the 100 year flood

I read somewhere that the MidWest is experiencing its fourth 100 year flood in 35 years. Clearly something is amiss here. Maybe someone misplaced the zero? Already a debate has started whether or not global warming is to blame. Remember Katrina? We are at it once again.

I want to sidestep the global warming issue because it is likely to lead to unproductive debates. Instead of pointing fingers, let's take a look at the facts. Nothing but the facts, ma'am. If four hundred year floods occur in less than forty years then we are really dealing with 10 year floods. And if every 10 year flood is as devastating as this one, we aren't going to do so well in the long run. It is not just a matter of poor statistics we are talking about. It is something that wrecks the livelihood of many good people.

Once again the problem is that people are trying to live in areas where they should not live or do things there that they should not do. I am not saying we should refrain from changing our environment, but there needs to be a limit somewhere. Humans like all animals try to modify their environment, and doing so is a good thing to do. I am absolutely positively in favor of making life better. And if there is some collateral damage, well so be it.

Changing the environment makes it so we can enlarge our niche and it protects us from danger and makes it so we can live more comfortably. But that also imposes a good limit. A cost/benefit limit. Clearly floods like these every ten years or so do not make us comfortable. They do not make it safer for us to live there. We are asking too much.

Every time you ask this much you should also ask yourself, why? And here the why is obvious. It is called greed. We live in the plains because it allows us to grow cheap food that we can transport easily via the river to far away places. But location is not enough. These plains, while enormously productive would not be so without cheap oil. Once again, cheap oil is allowing us to do things we better not do.

The floods are but one symptom. They inundate the land that we grow food on and make it so our yields drop. But in "normal" years the runoff from pesticides and fertilizers make it so the Gulf of Mexico is becoming a wasteland where food (here fish) is disappearing quickly. It appears this situation is one of extremely high cost, with very little benefit. Unless you think high fructose corn syrup is a benefit. The only benefit we can see is dollars flowing into the pockets of some very rich farmers. That is called greed. For the time being the profit is quite literally underwater. 

But fear not, those farmers will go to Congress and you and I, the taxpayers of America will bail them out. Whether we like it or not. And that is wrong.