Leslie Kaufman at Inside Climate News writes—Sandy's Lessons Lost: Jersey Shore Rebuilds in Sea's Inevitable Path:
Toms River, N.J.—For most of the last century, modest one-story summer bungalows lined this private strip of road that dead-ends at Vision Beach. Then Sandy made landfall here on Oct. 29, 2012, obliterating them.
Today, except for the occasional vacant lot, the street has been transformed into two rows of gleaming brand-new three-story homes.
The main floors are about 14 feet off the ground, perched on pillars. Below, instead of an enclosed ground floor, many have parking spaces or picnic tables. Jay Lynch, the town's planner, calls the new developments "canyons" because of the heights.
Similarly towering construction is occurring on almost every nearby road.
At first, Sandy seemed to be the calamity that was finally big enough to rouse the country to the arrival of climate change's many risks. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for example, spoke of "a wake-up call and lesson to be learned here."
In Toms River, Mayor Thomas Kelaher, a Republican, said he now accepts the evidence. "Sea level is rising," he said, "I am absolutely convinced."
But even as the inevitability of rising seas and extreme storms settled in, a chasm opened between the actions necessary to deal with that knowledge and what would actually get done.
As people in towns like Toms River rushed to rebuild, they did not retreat from the coast. Instead, at the waterfront, so much—houses, businesses and sand dunes—is coming back bigger, stronger and taller than ever before.
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TWEET OF THE DAY
Looks as if there’s no longer any need to ponder how the Utah Republican would have voted had he lived in Berlin in 1932.
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—A Little Sanity on Cuba:
President Bush has a chance to break with America’s outdated policy of isolating Americans from Cuba and sign a bill that would ease travel restrictions to the island. A veto seems assured. Maintaining his tenuous hold on Florida may depend on it. […]
For more than four decades, Castro’s unique blend of what Spanish speakers call caudillismo and a fierce nationalist form of communism has done more than any other factor to shape contradictory U.S. foreign policy throughout Latin America. Since the time of the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary, the Caribbean has been seen as a U.S. “lake,” Latin America as “our backyard.” Out of this mindset grew an interventionism that brooked no meddlers from Europe and no objections from the peoples of the countries the U.S. chose to bring under its “protection.” While the U.S. did not create the dictators of Latin America, it nurtured many of them.
The coming of Castro, who soon linked himself to America’s No. 1 foe, exacerbated the older policy of backing thugs like Somoza in Nicaragua, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Batista in Cuba, men who were said by FDR’s men to be sons of bitches, but “our” sons of bitches. That expression of pre-World War II realpolitik summarized quite well what would become, 50 years later, the Kirkpatrick Doctrine—in essence, a policy of support for “our” bad guys as less evil than letting “their” bad guys gain power.
Since the fiasco at the 1961 Bay of Pigs and the nuclear close-call of 1962, Castro has overshadowed all of U.S. policy in Latin America. From the hemispheric Alliance for Progress to the counter-insurgent “low-intensity conflicts” in Bolivia and Colombia, from support for the generals of Brazil, Argentina and Chile to the trumped-up invasions of the Dominican Republic and Grenada, from the one-sided slaughters in Guatemala to the full-scale civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, U.S. policy throughout the region has been mostly about Fidel.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: In trouble with women? Newt can fix it! Greg Dworkin finds something good about Trump. David Waldman does not. Joan McCarter peeks behind the DSCC curtain in FL-SEN, forecasts filibuster reform and closes the circle on that Obamacare rates story.
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