Stromata Blog: Hurricane Gustav in a Carbon-Free Economy

Gustav will find New Orleans and coastal Louisiana all but deserted, because, this time, a mass migration is moving the population inland.

Now suppose that we lived in an economy that forswore fossil fuels and extracted all of its energy from much more expensive sources. In that counterfactual world (only ten years in the future, if Al Gore has his way), helicopters are a rarity, small political units do not maintain flotillas of motorized boats, and the State of California would find it hard to pay for dispatching men and equipment halfway across the continent. The post-Katrina rescue is, in short, impossible for want of ships and planes and money. A hundred thousand emergency workers could no more have reached Louisiana in three days than they could have flown to Mars.

On Planet Gore, the pre-Gustav evacuation is just as problematic. Private automobiles are rare. Buses can hold only a small fraction of New Orleans’ population. To move several hundred thousand people northward requires requisitioning all of the vehicles within several hundred miles and driving them into the threatened area. Leaving aside the immense cost, shortage of time would make the effort a guaranteed fiasco.

Climate change alarmists warn that, if we do not alter our carbon-grubbing ways, natural disasters will punish us for our sins. But disasters we have with us always, whatever our ecological virtue. If we do give up the carbon-based economy, we leave ourselves helpless before them.