Don't forget that Katrina, at the time of landfall, was not an uber-hurricane. It was a pretty average Gulf Coast hurricane. Most of the horrors from Katrina came from where it hit and who it hit. New Orleans had been patiently waiting for that storm, and doing nothing to prepare for it for decades. Couple that with a population that had grown so totally dependant on the government and welfare that it couldn't even manage to leave when told to leave, and a response by local, state and federal governments that was inadequate in some cases and criminal in others and you get what you got. So yes, mankind _was_ responsible for the Katrina disaster, but no one's SUV or gassy cow had anything to do with it.
My uncle, who lives in the French Quarter rode the storm out. Virtually no damage to his home. Had phone service back within a day or two. Streets flooded but not into his home. The problem was lower lying neighborhoods, inadequate levis and an almost unbelievable willingness for the poor to sit there despite all warnings to the contrary and no one came to help them. Not the mayor, not the governor, not the president. And they had days to do it in, and in many cases, they only needed to go as far as the French Quarter.
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Most of what you said here is true but I must disagree with some of your Katrina falacies.
I don't blame Katrina on co2. Hurricanes were sinking ships off the Florida coast years before GW. The winds from Betsy in 1965 did more damge in our area than the winds of Katrina.
However, evacuating is far more difficult than you make it seem. And who would know in advance that you just had to evacuate to the French Quarter even if there was a place there that would accept 1,000,000 evacuees for 2 years or more? Most of the other places that flooded had never flooded before so we had no way of knowing which areas would flood. (Though I made sure all the properties I own were well above sea level before I purchased and they were all safe) There were 4 evacuations called for that year before Katrina. In order to get out of town to a safe spot you must leave 4 days before the hurricane hits. 4 days before a hurricane they usually predict it will hit between Pensacola Florida and Galveston Texas. This means 20 million people must evacuate. TO WHERE? There aren't that many motel rooms in the south. There aren't enough highways to handle the traffic. Evacuation means you are out of work without pay for a week or more and paying big dollars to evacuate. IF you wait till 2 days before the storm hits to narrow down where ground zero is, then it is too late to evacuate. The highways are gridlocked. There are no motel rooms within 500 miles. I'm sure you saw the traffic jams on TV of people trying to get out of Houston for Rita. After you evacuate 4 times in a year for nothing because the hurricane misses, most people wear out and run out of money and stay home the next time. Then the big one comes. You live here for 50 years knowing the levees could break and flood someday but you always presume the officials have plans to fix a levee. The levee breaks. Officials run around like chickens with their heads cut off not knowing what to do and with NO plans. The pumps are turned off because the public workers who man the pumps were evacuated hundreds of miles away and can't get back. (We paid many millions of dollars in tax money for those pumps and had NO idea that when we needed them most they were going to turn them off and run away.) Jefferson Parish (New Orleans largest suburb) had no broken levees and had billions of dollars in flood damage simply because the pumps were turned off. When they were turned on days later the water went right down. The remedy the politicians came up with was to let New Orleans flood through the broken levee until it fills up level with the lake, THEN fix the levee and pump the water out for the next 3 months.
EVACUATION IS NOT AN OPTION! A very rich city would go bankrupt evacuating it's citizens many times a year.
The federal gov't maintaining IT'S levees that it built and has complete power over, IS the only option. Louisiana has been fighting the feds for years to repair THEIR levees and build them strong enough to provide safety for it's citizens. The feds ALWAYS approve money for the levees just like they are doing now for the rebuilding of New Orleans. The truth is that the money is always just APPROVED and never received. Just like the 10 billion dollars they approved for the Road Home program a year ago and so far the federally approved company writing the checks has been paid 700,000,000.00 for writing 500 checks to the victims for less than a millon dollars.
Please forgive me for rambling but Katrina is a sore spot for many of us in the area who have lost so much, friends, relatives, property, neighborhoods and more, while the news media makes it look like it affected no one but some poor dumb souls on welfare who were too stupid to leave.
