Those Pesky Engineers

NYT:

Participants in the 2009 seminar called on officials to seriously consider whether to install surge barriers or tide gates in New York Harbor to protect the city. Their views are contained in 300 pages of technical papers, historical studies and engineering designs from the seminar, copies of which the society provided to The New York Times.

Any effort to install such barriers would be extremely costly and take many years to carry out.

Even if the government had embraced such a proposal in 2009, it would not have been in place to prevent destruction from Tropical Storm Irene last year or Hurricane Sandy last week.

Some scientists have championed such barriers for years. But as the region struggles with the devastation after the storm, some of the engineers involved in the 2009 seminar see parallels to alarms that went unheeded before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005.

“Scientists and engineers were saying years before Katrina happened, ‘Hey, it’s going to happen, folks. Stop putting your head in the sand,’ ” said Malcolm Bowman, a professor of oceanography at the State University at Stony Brook who spoke at the conference and is an editor of the proceedings.

“The same thing’s now happened here,” Professor Bowman said.

Not only have we failed to protect our infrastructure from massive storm damage potential when that potential is well known (another area to watch, the Sacramento River delta), we've failed to invest to replace the aging infrastructure itself.  While technology will bring improvements to our standard of living, I think we've hit a peak in the rate of change of that standard.  Computers will get faster and phones will get smarter, but access to clean water and reliable power and other things which we've taken for granted will not change in a positive way. Another area of change, in a bad way, will be energy costs.

Right now we are in the bubble-blowing media hype season for shale oil and gas.  What gets buried in the stories about supposed energy independence for the U.S. are the actual expense of the process, and the actual depletion rates of the producing wells.  We are setting up for a neverending cycle of more and more wells for less and less oil (and eventually, gas).  Already, we've seen that the gas price is too low for drillers to make money, so they have to cut back on drilling to get the price back up.  This boom will be good for us in the short term, as we'll be more competitive economically, but it will be a much shorter time frame than the backers suggest.  I'll fall back on my old point, we're living an unsustainable lifestyle.  Since we won't do anything about it until we have to, it's going to be a bad ending.  Party hard, because the hangover is going to hurt bad.