Disconcerting thought on offshore drilling.

While California has managed to put a stop to offshore drilling, it is still a very big part of the Gulf of Mexico. We have seen the coastline of Louisiana and Texas become a new ground zero in the climate change fight. It began with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita storming on shore with major impacts.

Some of it could have been avoided were it not for the fact that the coastal wetlands that could have blocked the storm surge associated with Katrina had been slowly disappearing, due in part to excessive use of nitrogen fertilizers in the corn belt of the upper Mississippi River. Today, scientists are working to restore the wetlands.

The Louisiana Bayous are also the site of the first abandonment of a village due to sea level rise.

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.

But that is not the entire story. In today's edition of Yale University's Environment 360, Michael D. Lemonick writes about the fact that Sea Level Rise does not occur equally in all parts of the world. Along the Gulf Coast of the United States, it is accompanied by a sinking of the Continental Shelf under much of the Gulf of Mexico.

And in some coastal areas — most notably along the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana — the land is falling as well: Thanks to massive oil and gas extraction, the continental shelf is collapsing like a deflated balloon. “The rate of subsidence measured at Grand Isle, Louisiana,” says Rui Ponte, of the private consulting firm Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc, “is almost 10 millimeters per year, compared with two or three in other areas.” That’s especially problematic for a city like New Orleans, which already lies partly below sea level.

This makes the position of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D. LA.) all the more puzzling. While pushing for more exploration and more consumption… all in the name of economic recovery… Landreiu is sealing the fate of her own state, from subsidence, from the creation of more dead zones in the Gulf and finally allowing it to sink further into the ocean.

Is this the wisdom we expect from a Senate where the pace is supposed to allow contemplation of the full impact of an issue? It seems to be what we get. Louisiana Greens need to take this issue into the election cycle. If allowed to continue, it could be that Louisiana will be the first state to relocate climate refugees and the rebuilding of New Orleans might have been a waste of money as it sinks further below the level of a rising sea.

The lesson for California Greens is that our own California Delta is headed for a similar fate as coastal Louisiana.

Tale of Two Deltas

When I first started to closely follow the water issues surrounding the California Delta, one of the first items I read was by Dr. Jeffrey Mount of U.C. Davis Center for Watershed Studies. (Various stories are around. In this one on MSNBC Dr. Mount makes the point.)

Yesterday, a Federal Judge put a large portion of the blame directly on the Army Corps of Engineers.

"It is the court's opinion that the negligence of the Corps, in this instance by failing to maintain the MRGO properly, was not policy, but insouciance, myopia and short-sightedness," U.S. District Court Judge Stanwood Duval Jr. wrote in his lengthy ruling, referring to the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet canal.

"For over 40 years, the Corps was aware that the Reach II levee protecting Chalmette and the Lower Ninth Ward was going to be compromised by the continued deterioration of the MRGO ... The Corps had an opportunity to take a myriad of actions to alleviate this deterioration or rehabilitate this deterioration and failed to do so. Clearly, the expression 'talk is cheap' applies here."

When I look at the water legislation passed recently by the California Legislature, and signed with great fanfare by our Greenwashed Gov, I have to think that no lessons were learned, no effective actions were taken and the levees are in worse shape today than they were when Dr. Mount was quoted on MSNBC.

It will take years before the Sacramento Bureaucracy admits that this effort, just like the Feinstein crafted CALFED program from the 90's, is another failure. I only hope that the levees in the Delta do not themselves fail before then. If that happens, we know who is culpable. Calfifornia Department of Water Resources, California State Legislature and, lest I forget, the Army Corps of Engineers.

The world is flat and very crowded.

Yes, thanks to Joe Romm at Climate Progress, I have been reading Thomas Friedman again. In particular, I want to call attention to this excerpt from his OpEd today at the NY Times.

According to the 2006 U.N. population report, “The world population will likely increase by 2.5 billion ... passing from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050. This increase is equivalent to the total size of the world population in 1950, and it will be absorbed mostly by the less developed regions, whose population is projected to rise from 5.4 billion in 2007 to 7.9 billion in 2050.”

The energy, climate, water and pollution implications of adding another 2.5 billion mouths to feed, clothe, house and transport will be staggering. And this is coming, unless, as the deniers apparently believe, a global pandemic or a mass outbreak of abstinence will freeze world population — forever.

People always get anxious about what you are going to say next when you start talking about population, especially when you think that they might all want to have the same consumer that so many Americans buy so much of. Add it up and try to calculate just how much climate change is going on. This can not be sustained and those who deny, doubt, delay action should be held criminally culpable for any and all failures, just as the Army Corps of Engineers has been held responsible for the flooding of the 9th Ward by Katrina.

With all of the other economic crises facing us, we can not afford the price of inaction. The time for civil disobedience is now.