How miserable to you have to be in order to find the raincloud in every silver lining? This miserable:
After decades of bureaucratic delays, corruption and resistance from environmental groups, sea walls designed to defend Venice from “acqua alta,” or high water, went up on Saturday, testing their ability to battle the city’s increasingly menacing floods.
By 10 a.m., all 78 floodgates barricading three inlets to the Venetian lagoon had been raised, and even when the tide reached as high as four feet, water levels inside the lagoon remained steady, officials said.
“There wasn’t even a puddle in St. Mark’s Square,” said Alvise Papa, the director of the Venice department that monitors high tides.
Had the flood barriers not been raised, about half the city’s streets would have been underwater, and visitors to St. Mark’s Square — which floods when the tide nears three feet — would have been wading in a foot and a half of water, he said.
“Everything dry here. Pride and joy,” tweeted Luigi Brugnaro, Venice’s newly re-elected mayor.
So, good news — right? Not so fast.
At the New York Times, the Pravda of America, there can be no upside to the idea that mankind, blessed with inventiveness and determination, can overcome natural elements and triumph over them. It’s not only regrettable but bad form.
Imagine waking up every day and asking yourself, “how can I spin a positive news story — such as the potential rescue of one of Western civilization’s greatest treasures — and convince our gullible, guilty, fearful, timorous, locked-down readers in their lonely Upper West Side apartments to hate this development?”
It’s easy if you try. Having delivered the good news — San Marco is not underwater — the Times drags in a history of the sea wall project, merrily observing that “the mobile barrier system was delayed by cost overruns, corruption, and opposition from environmental and conservation groups.”
There were huge cost overruns, plus a characteristic Italian bribery scandal.
Further, the system is not fully operational yet — that is slated for the end of next year — but when it is, the gates will go up whenever high-tide levels reach four feet and are expected to protect the archipelago city from water levels as high as ten feet.
But… there’s a but (as you knew there would be with the Times and the “but” has to do with not “racism” but — “climate change”!
So without further ado, bring on the hypotheticals and the counterfactuals:
“With climate change, there’s a chance that the floodgates could be employed 150-180 days a year, becoming an almost fixed barrier and severing the lagoon’s relation to the sea,” said Cristiano Gasparetto, an architect and former provincial official who has long opposed the project.
“If the lagoon is cut off from the sea for long periods, it dies, because the natural exchange of waters stops, and all of its organic life risks decaying,” he said. “If the lagoon dies, Venice dies,” he added. “It loses its characteristics.” Concerns also remain about the costs of maintaining the floodgates and potential damage from saltwater.
Of course, they do. In Times-land, there are always “fears” and “worries” behind every new development, no matter how ostensibly good.
Like the Dreaded COVID, “climate change” is another almost wholly imaginary terror that can’t be seen, can barely be detected, and will end the world if left unchecked by the power of government in ten, twelve, twenty years, or maybe five minutes if we don’t do something right now.
On the hard Left, where the Times has unabashedly been squatting for the past several years, the perfect is always the enemy of both the good and the good enough.
Under current leftists thought processes, if it might not be work in the direst, barely foreseeable calamity, there’s no point in doing it at all.
No wonder the Left loves the lockdowns so much.
Read more at The Pipeline
I think the barriers at the Venice lagoon are incredible, just like the London ones. The problem with Venice is that it is sinking as we know because of how it was built with wooden pylons driven into the mud. However I would be sure the Lefty morons either don’t know or pretend it isn’t the case, only sea level rises will do for their mythical climate change. Same with New York, but the city is subsiding naturally along with much of the eastern coast of the Americas. But no! sea level rises are the causes. Sad, really sad!!!
Same with the Louisiana coast. It is sinking. Not rising water due to Global warming. But if you mention that fact, you are labeled a science denier.
maybe the NYT’s needs to get a flooded Basement
I wonder what they make of the Thames Barrier at the NYT
Why is it lefty marxist humanities and arts graduates seem to prefer imaginary or plain undeliverable snake oil cures to unprovable and unreal problems, that they invent but cannot prove exist, to targetted technological solutions to the real problems we can all see work? Something else not to be afraid of? Or something they can’t scare uneducated people with any more, perhaps?
Nuclear power can replace fossil fuel safely, sustainably and cheaply. GM foods are the faster created successor to selective breeding that Norman Borlaugh and the monks before him used to improve yields. Every time humans use their increasing understanding of nature to protect themselves from its bad effects, these well protected city scribblers oppose it.
In part Because a solution that works without inflicting some suffering on people defies their phoney beliefs, and their prophesies of doom are exposed as plain wrong/deceit.
FACT?: Humanity finds ways to improve the planet for humans without damaging the planet, and improves them as the solutions are established.
I wonder what they make of the Thames Barrier at the NYT? It seems to work very well and is a far better use of £0.5B than wasting it pretending to save the world by subsidising windmills and solar panels that simply can’t, instead of building the nuclear power which is all that can replace fossil fuel, at zero CO2 as well.
The UK government currently wastes £10Billion a year of our money by law in added energy poverty burden on our economy, with NO provable benefit to UK plc or the planet, which they know cannot change anything, except the cost of electricity and the probability of power failures, that is. But it makes alot of insiders, including politicians who are rewarwded after office, or even in it, for promoting and passing the enabling laws.
The Thames Barrier protects the whole of the wealth of London and cost £0.5B. I make this rather obvious point with evidence in my talk of climate realities and the real, as in deliverable by engineers, rather than Wizards and Priests, solutions to energy supply.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ui3g0bnga6nzefj/Thames%20Barrier%20slide%20.png?dl=0
It is Bjørn Lomborg, someone who seems to agree that increasing CO2 can have an effect on the climate, says the same thing. Don’t waste money on “green energy” solutions but use our ingenuity to ameliorate problems that may happen. That’s what they did in Venice and what you are showing on the Thames. But the greenies would rather destroy our economies with their idiocy.
A few years ago, an MP asked why the Environment Agency had not started to strengthen or replace the Thames Barrier, which was supposed to last about 40 years from its opening in 1982. The EA replied that as sea levels hadn’t risen as expected, they had postponed the replacement plan until 2070. Sea levels are not rising, or are rising very slightly. But the Warmers don’t know that.