In the Background

Tuesday, September 6, 2005,
     We've entered the blame-o-rama phase of Hurricane Katrina. I actually heard Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff sparring with NPR's Robert Siegal on the air last Thursday, and a more weasily performance than Chertoff's would be hard to find in any bureaucratic circle of hell. FEMA chief Michael Brown gave new dimension to the word "clusterfuck" by blocking private charity shipments of food and water into New Orleans and making the armed forces "work around" his agency in order to get anything done. And it was revealed yesterday that a navy hospital ship idled with empty beds off the Louisiana coast without orders while old people died slow deaths on the sidewalks outside the Convention Center.

    There has already been one proposal for rebuilding the city, from Daniel Libeskind, whose proposal for turning the World Trade Center site into the set for a German expressionist horror movie won the hearts and minds of the architectural mandarins in New York. Libeskind said that New Orleans should adopt a jazz theme. Wow! Maybe they should think about serving Creole food to go with it.

     The actual tendency in practice, is to build back pretty much what was there before, because the insurance companies demand it. If a strip mall was washed away, then the insurer will only finance the rebuilding of a strip mall. This is most unfortunate, particularly for those places further east of New Orleans along the Gulf Coast, and a hundred miles inland, because they were composed primarily of suburban sprawl. If they rebuild along that template, they will do so in the face of strong signals from reality that the age of Easy Motoring is over. The romance of the car may be too great to overcome in Dixie.

      We have as yet no word how the cluster of downtown skyscrapers in New Orleans proper fared, but there is a good chance that some of them will not survive the damage to their foundations. It would be a shame to rebuild priapic towers in a new era when the urban norm probably should not exceed seven stories (the walkable limit for buildings with stairs). All our big cities will be contracting in the years ahead, as the electric grid becomes less reliable, and the demographic trend of the past two hundred years reverses, with populations shifting back to small towns and agricultural regions. It was interesting to see, finally, that the driest place in New Orleans was the French Quarter, the original settlement.

      The poor neighborhoods were composed largely of shotgun shacks, little post-war brick bunkers, and government-built housing projects. Virtually all of them appear to be ruined. I'd guess that few were insured, and the insurers will probably try to label it "flood damage," which generally exempts them from paying out. The population that inhabited them is now dispersed, and some of those who feel that they lost everything may not return. These neighborhoods will be blank slates. But they will also remain low-lying in relation to a coastline that is losing its wetland buffers against an ocean that is seeing a cycle of more violent storms, probably due to global warming. Anything new built in these wards will not be insurable.

     Meanwhile momentous things are swirling in the background. The price of gasoline may retreat sometime in two to six weeks, but I doubt it will fall below the $2.50 range again. In fact, having gone way above the psychological barrier of $3.00, the gasoline retailers may resist falling below that. There have been no new oil refineries built in the US since the late 1970s. There will be no new ones built now, despite the crunch on refined "product." Why? Because the oil companies understand that they are in a twilight industry and refineries represent huge investments in future activity, which the corporations correctly perceive will be shrinking as global oil production passes peak.

     The biggest shock to the public lies a couple of months ahead when the cost of natural gas for home heating (50 percent of the dwellings in America) combines with stubbornly higher pump prices to whap them upside the head. Natural gas at around $12.00 is now many times what it cost as recently as 2003 ($3.00). A lot of Americans will be shivering this winter and some of the weak, old, and poor will die as a result.

     President Bush has already taken a hit on his appointees' Chinese Fire Drill response to disaster management. But the toll from the energy problems the whole nation faces will be more insidious. Strapped for cash from filling their gas tanks, unable to buy Christmas presents at WalMart, and huddled around space heaters, the public will be wondering why they were so poorly prepared.

Comments

[nuttymango]

Hurricanes are a national security issue. The Bush administration just showed us how it will deal with the next 9/11, global warming, declining oil production, and epidemic outbreaks.

Bush cut funds for the levees in New Orleans to pay for war against a country with no ties to 9/11, no ties to Osama Bin Laden, and no WMD. He gutted FEMA and staffed it, like his other appointments, with people whose only qualification is loyalty to the Republican party over and above loyalty to American people and our Constitution.

The Result is 1800 dead troops, 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians, and God knows how many thousands dead in New Orleans. In Iraq $12 billion has been given to Cheney's firm through no-bid contracts, $9 billion has been lost (just gone, no one knows where), and 10,000 human beings have been detained without trial. Detention without trial is a fundamental violation and a threat to democracy. So is torture: Sean Baker, innocent American tortured by mistake; Maher Arar, innocent Canadian tortured by mistake; Manadel Al Jamadi, hung from the ceiling and beaten to death. Was he a terrorist? We'll never know because the Bush administration abandoned the Constitutionally mandated requirement for due process.

The Bush administration is not protecting the American people, not upholding their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution, and they are looting the federal treasury.

The Declaration of Independence tells us that government derives its “just Powers from the consent of the governed.” It's time for Americans to withdraw our consent, using the tools bequeathed to us by the Constitution, and hold accountable what will certainly be recorded as the most corrupt administration in U.S. history. Please lend your voice in any way you can. Letters to editors and elected officials are a good start.

[JayVTGreen]

The guys over at Lenin's Tomb
http://www.leninology.blogspot.com/
have all the stuff on what's going on regarding the Katrina distaster and are saying what needs to be said. For me it's an invaluable resource and blows everything else away. Your readers should check it out.

[kd]

Thanks, Jim. Your thoughts on what will happen next--ie: the "rebuilding" of New Orleans & environs--are clear, probably correct.

Then of course there's what's "swirling in the background..."

[Sue]

Chertoff reminds me of a fetish doll. He's a ghoul. He should be strung up with the others like him at Marie Laveau's House of Voodoo...

[DigitalDjigit]

Chertoff means "Satan" in Russian.

I disagree that 7 stories should be the limit. Getting electricity to run elevators will not be a problem for quite some time (well after the peak). Putting up tall buildings allows more density and thus less sprawl. You are right on with everything else.

[sipsey]

I am an ex-New Orleanian. My wife and I lived there for 7 years, our first child was born there, and we left our hearts there. As much as it pains me to think this, New Orleans may not be rebuilt. This much is sure: the city that we all loved is gone forever. In dispersing the poor black residents around the country, the engine that fed NO's unique culture is gone.

[doyoumrjones]

The swiftness of the "blob", a la de Zengotita's "Mediated" book, to atomize this chaos into witless memes big and small is quite a wakeup call. The fact that a call for impeachment for our pro-business administration by an organized opposition is most frightening of all.

[brain dead]

"Letters to editors and elected officials are a good start."

I am on hiatus from a two to three letter a week habit over the span of two years. Where I was printed in letters sections, my thougths were so edited as to gut my thesis or make it seem as if I had barely a third grade grasp of the english language.

Our supposedly elected officials send back form letters thanking me for my concern if they acknowledge my writing at all.

If change is to come, it will come from the blunt end of enough persons realising that "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

[Andy R]

DigitalDjigit,

Taller buildings require more energy to cool - especially in the sunbelt. Go into any attic in July - that's what the HVAC has to overcome in taller buildings.
Kunstler is into "human scale" architecture, which pretty much precludes skyscrapers, but from a practical standpoint, tall buildings in the South are big time energy eaters.

[DigitalDjigit]

Andy R: didn't realise that. Thanks.

[Bryan Price]

"If they rebuild along that template, they will do so in the face of strong signals from reality that the age of Easy Motoring is over. The romance of the car may be too great to overcome in Dixie."

Hasn't the whole nation pretty much passed that benchmark already?

[Syltty]

"The guys over at Lenin's Tomb"

Do you really read that shit?

[kd]

A friend of mine, one of the best men I know, writes, in response to the question "What is the ANSWER?":

There are no answers, except the obvious ones: know what you see before you and know where to then step.

[phonono]

In Helsinki (the capital of Finland), if I recall right, seven stories is the maximum allowed height for new buildings in a city center according to a municipal law voted many years ago.

"The guys over at Lenin's Tomb"

Do you really read that shit?
Well, they cannot be worse than the guys at Reagan's tomb.

[Tom Lord]

Very nice, Mr. K. (I'll overlook the obligatory Bush-bashing :-)

In the spirit of brainstorming to the blogosphere:

Isn't it increasingly obvious that the intractability of restoring NOLA lowlands combined with the pre-existing and now much worse ecological crisis suggests that the NOLA of the future will be a much smaller "boutique" city, with some of the former territory give over to wetlands restoration? And won't that be an additional, *big* addition to the tourism value of the place with spillover benefit for the surrounding region? And isn't this a big whoopass opportunity to radically rethink the strategy for maintaining the mouth of the Mississippi as a shipping lane?

"There is a little bit of heaven in every disaster area." -- Hugh Romney
-t

[Richard Bennett]

"Bush cut funds for the levees in New Orleans to pay for war against a country with no ties to 9/11, no ties to Osama Bin Laden, and no WMD."

Blah blah blah. The one levee that broke was bashed by a barge, and it wasn't the one that the Corps of Engineers was worried about.

Back to your talking points.

[Richard Bennett]

"The price of gasoline may retreat sometime in two to six weeks, but I doubt it will fall below the $2.50 range again."

I'd be willing to bet that it will.

[Joe Grills]

Meanwhile momentous things are swirling in the background. The price of gasoline may retreat sometime in two to six weeks, but I doubt it will fall below the $2.50 range again. In fact, having gone way above the psychological barrier of $3.00, the gasoline retailers may resist falling below that.

You hit it on the head again, Jim

[TheInterloafter]

DigitalDjigit: Don't give up so easily.

Andy R: Tall buildings require a lot of energy to cool but they require *less* energy to cool than the equivalent sprawl, even, or should I say especially, in the south. Skyscrapers don't have to be the hermetically-sealed modernist crap that they've been since WWII. They could take the form of those beautiful elegant 1920s towers that we have in a precious few of our older cities - with windows that open and counterweighted elevators that require minuscule amounts of energy to run. Human-scaled walkable neighborhoods are best, certainly, but anything that reduces sprawl is a great.

[kd]

http://www.thehappytutor.com/archives/2005/09/the_social_cont.html

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Not bad, Interloafter.

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I wonder what will really happen to New Orleans & other areas Katrina hit: Will folks move back? Will many decide to stay in Texas? Who will build/rebuild? What will it be like? Who will profit, who will pay? Who will decide?Property values, pay scales, rents, mortgages, utilities, infrastructure, demographics...how much will change?

*

Richard, let's hear more of your thoughts on gas prices.

[Richard Bennett]

The market sets gas prices, not "psychological barriers," and gas retailers don't fix prices, the compete. When the supply comes back to normal, prices will fall back to $1.80-2.00 gallon, and that will take 3-6 months.

Yesterday I drove to Seattle and found prices all the way from $2.60 to $3.10.

Don't sell your car for a horse and buggy just yet.

[kd]

But even before Katrina, many folks were predicting gas prices going up.

Prices were past $1.80 long before the hurricane. What would make them drop down to $1.80 in 3-6 months?

PS: No horse & buggy for me, but I'm keeping my bicycle (& myself) in good shape. But I like to ride it anyway.

[Richard Bennett]

Prices were high for the last week before Katrina because of a refinery fire.

It's all about supply and demand. The West Coast puts itself at a disadvantage by requiring fancy blends, which are only produced at a few refineries.

Why don't you tell the children what it was like to build the Alaska Pipeline, Kim? I'll bet they never heard about it from somebody who was part of the effort.

[SqueakyRat]

Prices were high for the last week before Katrina because of a refinery fire.

Gas prices have been way over $2/g for most of the summer, seems to me. Oil is being traded up on every item of bad supply news, no matter how small, of which there is always plenty. And it doesn't go down much when things seem to ease up. This is because traders know that there is little or no spare capacity.

Ironically, Katrina itself may drive down oil prices, since shut-down refineries can't absorb it.

[Greg]

Re reconstruction, Rove is pulling strings behind the scenes and, as usual, politics trumps policy and good governance. New Orleans was the Democratic engine of Louisiana. Now that the NO poor are dispersed throughout the country, do you really think the administration will let them come back, even if they wanted to? Sadly, NO will never be the same.