NC Planners May Be Barred From Using Speculative Sea Level Rise Predictions

ideonexus writes "Republicans in North Carolina are floating a bill that would force planners to only consider historical data in predicting the sea-level rise (SLR) for the state as opposed to considering projections that take Global Warming into account. NC-20, the pro-development lobbying group representing twenty counties along the NC coast, is behind the effort and asserts that the one-meter prediction would prohibit development on too much land as opposed to SLR predictions of 3.9 to 15.6 inches." Scientific American has an acerbic take on the bill.

Hard to insure

[utoddl]

That's public sector planners. Insurance companies will use whatever sources they think are reasonable, so some of this to-be-planned development may be hard to insure.

Re:Insurance?

[i kan reed]

No, using poorly thought out limitations on what governments can do is rule of law. Using poorly thought out laws to limit what corporations can do is destroying freedom.

I honestly could not formulate that statement in a way that I feel no republicans would agree with.

Barrier Islands

[HornWumpus]

There have been people that have wanted to ban development on barrier islands for many years.

It sounds like the R's are passing this bill to prevent the Ds from back dooring this policy.

Personally I think if someone lives somewhere that the house is destroyed every 30 years or so their insurance payment is equal to their 30 year mortgage payment. This should be true on barrier islands and in Santa Barbara canyons. Then it's just an informed decision.

Re:Now that's conservative!

[Jeng]

There is an ice sheet nearly 3 kilometers thick sitting on Greenland, that is not floating in the water, if that one single ice sheet melted the oceans would rise by around 7 meters.

Now imagine how much worse it would be if the the Antarctic ice sheet also melted.

Re:Insurance?

[fermion]

Insurance is going to drive some of the development, but some of the development and policies will be driven knowing that the federal government will subsidize bad decisions. Take for example the Texas wildfires. Rick Perry encouraged the budget to be cut for firefighters and fire prevention, loose regulations allowed structures to be built where they presumable should not have been built, and a further presumption can be made that some of those structures did not have proper insurance because it was either too expensive or not required. I can say this because I know that, for instance, not everyone in the flood plane on the Gulf Coast of texas has flood insurance. They just expect the feds to pay the rebuilding costs.

Just like Rick Perry expected the feds to pay all the costs of the fire even though just a few months before he was saying that the state should secede. The taxes to the feds are not the problem, Texas gets most of those back, it is the Perry slush fund that allows him to reward donors. Simple fiscal incompetence. That is what tends to characterize those that don't want to invest in rational infrastructure and development, instead pushing projects based on ideology.

Just imagine if Texas had passed a law saying in 1900 saying that only long term historical data could be used to make plans. That the hurricane could not be used and it would be illegal to based future plans on the fact that Galveston had just been destroyed. It was a one time thing. Not going to happen again. That people are just liberal fanatics who want to destroy the island economy and waste billions of dollars to build an unnecessary ship channel. Texas would not be in the good shape it is now. Fortunately people in Texas are not as crazy as most other states in the south.

Re:Just don't make taxpayers cover it ...

[guises]

Just don't make the wiser folks pay for it when the disasters ultimately strike.

This is a useless thing to say. It's nice in principle, but it will never happen. Disasters can never just be ignored, the only way to keep "the wiser folks" from paying for them is to prevent the disasters.

If you need examples, look at the bailouts for Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, the auto industry, and everyone else four years ago. Or look at the Mississippi floods last year for something almost exactly the same as what's happening here - the Army said, "Don't build in these areas, we may need to flood them in case of heavy rains at the wrong time." People built in those areas anyway because they were on the water and scenic and could sell for high prices. Heavy rains at the wrong time happened, result: endless whining, people blaming environmentalists and everyone else they could point their fingers at except themselves. And bailouts from FEMA.

(Caveat: I realize that not everyone harmed by the flooding were in places where they shouldn't have been, and some of those that were had been deceived or misinformed about the possibility of floods. I'm not trying to blame the victims, just the whiners.)