things. The closest reason I can think of you thinking that is it allows injured sailors to sue for damages. Maybe that equipment leads to a huge number of injuries?

We should have a one-time buyout for flood zones: pay someone enough to buy a median home somewhere similar and turn the land into a nature preserve (let mangroves return to protect Florida coast, etc.). Put a cap on it so we’re not buying new mansions for a few rich people with beach houses but otherwise keep it simple so people aren’t impoverished into becoming a drain on society.

I have no expectation that we’ll be willing to invest in our neighbors, though.

Agreed, building on a flood plain is incredibly stupid. The city of East Grand Forks demolished all of the buildings in the flood plain portion of town after the 1997 Red River floods and turned it into a park. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Grand_Forks_Greenway

The “majority” of people aren’t so poor they can’t move over the multi-decade timescale this article is talking about. This country has a huge level of internal migration. 17 million Americans move every year.

Why do people have these blinders where they can’t view any issue except from the perspective of the minority of people who don’t have any resources? Why are so many people moving to places like Florida that are threatened by climate change?

> de facto banned

seems a little strong, but I understand why they say this

> climate change is real, it has deleterious effects on our world, and we should take collective action to mitigate or even reverse it.

plenty of comments on HN to this day will disagree, saying climate change is some anti-progress conspiracy or hasn't been studied enough or won't be that bad, etc etc.

Way too many Americans either don't know or disbelieve that a substantial chunk of the body politic, and now our elected and military leaders, actually literally believe this type of stuff.

IMO any eschatological beliefs whatsoever should be 100% universally disqualifying for any political or military position, no matter what book title or special ancient zombie character they're filed under.

so, you're talking not about renters but about homeowners, and you're saying housing prices are up everywhere else except they are down in New Orleans? I'm not from NOLA so I'm not going to bone up on prices, but I do doubt what you are saying holds water.

The reality is that New Orleans is simply not important enough.

Even the biggest ultra conservative GOP voting redneck will have to admit that America can't survive without NYC which is why it will get it's seawall.

The absence of a legal mechanism does not imply the absence of a mechanism (or even the absence of a peaceful mechanism.)

While there is a legal process for amending the Constitution which, as you note, is likely intractable in the status quo conditions, Constitutional change—whether peaceful (even if there is the implicit consequence of force if compromise is not reached) or not—historically and globally is often an extralegal process that is retrospectively legalized, rather than a legal process under pre-existing rules.

Systemically, the problem is that there needs to be a last person, and yet people leaving expect market value for their homes which normally happens by selling to the next person. The last person can currently only get the money if a disaster strikes and insurance pays out. To do it ahead of schedule, insurance would have to pay out sooner, which means there would have to be some kind of government intervention to make it happen.

> For one, if you own property there, you’re basically either caught holding a bag with life changing amounts of money lost, or trying to pass it off to another sucker which just feels unethical.

every day you wait this gets worse and I am not sure what is unethical about selling a home. many people have to move (e.g. for work) but if it would put you mind at ease (ethically speaking) you can put a disclaimer on the listing. of course you also have an entire political party followers who believe all this is a hoax so you can put that on the listing too /s (last sentence)

What if you sold your property to a soulless property development investment fund?

i work in insure tech, in the E&S space, which is where all of the flood and wind polices gets placed. Actuaries have nothing to do with it --- the cost of hurricane insurance comes from Moody's RMS and Verisk AIR, the only two CAT models the carriers and re-insurance companies use. Actuaries price the non-cat risk.

They can still get insurance for flooding?

Keep an eye on the sales number before and after this article drops. Something tells me it will not be going up.

For less and less, presumably? Or is the housing situation so bad that prices rise even when the area will soon be underwater?

It doesn't even matter, really.

Suppose one person follows the sage advice of the HN glibertarians, sells his house and moves out. Good for him. But does this solve the problem? No, because now there's someone else there. Possibly a more desperate, poorer person. They can't all follow your advice, no more than they can all be best in their high school class, run the fastest in the marathon, or being on the winning side of a prediction market bet.

I mean this is a sign of the flawed political process. But even in a working democracy if people arent interested, politican mostly wont care. So Americans dont think New Orleans is worth to preserve?

> I can't help but feel I'm offsetting the people "down south" with their more expensive property that is literally underwater.

I am not sure about Louisiana, but you very well may be.

State insurance commissions sometimes promulgate onerous regulations that effectively require cost shifting. For example, if it's profitable to keep operating in a state overall, but you can't raise premiums or drop policies for the riskiest properties, then you just raise premiums across the board and let the less-risky subsidize the unprofitable policies.

And rising reinsurance premiums mean that everybody pays more to account for increasing risks and costs in the insurers' portfolios, which may be concentrated in riskier areas far from your own property.

I think GP might be using "state" in the common international English definition, e.g. state in the sense of "sovereign state" or "city-state", not "US state". I would agree with you though that any US government actually implementing the idea today is hard to imagine, but I can easily imagine that after 2 other cities suffer a climate-related disaster first, then there will be the political will to bring a program like this to life. It's a creative policy idea, I love the thought that was put into this.

Louisiana is just the state with a major city closest to the point of it having to be abandoned. There will be more that follow in other states, such as Florida.

USA loves socialism in most forms that benefit landowners

What is there to discuss? If you have the ability to move away, then you move away, done.

We aren't discussing this particular group because we're a too emotional to think straight. We're discussing this group because it's the one that will bear the brunt of the suffering and it's the one where there isn't an obvious "just let them figure it out and it'll be fine" solution.

> it's an emotional obsession with small percentages of the population

Ah, right: it's a small percentage of the population, so we should just let them die, "and decrease the surplus population", right?

This kind of callousness is one of the biggest problem with the tech industry today. We learned to think in numbers, and some of us never learned to think about the people behind those numbers.

Yes, there are some kinds of problem where you really have to think about the numbers, and not the people, because if you try to save everyone you will end up saving no one.

This is not one of those.

The people who can move now, without financial hardship, get to make their own choices about when and whether to get out. The people we, as a society, should be thinking about are the people who cannot get out—either without financial ruination, or at all—because they are the ones we as a society must help.

Tragically, given the state of America today, we aren't likely to help them. And many of them are likely to die, whether by drowning when the next Hurricane Katrina inundates New Orleans, or by slow starvation and disease when they and everyone else in their community and support network are left homeless.

[Edit] The following comment can be read very snarkily but that is not the intention. I'm legitimately interested + curious:

Very interesting! Does it affect the point that insurers (even if not actuaries) put a high price on this risk and that the price is subsequently suppressed by government insurance subsidies?

The difference is that schools, crime, etc., are all what they are right now. It's there, it's verifiable. Anybody buying in has access to the full information. They can walk around the neighborhood and see for themselves.

The flooding and inevitable destruction of the city is decades away. It's still abstract. Some people might even think it is preventable.

I don't think it's unethical to sell. People have their own motivations. Maybe a buyer just wants it for 5 years, who knows. Probably the risk will get baked into market price. What does need to happen though is the federal government needs to step up, because they're the only ones who can, and guarantee they will buy it for a certain percentage of appraised market value. I would imagine that percentage will decline over time until they declare the city a total loss, after which your property is declared worthless. If they do this now, they can make it possible for people to leave with some semblance of dignity and mitigate hardships.

Is it unethical to lie in order to sell something? Yes, yes it is.

This sort of puffery is relatively minor and is thus not tremendously unethical, but it is unethical.

no one really lied to me, most certainly not the seller. blame my wife for that one :)

I would not put this on my listing, what are you smoking mate?! (I own a condo in brightwood park in northwest dc, been sketchy since 2008 when I bought it, you need an address? lol)

We don't need them to "leave now." We don't need them to move to California. We need them to move to Baton Rogue over a period of decades. Under a high emissions scenario, sea level is projected to rise 6 feet by 2100. New Orleans is on average 1-2 feet below sea level (up to 10 feet). Baton Rouge is 60 feet above sea level. The average elevation of the state is 100 feet.

In any given year, 15% of the population moves, and 40% of them move to a different county. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/why-people-mo.... It's insane to say that most people wouldn't be able to make a once-in-a-lifetime move just a couple of towns over sometime over the next few decades.

This is true. It is also true that waiting until things bottom out will make things even worse. It will be more expensive and options will be more limited.

There will need to be a federal bailout to relocate everyone who needs help. The government should also probably announce a policy that there will be no future disaster relief that involves rebuilding, only relocating.

New Orleans will be the first, but not the last American city to collapse. Miami is probably next. Salt Lake City could very well run out of water, nevermind the increasingly toxic lakebed. Phoenix too. In the next hundred years people are going to learn why environmentalists use the word "sustainability" so much.