Tuesday, September 5, 2017

National Security and Climate Change

Climate Change is becoming serious and apparent enough that I think most people believe it exists at this point.  I am sure Senator Inhofe (Oklahoma's snowball Senator) is still in denial of course.
If your old enough  (or just google storm history) you get the feeling that we see worse and worse storms. I mean how many storms of the century do we have to have this century before everyone wakes up?

As the temperature warms up we get more rainfall from water evaporation and more sever storms as heat gives them more energy to work with).
We will have costly bailouts for our East and Southern coasts with them getting more frequent and more costly. Lowering emissions will help but we have waited so long were going to still have to deal with this even if we started reversing the trend today.  As long as the GOP is in charge I think any reversal is very unlikely.  So do we keep spending billions on patches?
If we were willing to spend significant money on infrastructure for flood walls, emergency dams (could be used for fishing or to help the power grid), regulating the flood plains and stringent building codes we can improve long term survival and probably save long term costs.

How Can We Pay For all these "Acts of God"?


I propose that by transferring up to 100 billion annually from the National Defense Budget we could do some serious improvements. We outspend everyone in the world, in 2016 the USA spent 611 billion and the second highest player was China at 215 billion.  So moving 100 billion still gives us the most expensive military in the world by a large margin.  A lot of this is  pork barrel politics so we would be transferring the wealth from some military contractors to civilian contractors.  The old contractors will complain but they can expand into the new markets. Aerospace could adapt tech for light rail for example.
Many of these companies build stuff overseas anyhow and at least some of this money will go to local job growth such as in construction.
This could be like the Apollo project but rebuilding America.
And as a bonus all those new jobs mean more taxes to offset our budget deficit.
If you like the idea tweet or share this link to this post to your congress person.

Seriously Imagine What We Could Do!

  • Renewable Energy for new jobs, economic growth and energy independence.  We dont have to put the oil companies out of business, many sell overseas already!
  • Create many small and medium sized dams used for fishing, recreation, power generation, and irrigation or water management.  These could hold some of the flood waters and reduce the damage to cities.
  • Saving thousands of American Lives!
  • Light Rail elevated transport for public transportation that is still usable even in flooded areas.
  • Improved Public Transit for more jobs and better standards of living.  Improved Tourism too!
  • Economic growth in short term jobs such as construction, mining, and manufacturing.
  • Permanent new jobs in renewable energy and tech sectors.
  • A safer and more prosperous America!
And really is hat not what money for National Defense is supposed to be for?
One thing I would love to see but would be a technical challenge is pipes from lower lying areas to the dams that act as sump pumps. That would be very expensive and technically challenging but if it works could further reduce flooding and speed recovery.

Some Links (Recent data is harder to come by and current data has been pulled by the Trump Administration).

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