Likewise, the flood plains of Texas are cheap and nice to live in when there are no floods and when floods are imminent you have sufficient warning that you can evacuate and the federal government will compensate you. You can then go back and live there. This one is harder because it is unpleasant to move and you don’t receive the inflated price but it does incentivize some on the border.
Of course the fires in Malibu are a story of going too far in the wrong time. If they’d had a sympathetic administration in the federal government likely some kind of compensation scheme could have been worked out. So you have to work on the politics and the economics.
At the very least a moratorium on new builds and additions should go into effect immediately.
Private insurers haven’t been willing to cover large parts of the south for decades. The NFIP was the backstop and already overstretched when Katrina hit New Orleans, which is when it first got bailed out. It’s been a downward spiral ever since.
I've no idea what the going rate for insurance is currently in New Orleans but it has to be crazy right?
Wouldn’t plan it but sounds like could’ve been a solid strategy assuming trust in timely condemnations (out of homeowner control, I think).
But so is lower Manhattan, Miami, 60% of the land in the Netherlands, almost all of Bangladesh, along with numerous other places.
Now 3m-7m is vastly higher than any current predictions, but hey lets scare monger about a single city!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-026-01820-z
It appears that if you go through the link in this Guardian article, you will get free access to the full paper:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/04/new-orleans-...
The southern third of LA has ground composed of spongy organic material deposited by rivers since the last ice age as opposed to solid ground largely made up of silicates and minerals covering bedrock.
And would this silt deposition actually occur at a rate that would fully counteract sea level rise, just as the huge rise in sea levels at the end of the last ice age did not mean that the delta disappeared?
If so, the danger to New Orleans would be entirely avoidable by changes in local land use.
Perhaps the fundamental issue is that river deltas tend to be dynamic, with the watercourse continually changing, which isn't really compatible with a city in a fixed location. (Hence the damaging attempts at stopping this.)
'Point of no return': New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level
I think the article didn’t talk enough about how Louisiana is far too poor to undertake a planned relocation without a vast amount of federal help.
Then, you’ve got the fact that Louisiana’s political leadership is some of the worst in the country. The article touched on it but arguably didn’t discuss it enough. These are not people who will do anything that benefits constituents. Arguably they aren’t even benefiting their donors by burying their head in the sand, although I imagine their donors have accepted that they’ll just leave New Orleans with their profits in hand when the time comes.
take some of that $1 BILLION PER DAY being used to bomb innocent kids and civilians in Iran, soon Cuba, and help innocent people in your own country relocate
if the current administration is in charge the week New Orleans is about to go undersea they will "solve the problem" by banning FEMA from doing anything or just defunding it to $1/day
I've no reason to doubt this is absolutely true.
that's not what they're gonna do though....
> The region has “crossed the point of no return,” the paper’s authors wrote, adding New Orleans “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century.”
sorry, Gulf of what ? /s
Using the Census ACS age brackets, about 20-ish% of louisiana's population is under 15, and another 20 is between 15 and 29. Everyone 30 and older adds up to the other 60.
So a hair over 60% are were at least 7.
But that's who lives there now not who lived there then. Between 2005 and 2006 about the state population dropped by 6% and most of that displaced population never returned - people coming in from elsewhere weren't there for Katrina. So the fraction who were both living there AND old enough to remember it is considerably smaller than 60%.
So like I said, roughly half.
Relative sea level rise = actual sea level rise + land subsidence
Cities like New Orleans are suffering a double whammy: not only are they subsiding (sinking), but the sea levels are also rising and so between the two they're in grave trouble.
Land Sinking: + ~8.0 mm/yr
I wonder why CNN have decided to highlight oceans rising and not mention land sinking anywhere in the entire article? Is it possible they have an agenda?
This isn't a left/right thing either.
Because water incursion is a much more difficult thing to deal with, in terms of infrastructure and prevention.
Also, let me know when the rest of coastal land has the same sinking as N.O.
A single catastrophic event that causes a temporal rise of several meters can permanently alter the coastline and storms are worsening.
They probably should have mentioned it, yeah. But if you’re on a sinking ship in the ocean that does mean that the water level is rising relative to you and that is most of your problem.
And are we supposed to not be prepared and informed about the ocean rising at over 3mm per year? I wouldn’t exactly jump to being dismissive of sea level rise that is so dramatic. Every 10 years you’re gaining over an inch, every 100 you’re gaining about a foot. And then you’ve got the ice caps melting which is an impending climate disaster.
In reality, the right-wing criticism of the “mainstream media” has been a form of projection and justification for legitimizing its own propaganda network. Meanwhile, the right denies their own mainstream status: the “mainstream media lies” but the #1 cable news network is a right wing network, the Joe Rogan Experience is the #1 podcast that hosts political guests but isn’t part of the “lying press,” and this is all justification for the FCC to send threatening letters to terrestrial networks for their choice of jokes on late night talk shows or their daytime talk shows not being conservative enough.
CNN misses one detail in a highly scientific story and they get accused of having an agenda, Fox News trots out an employee in a mask pretending to be antifa and nobody bats an eye.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t scrutinize all media, but this particular dynamic is something that has been noticeable.
Louisiana isn’t poor by almost any objective measure. They’re in the bottom half of US states by GDP per capita (not in the bottom 10), but they’d be in the top 20 countries in the world by GDP per capita if they were a country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
They’re just behind Denmark by GDP per capita and ahead of Germany, Sweden, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and the UK.
Drive through LA and those places you mentioned and you'll see it.
Also, use PPP.
Uh, by the objective measure of my own two eyes? You can trot out all the fancy numbers you want, I’m not blind. The resource extraction that goes on in Louisiana does not necessarily trickle down to its residents nor even stays in the state.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/louisiana
Subscores:
* Crime 50th * Economy 50th * Education 46th
and on and on. In fact, I can't find a single top line number when they AREN'T in the bottom 10.
> The pump station complex, which is the largest of its type in the world, consists of 11 each 5,444 horsepower Caterpillar engines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Intracoastal_Waterway_Wes...
To what I think is your larger point, that project is a small part of the efforts at water control around New Orleans. But, so far they have generally been viewed as beneficial and the various governmental entities keep paying for them -- why should we expect anything different in the future ? Roads get repaved all over the country, bridges rebuilt, and the levees rebuilt. There's always an "infrastructure crisis" of the decade, the chatter is how we as a society judge the expense and confirm it's necessary.
I mean hard to say. "Climate change" means that weather patterns will change on a location by location basis, it's not all for the "worse" (climate doesn't care one way or another about what humans in particular value), and so far the 2000s have had more storms hit Louisiana than the 2010s and the 2020s have been milder than the 2010s. It's entirely possible that climate change reduces the number of storms that hit new orleans
If it's as the earlier poster said that sinking is 8mm per year, versus 3.2mm and they point out the 3.2, don't you think this news organisation has missed the main detail?
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-col...
Louisiana is 32nd for tax revue per capita.
But on the other hand, the timing (having seen over the past week or so several articles about the most disastrous IPCC model now having become implausible) makes me wonder if some individual actors are thinking they need something to shore up their disaster prophesying.
There’s a difference between “there exists people there who are poor” and the state and local governments are poor.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-col...
Louisiana is 32nd for tax revue per capita.
They're also, once again, dead last in economic oppurtunity.
Frankly, I call bullshit on your interpretation. Have you ever set foot in Louisiana? I've lived in the deep south my entire life.
The entire south, outside of a few cities is generally pretty poor, but Louisiana/Arkansas/Mississippi is just a different level. That's what happens when you elect a bunch of MAGA morons.
PS: The local governments are doing everything possible to NOT help their citizens.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-col...
Louisiana is 32nd for tax revue per capita.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-col...
Louisiana is 32nd for tax revue per capita.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-col...
Louisiana is 32nd for tax revue per capita.