What Would Another Hurricane Season Do To The Republicans?

This may not be a proper Environment forum post, but I am wondering what effect another hurricane season like the one now passing would have on GOP state legislators and GOP congressional incumbents. Next year's hurricane season is already supposedly going to be as bad as this one, and the folks living in Florida and not so far from the Gulf will be still picking up the pieces of the 2005 season.

I expect that after two seasons of suffering as refugees under the Banana Republicans, a lot of folks are likely to be riled. While I suspect that New Orleans' mayor Nagin and Louisiana's governor Blanco are in danger of being sacked by the voters, I can't help but think that Packyderm Party incumbents might start to worry.

And that NOAA sees nothing but more of the same for next year (as per this morning's NPR), we won't have long to wait.

More importantly what will it do to the oil & gas companies & the insurance industries?

Most importantly, what will it do to the millions and millions of people who live along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts, to say nothing of the land they live on.

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1) What's "fair" has almost nothing to do with people's voting habits.

2) Although hurricane seasons appear to obey cycles, it has also been recently demonstrated that (a) human greenhouse has emissions definitely are increasing both atmospheric and ocean temperatures. and (b) that these temperature increases are definitely making hurricanes more intense.

3) Although the Bush administration is not exactly to "blame" for any given hurricane season, they most certainly are to blame for doing nothing about reducing fossil fuel usage, and in fact for explicitly acting to encourage fossil fuel usage.

4) The Bush administration is also to blame for gutting FEMA, thus rendering the federal government unable to respond to the inevitable hurricane disasters coming our way.

(edit) I have to grudgingly give BushCo a bit of credit for talking up nuclear power, which I approve of on the grounds that it's an important greenhouse-free alternative to fossil fuels.

Bush, twice cut Crops of Engineer funds that were supposed to go to rebuilding the levees, all the while ignoring warnings from all directions about what a levee break would do to the Crescent City.
As a musician who lived & studied Jazz there, I blame Bush and his supporters for destroying the city that gave us Jazz and Funk

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The uranium Niger business, the "dirty bomb" talk, the "mushroom cloud" business, the hype terrorist attacks on nuclear power plants, the terrorist nuclear weapons stuff, the fuel diversion attention, the enrichment scare stories...

...none of this has worked to improve the image of nuclear energy. All of these are talked up by the Bush administration at the very same time they completely ignore and minimize the climate crisis.

From a technical standpoint all of this stuff publicized by the Bushies is ridiculous on its face to someone who understands nuclear technology - as are most of the other talismanic objections - but nonetheless all of this rote stuff has been placed into general conciousness - and all of it can be summoned easily into common parlance, as I see all the time.

In fact the nuclear renaissance was set in motion - discreetly - in the Clinton administration. It was the Clinton administration that promoted the fissioning of weapons grade plutonium (the only sensible alternative for nuclear disarmament) is commercial reactors. This represented a de facto acknowledgement that the use of nuclear energy is generally safe. I have little doubt that if President-elected Gore has been seated in office, that ultimately he would have smoothed the way for the embrace of reality - the political difficulties aside.

The other big factor in the nuclear renaissance has little to do with the environment and every thing to do with economics, specifically the inevitable surge in natural gas prices. Coal plants suffer almost as much from NIMBY as do nuclear plants, but natural gas - a dangerous and dirty fuel - has been acceptable to most people. During the 1990's the path of least resistance was simply to build a new natural gas fueled plant whenever new capacity was needed.

Nuclear energy however is as cheap as coal now, and every power executive in the world is aware of that fact. Most have not be willing to embrace this reality from a business strategy because most have been intimidated by public fantasy and public perception. Many people now are rethinking their knee jerk opposition to nuclear power - many of them, like me, with no reference to the pablum issued by the denizens of the "culture of corruption" in Washington. I began to rethink nuclear power in the late 1980's, when I recognized that not everyone in Kiev was killed by Chernobyl. I have long been aware of the crisis represented by fossil fuels, and that was even before the implications of the greenhouse effect became widely known. When I embraced this line of thinking, nobody knew who the fuck George W. Bush was.

If the Bushies really wanted nuclear power - they would have embraced and not rejected greenhouse gas limitations proposals. It is technically very, very difficult to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without nuclear energy. Moreover the investment in nuclear plants would have represented an important boost to the economy since it builds infrastructure. Using even more fossil fuels on the other hands, clearly destroys infrastructure. When the infrastructure is totally gone, there will be hell to pay.

Bush did propose some kind of incentives for new reactors. I think I posted it here a few months ago. Not that there's any special relationship between what comes out of his mouth and reality. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

You and I agree on most things.

The Bushies have done very little however to help in the matter in any case. They have helped with some small scale procedural stuff, but the big thing, the institution of the combined operating licenses, COL, was well under way before 2000.

But if the twice a day clock manages to be timely, it cannot hurt.

I am worried really about the issue of credibility and the other 86,398 seconds in the day, though. Political liberals, who by the way did most of the nuclear inventing, are not encouraged in any case by the Bush-Cheney "support" for nuclear energy. All of us are (rightly) suspicious of anything these two dunderheads say. I'd rather that they just said nothing at all. I have frequently needed, as you know, to address the "guilt by association" logical fallacy here wherein I am associated with Dick Cheney.

At that time there were no approved reactors under the 10 CFR Rule 52 promulgated at the time. Thus the ruling had little practical impact, little immediate impact anyway. The ruling was not changed during the Clinton Adminstration. I'm sure Ralph Nader types were infuriated by the ruling, but it garnered little attention, and still does.

The importance of the rule was to place in effect a climate very much like that which lead to the highly sucessful French nuclear program, in which reactors were more or less "cookie cutter," to minimize design changes that need to be made on the fly. In the American building program various types of objections were raised, and one could not refer to other reactors of the same design to address their probability. People raised all kinds of these objections, using lawsuits to delay construction while specious matters, like "can Long Island be evacuted in 20 seconds or less?" were investigated.

From a purely economic standpoint the American process of individualized case by case reactor design was inferior and the mechanisms of the American legal system allowed nuclear opponents - of which I was one - to hike the cost of nuclear reactors in order to prove that nuclear reactors are too expensive.

This process played out in two famous cases, Seabrooke and Shoreham. At Shoreham we were able to stop the reactor whereas at Seabrooke, one unit came on line. (Unit 2 was stopped.) The predictions of the protesters of the destruction of New Hampshire and Massachusetts should Unit 1 come on line have failed to materialize. I've seen that reactor many times. It has had almost zero environmental impact on Seabrooke. In fact the water near Seabrooke is still quite cold, and the fish still live there, along with the lobsters.

Heck, didn't some guy named Henry Ford invent that idea here in America?

...but knowing that hurricanes strike every year, isn't the executive in power beholden to the people to be prepared for it? As opposed to cutting the very funds used to promote hurricane preparedness.

what will it do the Red Cross/Red Crescent/Red Crystal (my avatar is the new "Red Crystal"), and the Salvation Army, and the Southern Baptist Brotherhood Disaster Feeding, and the heavily drawn down National Guard.

We have "Donor Fatigue" and "Volunteer Fatigue" now.

And what will it do to insurance rates and reserves.

"Coastie" says "Semper Par"

Or, that insurance will be effectively unaffordable to anybody but the wealthy. Which is pretty much the same thing.

The only way I can think of to dodge that problem is rigorous "cat-V" building standards for all structures along the gulf coast. Residential, commercial, everything. And I wonder if that sort of building code is unaffordable to most people too.

I predict that there will be an eventual migration away from the gulf coasts, except for inherently ocean-based industries (ports, fishing, etc), and the people they employ.

The business model of casualty insurance is

Flood insurance?
Earthquake insurance?
Nuclear power plant insurance?
Some types of war risk insurance?
Liability insurance on some vaccines?