Also the news here is that DARPA is interested in this, not that oysters protect shorelines – this has been known for some time. Thinking about climate change through the (slightly more practical) lens of national defense is a smart approach, perhaps it will bypass a lot of the B.S. involved in the discussion.
> After the storm, multiple investigations concluded that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which had designed and built the region's levees decades earlier, was responsible for the failure of the flood-control systems. However, federal courts later ruled that the Corps could not be held financially liable due to sovereign immunity in the Flood Control Act of 1928.
and
>A June 2007 report released by the American Society of Civil Engineers determined that the failures of the levees and flood walls in New Orleans were found to be primarily the result of system design and construction flaws.[41] The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been federally mandated in the Flood Control Act of 1965 with responsibility for the conception, design, and construction of the region's flood-control system. All of the major studies in the aftermath of Katrina concluded that the USACE was responsible for the failure of the levees. This was primarily attributed to a decision to use shorter steel sheet pilings during construction in an effort to save money.
They skimped out to save money and ended up killing 1300+ people, destroying hundreds of thousands of peoples lives, and causing hundreds of billions $$ in damages.
Fuck the Army Corps of Engineers.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina#Analysis_of_...
There are reasons that it took massive engineering to clear property and build upon it. There are reasons why even the dead are interred above-ground there. There are reasons why only the poorest of the poor tended to live in those threatened areas of town!
Now I'm not saying it's the fault of the poor residents for not moving or being underinsured, but it certainly ain't Uncle Sam's fault that Mother Nature eventually... found a way.