''911 IN NEW ORLEANS''

"We're told the 911 attacks changed everything for America--that they ushered
us in to a new and more dangerous world, where we could no longer afford old
illusions. If we take its full lessons, the disaster of Hurricane Katrina
challenges us even more profoundly.

If the comparison seems overstated, the death tolls from Katrina may well
exceed the number of those lost at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The
projected cost of rebuilding New Orleans and its surroundings is now
projected at $25 billion and may even approach the $40 billion paid out by
insurance companies worldwide related to the 911 attacks. And while New York
City beyond the Twin Towers remained intact, a refuge to flee to and base
from which to assemble emergency resources, New Orleans is a sea of
desolation, a wet and desperate landscape with no place to hide. New York
City and the national economy rebounded relatively quickly from the attacks.
The New Orleans projections are far grimmer.

So what are the lessons of New Orleans? We may call hurricanes acts of God,
but Katrina was a level 1 storm, the lowest, until blistering temperatures
in the Gulf of Mexico supercharged it to level 5. The storm's virulence was
related to global climate warming just as surely as the recent forest fires
that ravaged Southern California, floods that covered much of Bangladesh,
and European heat waves that killed 35,000 people two summers ago.
Ironically, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played a key role, as an
energy lobbyist, in convincing the Bush administration to break its campaign
promise to support limits on the carbon dioxide emissions that fuel global
warming.

This disaster was fueled by more than global climate change. Engineers and
software writers talk of "common mode failures," where one mistake magnifies
another and the cumulative impact is greater than all the separate parts.
The New Orleans levees might never have been breached had the Bush
administration not reversed Clinton administration policies prohibiting
development of coastal wetlands that once buffered the impact of storms. The
levees might have been buttressed and repaired had the administration
responded to a 2001 FEMA study warning that a hurricane striking New Orleans
was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But instead of
honoring the Army Corps of Engineers' request to strengthen and renovate
levees and pumping stations, the Bush administration cut the flood control
budget of the New Orleans Corps of Engineers by $71 million, 44 percent of
its budget. They needed the money for the Iraq war and to give $130 billion
a year of tax cuts to a tiny group of wealthy Americans.

Finally, this catastrophe built on the slow-burn disaster that's been
hitting America's poorest communities for decades. The wealthy and
comfortable could evacuate New Orleans and did, though their lives were
severely disrupted. But in one of the nation's poorest cities, vast numbers
of citizens had nowhere to go, no transportation or money with which to
leave, and no friends or relatives with extra space to house them. They are
the people left desperately trying to get out, while the helicopters and
resources of a third of the Louisiana National Guard are deployed in Iraq.
And they will be the ones most damaged and most forgotten when the
floodwaters eventually recede.

A year ago, the world's second largest reinsurance company, Swiss Re, warned
that the economic costs of climate-related disasters threatened to reach
$150 billion a year within ten years. We're already seeing storms of
exceptional virulence accompanying the heating of our oceans by a single
degree. What will be the level of destruction as global temperatures
continue to increase?

The development patterns that destroyed Louisiana wetlands are being
repeated throughout America, with the support of an administration intent on
removing all limits on private economic activity. The aging levees are part
of a deteriorating national infrastructure that will take billions of
dollars to address. The poverty that leaves people helpless to respond to
disasters of whatever kind continues to grow, accelerated by government
policies that transfer resources away from the poorest.

911 may have indeed changed our world forever, though I think we've drawn
the wrong lessons. We now have a chance to heed those of New Orleans and
Katrina, with consequences potentially far worse if we don't. It's up to us
how we respond to the power of this warning."-from the post by Seattle writer Paul Loeb on AfterDowningStreet.org.