coe088_harvey-aftermath.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Welcome back, everybody, to the Cultures of Energy podcast. We are coming to you with a special iteration of the podcasts, we're calling it the Harvey aftermath, but we do not think that that is a sign of closure, but rather an opening for new for new ways to go forward. So it's kind of like Harvey. And then there's

Speaker2: [00:00:44] Much there's much that will be unfolding for months and possibly years to

Speaker1: [00:00:49] Come, and there's going to be a lot more math to be done to because it's going to be a very, very, very expensive undertaking and major structural changes need to happen

Speaker2: [00:01:01] On a dark day.

Speaker1: [00:01:01] Yes. Yes. Yes, yes. So, yeah, well, here in Houston, it's beautiful blue skies out there and I don't know, probably 80 degrees and it's very sunny, but the helicopters are still running around. And as you go around town, you can see the water lines at various levels. So you can sort of see on the outsides of houses how far the water went up on them. We didn't do an extensive tour. This is just getting a car over to my father who's got who doesn't have one. So we got him a car so he can burn up some fossil fuels, but also go and get some supplies because his apartment was flooded. So. And we also there's a lot of volunteer work going on here, and apparently there are thousands of people being turned away at the convention center because there's too many volunteers in a way. But that's that's a good thing. That's a good sign of plenitude. And tomorrow we're going to go do some house cleanup through the rice program. So they've got a network going on so that we can go and spend four or five hours tearing out drywall or tearing up carpet. I don't know, moving, you know, soaked stuff out to the curb

Speaker2: [00:02:11] Or they're not really any estimates yet of how many houses were inundated. And again, you know, there are cases like Symphony's dad, who had just a few inches in his apartment. And so for the most part, comparatively speaking, did pretty well. But then we've heard of other cases, including some faculty we know who had almost two feet of water in their homes and obviously people whose entire homes were submerged and everything they owned was completely ruined by the floods. So it's a it's a study in contrasts here in Houston on less than one week after the hurricane hit some places like our neighborhood completely intact. You would know that anything had happened. Everyone's going about their business in other parts of the city, you know, sheer devastation. I think one of the things that was not particularly well covered in the media, but I also just think it's something that people generally don't know very much is just how big Houston is. I mean, 700 square miles. It is much less a single city than a kind of constellation of hundreds, if not thousands, of small towns and subdivisions and in older urban area, which is where we live and where resources so that, you know, it's almost hard to speak of the experience of Houston in the singular.

Speaker2: [00:03:25] And yet obviously, we're linked. We're linked by roads, we're linked by sewage systems, we're linked by other kinds of infrastructure. A grid that has been stressed beyond belief and in many cases has failed. But, you know, I just also want to feel like we have to shout out our neighbors who are suffering much worse than we are even in Houston. Beaumont, which is a city to the east of Houston along the coast, also heavily invested in petroleum industry, has lost all of its water and today it's in water. Back up water system has failed. Port Arthur, which is just south of Beaumont, was as in the words of the mayor, the entire city is underwater. And then also a smaller community to the northeast, where a chemical plant exploded this morning in Crosby. And there are three thousand people who live there. And it's unclear whether and if those people are going to get to move back because the company is being rather close lipped about what exactly might be in the air there right now, right? Right.

Speaker1: [00:04:26] So it's flammable to even have it as it's airborne.

Speaker2: [00:04:30] They're describing it as as an irritant, but not, you know, an irritant comes in many forms. Plus, of course, communities like Manchester Galena Park in the east end of Houston that are sitting next to petrochemical facilities that have been emitting maybe eight or 10 times their normal toxins. Because when you shut these facilities down quickly, the toxin level shoots through the roof. And that probably explains we talked on the last podcast a bit about weird smells in the air. That's probably part of what we were smelling.

Speaker1: [00:04:56] Well, and Brian Paris, who is one of the founders and one of the key people at Texas, which is an organization that draws attention to what are called fenceline community communities, those communities that are located in industrial areas and are exposed to toxicity day in and day out. But even more so in situations like this described it yesterday that people in the. Region, we're smelling such strong, toxic odors in the air that he described them as being gassed. He said they're just they're literally getting gassed by these toxic chemicals. And yet where are they to go right? Right. When when a lot of the city, 30 percent of the city has been affected by the flooding in one way or another? And if you see that they had a good map on the New York Times front page today that showed the distribution of these calls to social media for rescue, and I think it gives you a good sense of the distribution of the flooding. I mean, it's it's kind of a pointless scheme in a way. It's not like what half of the city was taken out or another. And it's not, you know, that it was only some communities that were affected, but by and large, it as many communities that are, you know, under-resourced economically communities of color, of which there are many in Houston that were really affected. And so I think looking at the kind of stuff that Texas has been looking at for a long time and looking at what Dr.

Speaker1: [00:06:20] Robert Bullard has been doing for his entire life. People think of him as the father of environmental justice, and we would love to get Dr. Bullard on the podcast. So we're going to keep on trying to do that. But he's a busy person, but there's a really nice interview with him on Democracy Now, if you want to listen to some of what he has to say as he's waiting to be evacuated from his home, right? A couple of days ago, because of the rising Brazos River, he's on the phone with Amy Goodman and, you know, giving a short interview, and he really makes the point that this is an opportunity to change like this. This is a, you know, a bellwether event. And he talks about the role of unchecked development in Houston and the role of unrestrained capitalism behind that development in Houston. He says that really, Harvey was a catastrophe that was waiting to happen. We knew it would happen. At some point. It's been predicted in various ways. And the irony of the fact that we are living in a city which has such a high level of contribution of greenhouse gas emissions to the entire planetary atmosphere. So there are so many, so many next psi there.

Speaker2: [00:07:29] And if I can use that because that's a perfect connection point to introducing our special guest in an interview today on this episode. And please, we're going to have a few more ruminations, but please listen through to the interview because it's really terrific. And we're talking with Jim Blackburn, who is the co-director of our severe storm center at Rice, also a basically legendary environmental lawyer in town. Everyone knows who Jim Blackburn is. He has won a lot of communities, a lot of money in suits against refineries and other kinds of industries that have been releasing illegal levels of toxins into communities. He has sued FEMA for messing around with the 100 year flood maps. In fact, those of you who've been hearing about the attics and barker reservoirs, these ancient reservoirs among the, I think, top five most likely to fail because they were built out of Earth back in the 1940s, right? These areas that are flooding around those reservoirs that were parts of new developments, those are, in fact, I believe, related to the lawsuit. In other words, that that the local government, also national government, was allowing people to continue to put down a lot of pavement and a lot of new communities in areas that really needed to be left undeveloped to absorb more water so as not to overstress these two reservoirs. And so what we're seeing here again, just what you were saying, Simone and Dr. Bullard was saying, we can see this coming because the unchecked development has only been accelerating the process of of placing stress on the water drainage system by allowing by basically through pavement and surfacing that is impermeable to water so that more and more of it is aboveground and looking for a way out, right? And that sends it coursing down.

Speaker1: [00:09:18] Yeah. To homes. There was a good quote on one of these media reports. It's all a wash right now, but the problem is not that the rain comes down, but that it has to get out of the city. And how does how does it get out? And as you said, one of the issues is that we don't have enough permeable soil to absorb this kind of rainfall. And the cement ification of the city, like so many cities, is a problematic one, especially if it's not been well engineered. And some of these places, some of the infrastructure in Houston is better engineered than others. Some of the bayous are very well equipped to handle very high water levels, and others are not.

Speaker2: [00:09:57] And just to finish, just in the interview with Jim, we touch on a couple of key issues. One of them is the fact that as terrible as Harvey was and is and will be in the months and years of cleanup that follow, it is not nearly the worst case scenario hurricane like reasonable scenario for a hurricane hit on Houston. So we talk about that what would be worse and we'll talk about that more with. Screen who we're going to get back on the putt next week to or the week after, we'll see how that works out, but anyway, there are still worse scenarios and you know, people who would have said, Oh, if you predicted three years ago that Harvey was going to have an Oh, you're being crazy, you're being a doomsayer? Well, you know, in fact, the scenarios are getting worse and worse, which means that we really do have to seriously think about a climate action plan for Houston and Harris County. A fundamental redesign of the city going forward. And we'll be talking more about that on the podcast, too. The other thing we talk about with Jim, though, is he's got a really exciting plan that I think would contribute to that way of emphasizing the circular economy in the Gulf Coast region, especially around Houston, and of really trying to tie our economic systems back to natural systems again in a fundamental way, which would mean, for example, very controversial ideas like buying people out of these areas that have flooded the past two or three years where, I guess, you know, people are going to say hashtag Houston Strong, I want to rebuild again. But you know what, if your house is flooded three times in three years, you should not be rebuilding there. Those are areas that probably are not going to be habitable. Going forward, the city or the county or the government federal, if they ever get their act together, should be helping to buy out those families and restoring those to wetlands. Because the local prairie and the local wetlands grasses would do a lot to sequester carbon and it would do a lot to increase absorption.

Speaker1: [00:11:47] Mm hmm. And there's we've been talking about this over the last couple of days. There's a vicious circle at work here, too, because as these as these properties, these places, these neighborhoods get flooded again and again and again, like in Maryland, you know, three years running now, people's homes flooded

Speaker2: [00:12:05] And my dad is a prosperous

Speaker1: [00:12:06] Area. So, yeah, so they've been flooded out, you know, three times in the last three years for these quote unquote 100 year storm events, right? And so you have a house that you paid several hundred thousand dollars for now, its value has gone down, which sort of gets you caught up. And that's, you know, that's in Ireland. But I know that there's other parts of the city, too, that if they've been flooded out several times over, the value of that property is going down has already gone down. So it makes it difficult to sell or selling at a loss. And that, I think, is part of the motivation. Why people rebuild or try and reconstruct things is because they realize that they can't get their money back out of their house, which is for most people, their main source of wealth. So there's all kinds of tricky, precarious economic questions that we have to ask that have to do with insurance that have to do with FEMA protections that have to do with buying out, that have to do with relocation. And I think we need to get all of the smart people that we have on board in order to to think that through. And then the other,

Speaker2: [00:13:09] There's really no purpose for us to have a research center like this in Houston if we're not working on that right? That's really the only meaningful thing we can do locally, right? That would make a positive difference. And that could perhaps serve as a model for other vulnerable communities in other parts because there are many in the United States and many more still in the world. Let's not forget also to mention what's happening in South Asia right now, what's happening in Nepal, what's happening in India, what's happening in Bangladesh? We're actually going to have a whole podcast on this next week, right? But let's remember that the the death toll in Houston right now is 30, standing at thirty eight with thirty thousand people in shelters. That's a terrible, terrible thing. But, you know, add a couple of zeros to that to what's happening in India right now in Mumbai, right? And elsewhere.

Speaker1: [00:13:55] Yeah, they've lost it close to a couple of thousand people.

Speaker2: [00:13:59] Yeah, I mean, uncounted, but thousands, certainly.

Speaker1: [00:14:02] Yeah. So yeah, so these are, you know, there's all these kind of parallel situations. They're going to say, Well, I was going to go back to this question of rebuilding because this is now this is the mantra. So yeah, we've been hearing on the radio hashtag Houston Strong and I've gotten a couple of emails from people like, Oh, the time to start rebuilding. And I'm like, They did. They did, they did it. Wait, let's see where we're rebuilding and how we're rebuilding, and how much energy and time and materials we're going to invest into locations that really shouldn't be inhabited by people. Let's think about making the city more dense and creating, you know, structures closer to people's homes that are more secure, that have good infrastructure where people can actually live. Because again, one of the the great things that Dr. Ballard said was that if we have the situation in Houston where you know, the city is famously un zoned and he said, you know, by the fact that we don't have zoning in the city just by default, poor people and people of color have been de facto zoned as compatible with pollution so that, you know, these fenceline communities are are a kind of zoning.

Speaker1: [00:15:14] It's an implicit zoning that occurs through development, capital and lack of city planning. And if we rebuild in the same way that we began this storm, we're going to be building on inequality again. You're just you're just recapitulating and rehashing the same inequality that we began with. And the storm, of course, is going to have very adverse effects on many people, but especially people who are living paycheck to paycheck and maybe whose, you know, businesses that have been lost and people then don't have a place to work. And for many people, they're going to be weeks and weeks without being able to work. Coming from the shelters, not having vehicles, a lot of businesses are shut down. So, you know, for a lot of folks, go in without a paycheck for two or three weeks is just devastating. It means you won't be able to pay the rent at all, can't buy food, etc. So it's really it's quite a it's quite a tangle.

Speaker2: [00:16:08] Yeah. And I think that the fact that this massive petroleum infrastructure in and around Houston again going all the way east to Beaumont and Port Arthur needs to go. And as soon as possible is a whole nother question and conversation we have to have and what will become of that infrastructure after it's gone. One of the reasons one of the reasons I really liked talking to Jim is he's got such such a great love for Galveston Bay, and a great sense of it is an ecological space, not just as we think of it, mostly as an industrial space, but it actually is the most kind of rich and productive from a biological standpoint estuary anywhere in Texas, probably along the coast as a whole. So it's this it's this amazing space that that maybe could begin to turn the tables in terms of how we think about what this region is. Post petroleum, it's going to take a lot of work to get there, folks, but that's something that everyone who listens to this podcast can help with. We're also going to list the names of some of the great charities and relief organizations here that are working in Houston, in the liner notes.

Speaker2: [00:17:09] So if you find yourself move to do so and have the resources to do so, we would surely appreciate donations. But in addition to the folks like Red Cross and the amazing work the city is doing in terms of just helping people escape these very dangerous, life threatening conditions and getting them resettled, I would put in a plea as well to think about donating to organizations like Texas that are doing incredibly important both short term and longer term work on environmental justice issues, which are such a huge part of the story here in Houston. And then also, Jim mentions a couple of programs, but it's a little garbled because we are on a kind of shaky Skype connection in the middle of the storm. He mentions the Galveston Bay Estuary Program and the Houston Audubon Society as two groups that are really doing good long term work, as well as, I guess, kind of midterm work on ecological issues here in the area. So again, these are things that issues that will remain even after people are back in their homes or in different types of shelters that are going to remain and that we'll need funding and attention as well.

Speaker1: [00:18:15] Right and right after we got off the phone with Jim, he went got on the horn with Rachel Maddow.

Speaker2: [00:18:20] Yeah, it's a dynamite interview. Check that out.

Speaker1: [00:18:22] So if you saw that this is the kind of extended play of that interview because we had a little more time to spend with them or check that one out to see, can I just say one final? You know, I have one more

Speaker2: [00:18:33] Thing, but you do your thing. I've got one

Speaker1: [00:18:35] More thing to talk. All right. So, you know, the last two nights here in Houston, we've had curfew. Yeah. At first they said it was going to be till 10:00 p.m. and then they moved it up to to midnight. And I guess it's been successful in the sense that people haven't been out on the streets. It's a very interesting turn. This is the only U.S. city I've ever been in, where I was actually living through a curfew. The only other, the only other place I've been that had a curfew at night was Hanoi in northern Vietnam. And that's more the quotidian practice there. But it's very interesting to think about this practice of curfew and how that might be utilized in the future as a form to kind of repress dissent. I'll throw that out there. It's been effective in the storm, I think, because people are, you know, wanting to come together. And also there's the threat of being getting a citation or a ticket if you're out there. So why are they having curfew? Well, you guessed it, they're worried about looting, right? Because these houses are half half flooded and abandoned, and there's not enough kind of personnel out there. And so there's worries about looting. But I just have to say the biggest looter in chief that I've seen throughout this entire thing was when the president himself showed up here in Texas with his to sell hat with his commercial hat, his little and his small brain pan topped with a gigantic baseball cap that said USA. And this is another commercial stunt of his. He's trying to sell his piece of shit hats for what, 40 bucks a piece or whatever. So everyone was talking about Melania's high heels. Yes, ridiculous. Totally agree. And that's from someone who wears big shoes. But this the brazen capitalist exploit of wearing that, that hat as he's supposed to be coming and, you know, being literally and expressing regret, it's just like, it's he. It's like the biggest fucking looter out there

Speaker2: [00:20:21] As far as I can, you could you could totally imagine him if he was in a different station of life, being the guy who's standing there selling bottles of water for 20 bucks a pop to people who are desperate for a drink because right, been turned off like I see him is that he's the guy who's just looking for, you know, looking for the shorts, the short con and the long con. I mean, but man, yeah, I mean, the way he showed up expressed no remorse, didn't even show up. I mean, kind of went went around Houston Express, no remorse for what people have been struggling with here and then used it all as a, you know, use using the story itself to like, yeah, to do his Joe Arpaio and the whole thing has been the most cynical and manipulative stuff. And again, we're not surprised at all. But it just bears saying that that we've had a disastrous lack of federal leadership, even as our mayor, Sylvester Turner, deserves a shout out for being a really good job as far as I can tell. I think he's been managing the situation, also kind of keeping people informed and also hopeful in a reasonable way about good things that are coming down the road. I was just going to end if that's OK with this quote, something our friend of the Pod colleague Albert Pope from the architecture department at Rice wrote today because I thought it was a kind of a big philosophical thought and that connected back to what we were talking with Tim about earlier in the week. And he wrote that Houston's the poster child for the breakdown of the traditional holistic logic of the city from an urban perspective.

Speaker2: [00:21:51] This breakdown occurred at the moment of the great acceleration, when the explosion of the suburb could no longer be contained within the traditional center periphery hierarchy of the traditional city. But there's a second, equally interesting approach revealed ever so clearly by Harvey. The centric order of the freeway system definitively failed because the bayou system, which is 20000 thousand years old, is a linear system moving west to east not centric. The fact that every freeway was shut down in the storm confirms the failure of this holistic overlay. The failure to describe a concentric hole causes us to seriously re-evaluate the part. The necessary understanding of the city is not from the outside, from the whole, but from within the part. First of all, I never really thought of that relationship between the freeway and the bayou as being systems with different logics. But I think you're totally right about that. Yeah, and the fact that, yeah, the freeways and you know, the bayous one, the freeways may win three, three hundred and sixty four days out of the year, but they won by one. Yeah, this time around, and we'll continue to win in the future, perhaps more dramatically. But the other idea that I think really speaks to Houston is the need to understand it from kind of the street scale from the neighborhood rather than this idea of this because it doesn't, you know, whatever it is to think of it as a as a city like, I don't know, Philadelphia or Baltimore

Speaker1: [00:23:07] Or, well, it's much more like Los Angeles. Yeah. And yeah, now a lot more like Managua than L.A.

Speaker2: [00:23:15] Yeah, seriously. So this idea of Mega City is a different is a different thing. Yeah, a different phenomenon that again, like Tim's hyper objects, you can't really know it in its totality.

Speaker1: [00:23:26] It's very Nodar of it and scattered. Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:23:29] At the same time. Well, I guess that's enough talk, and it wasn't very funny. But you know, there's not a lot of room for laughter right now in Houston. We'll get there. We'll get back there eventually. We're also going to try to do a series of short conversations more in depth with people who are experts here about different aspects of the Harvey aftermath. So we're not going to end this here on the podcast either. We're really going to just this is our opening salvos. We all try to come to grips with a still dynamic situation, and we want to look in some more detail into some of these issues we brought up today. Do deeper dives and do kind of some special episodes down the road, right?

Speaker1: [00:24:05] Yes, that sounds good.

Speaker2: [00:24:06] All right. So shall we turn it over to?

Speaker1: [00:24:07] Yeah. Let's turn it over to Jim. Go Jim. Go Jim.

Speaker2: [00:24:29] So welcome back to the Cultures of energy podcast, everyone we are so pleased to have on the line here in Houston. Jim Blackburn, who in addition to having founded a terrific environmental law practice here in Houston, Blackburn and Carter, which has been going since nineteen seventy seven so 40 years of environmental law expertise. Also, Jim is a dear colleague of ours from Rice, and he is a co-director of the Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disaster Center, known locally as the Speed Center. Jim, thank you so much

Speaker3: [00:25:00] For joining us. Oh, you bet. I'm happy to be here, Dominic.

Speaker1: [00:25:03] Yeah, thank you, Jim. So, you know, as Dominic mentioned, you've had a law practice here since nineteen seventy seven, if you've been living in Houston for four decades, at least, and maybe longer. So as we're sitting here in the midst of the deluge of the The Post Harvey downpour, we wanted to ask you, how would you compare this particular storm and its and its ongoing aftermath with other hurricanes or weather events that you've experienced here in the Houston region?

Speaker3: [00:25:32] Well, I mean, it is actually very unique and you know, we've been trying we've been discussing with among various of us that are doing research here about whether this is a climate related event and climate change related. And we think it is. But the thing that's most fascinating is the Category four storm coming ashore and it just comes to a dead halt, right? And then turns and turns into a tropical cyclone and is now going backwards. And I think is now entering the Gulf of Mexico, and we'll swing around Houston and at least according to recent projections, and then come back to the North. You know, we've really never seen a pattern quite like that and not with a Cat four hurricane. We saw it with Tropical Storm Allison when Allison came through and then kind of went past us and then came back, but I don't think. I certainly am unaware of any Category four hurricane ever behaving quite like this.

Speaker1: [00:26:28] Yeah, it's really it's been a twisted tale, hasn't it? It's it's really been remarkable. I wonder what what is it that you've been discussing with your colleagues about the relationship between anthropogenic climate change and this storm?

Speaker3: [00:26:41] Well, I think the Gulf of Mexico and the heat of the Gulf of Mexico, Ron Sassou, I know you both know. Sure. You know, former chair of ecology at Rice and About Geochemist is my sort of mentor on climate. And he was saying that some of the information he's been reading indicates the Gulf of Mexico may be one of the hottest water bodies in the world right now. And that's, you know this this storm went from a tropical cyclone to Category four in virtually no time. It came over the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico as a tropical cyclone and intensified to a Category four hurricane in basically two days, which is incredibly fast,

Speaker1: [00:27:24] Right in 48 hours. There was a really I just read an article in the Atlantic that was published, I guess yesterday or maybe today that talked about the heat in the Gulf of Mexico and how normally as a hurricane or tropical storm comes over, it churns up water through the wind and the waves, and it and it produces cold water from down underneath the surface. But in this case, the warm water is so deep that it's actually regenerating the storm and all that heated water is getting recycled over and over and over again. So it's really it's incredible.

Speaker3: [00:27:55] Yeah, that's yeah, that's absolutely what Ron was talking about and and of course, heat in the water. It's the fuel to really make these storms go right, right?

Speaker2: [00:28:04] So Jim, why don't you talk to us a little bit? I mean, you have a you have a long history of work on on storms and coastal issues in Texas and the Gulf Coast. And I wanted to draw attention, folks, attention to the work of the speed center in particular to your work on work that I believe was was reacting in part to Hurricane Ike, although maybe it had other antecedents that is thinking about the vulnerability of Galveston Bay, about the vulnerability of Houston. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Because I'm not. Storm surge wasn't a big part of this storm, so I'm not sure everyone's attuned to that right now, but I think this is one of our great vulnerabilities here.

Speaker3: [00:28:41] No, I think our greatest vulnerability, frankly, is not the, you know, the horrible rainfall that we've been facing, although we're incredibly vulnerable to that. But our our biggest worry is speed center, which, you know, we researched severe storms and we've been looking at sort of worst case scenarios for Houston. And this rainfall event isn't really yet. The worst case scenario would be a 20 20 foot, 25 foot surge coming ashore, and that usually would be associated with a Category three hurricane, maybe for striking land much closer to the Houston region. And basically, the continental shelf off of the Upper Texas coast is much wider and the potential for large surges. Much greater up here than it was down in Rockport, where Harvey came ashore and up in up in this part of the world. We're looking at a very real chance of a 25 foot surge with the right storm coming from the right direction, and that would probably produce the largest environmental disaster in United States history, not to mention shutting down the economic engine of Houston, the Gulf, you know, the Upper Gulf Coast and perhaps protected in the United States, with the Houston ship channel being a center of refining activity and and plastics. And by the way, this storm Harvey is having an impact on the refining community and chemical plants because the workers can't get to the plants right, the roads are flooded to such an extent that they can't get there. So I've been hearing reports about gasoline prices going up across the United States because of that. Right. But that's not the that's not the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is that surge knocking. Basically, there's 2200 oil and hazardous substance storage tanks that are vulnerable to a hurricane surge. And Jamie Padgett in civil engineering has done the modeling on that and basically record that somewhere between 50 and 90 million gallons of oil and hazardous substances would be released with the 25 foot surge.

Speaker2: [00:30:52] And what would you compare that to? I mean, is this like the Exxon Valdez spill

Speaker3: [00:30:56] Or bigger, bigger? If Exxon Valdez with about 10 million gallons of oil, Deepwater Horizon was about 200 million, but both of those were in open water. This would be a spill that would be primarily limited to Galveston Bay, and it would destroy Galveston Bay probably would destroy the livability of the Galveston Bay region for a decade.

Speaker2: [00:31:21] Also, the human livability?

Speaker3: [00:31:23] Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, not to mention ecological livability, but certainly human livability. And that's really the worst case that we've been focusing on, you know. On the other hand, if we had modeled the scenario that is occurring right now, people would have told us that we were simply fear mongers, that we were making up something that could never happen, right?

Speaker2: [00:31:43] Because that's that's what happens with the unprecedented right. You can't think you can't think of it. Exactly.

Speaker3: [00:31:48] And, you know, I mean, the same thing with these big search events, we're talking about events that you know, we've never experienced. I think probably the largest surge we've had along the Texas coast, maybe in the 15 to 17 foot range, although we know that Katrina generated about 30 feet near pass Christian Mississippi, and I think it was Camille over in Alabama about the same. So we know the potential is there for a huge surge. We've just never experienced it and very hard to convince people to plan and spend billions of dollars on events that have never occurred yet. That's what exactly we're facing right now.

Speaker1: [00:32:28] So and in terms of the communities that would be affected were this storm surge to come through and these petroleum resources and chemicals be let loose and flooding. Who would be impacted by this? I mean, obviously the industry itself. But what does it look like in terms of the human and I guess, ecological impact around the bay?

Speaker3: [00:32:52] Well, most likely, the tanks would fail with an incoming surge and so adjacent neighborhoods adjacent to the ship channel. And there are many, unfortunately, fence line communities, often lower income that could be affected, particularly if you get further up the channel and into Houston. So, you know, the certainly up in the Manchester area of Houston in Galena Park on the north side of the channel. Those are areas that one would anticipate that there would be significant human loss. And basically, you're talking about oil and hazardous substances coming into the homes now, the homes, the homes would probably be destroyed anyway with floodwaters. But this is an added dimension and basically really probably most affects the ability to to to kind of restore or re inhabit those areas ecologically. I don't think we've ever seen anything quite what that would do to Galveston Bay, which is the second most productive estuary in the United States. It's a very important shrimp shellfish nursery and any number of finfish also direct from here. And we have vibrant oysters, all of that, right?

Speaker2: [00:34:07] Wow. So when we talk a little bit about what those responses could be, and I know that justifiably you have some doubts about what will get undertaken because you've probably seen a lot of wheel spinning in your years here. But could you explain a little bit you know what projects like H Gaps and Ike Dike, what they're about, what they're trying to do to limit the potential of a storm surge?

Speaker3: [00:34:27] Sure. Or I mean, the storm surge itself, the major efforts have been on trying to come up with from the speed center standpoint, affordable solutions that could be implemented frankly with local funding rather than relying on federal money. So I think that's a huge distinction to make. First of all, and we think that the ability to come up with alternatives that can be funded locally is essential. And so many of the alternatives to the ICDC, for example, is in the 10 to $15 billion range, and it may even be higher than that. And that pretty much requires federal funding. And it's just going to be, you know, incredibly difficult to get that money. And to you got a question, given what's just happened, that we ought to be spending $15 billion on a single solution when we're going to have multiple problems, they're going to have to be dealt with for years. Right.

Speaker2: [00:35:19] So does speed have a position as to a proposal that you feel is adequate to dealing with these risks? Or are we still in a stage of study?

Speaker3: [00:35:29] No, no. I think we have a proposal. In fact, I would tell you that it could probably be now undertaken to put together a permit application to the Corps of Engineers to to get permission to build it. It's called the Midway alternative, and we also think that a backside levee needs to be built around the city of Galveston. But the mid-May alternative basically takes the existing disposal areas along the Houston ship channel and some of which are 25 feet have levees 25 feet high and make a continuous 25 foot levee down the east side of the Houston ship channel and then bring in and build a a very large navigation gate that would be about 800 feet to 1000 feet wide, and that would be 50 feet deep and 25 feet above the surface. So it's a huge structure. The only one in the world that would be similar would be the Maslon barrier in the Netherlands and then jump over to the other side of the channel and then connect into the Texas city levee system. For those that don't know, the Galveston Bay system would be about a 20 mile levee system really down the kind of western quadrant of Galveston Bay. And then it would connect to Holland up on the north side, and that would basically wall off the Houston Ship Channel and the West Galveston Bay development from Surge. And we feel like that that would offer along with if we build that in the back side levee around Galveston and elevate some of the roads on both Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula, that that could be done in the $3 million range and could be done in increments and would also fit in with the dredging of the Houston ship channel. So we're trying to come up with multiple purpose concepts that can be built locally and afforded locally. And I think, frankly, common sense is just about going to dictate that we have to be working on those alternatives.

Speaker2: [00:37:31] So do you think to get back to what we're experiencing right now with Harvey? There's a lot of talk about and I think a lot of misunderstanding about, say, the how drainage works and the amount, the kinds of engineering that have gone into it. I think whatever people on the news see pictures of Houston's highway system flooded, they think that that is kind of inconceivable. They don't really understand how the highways work to help drain water out of the city. In other words, a lot of fairly complex engineering has already gone into water management in Houston. Do you think that that that the engineering solutions are going to be adequate here? Or do you think that there have to be other kinds of political, cultural, social changes that are made to the city?

Speaker3: [00:38:10] No, I think that our problem is that we have relied on engineering solutions in the past. And and, you know, I think engineering alone. I mean, while I mean, we have great, we have great engineers and they have designed some excellent projects, but it's going to take much more than simply engineering. We're going to have to basically use every tool in the toolbox. I'm particularly fond of nonstructural alternatives. I think buyouts of there are so many flooded areas will never be able to be protected. Right? You know, so you know, we should be honest about that until the people, we're not going to be able to protect them and give them a fair price for their houses and begin to evacuate those areas. That's one thing. We just need more area for water to go now. Our streets are the secondary drainage system, but we don't really tell anybody about it. We don't do a good job of informing the public of risk. I think our feeling has been, if we talk about it, it'll hurt economic development. And I think probably nothing could be further from the case because from the truth, because I mean, the industries know these things.

Speaker3: [00:39:23] People who are coming here are smart enough to do their research. But unfortunately, in some would say, moving from Iowa, it moves here and may move into a hurricane evacuation zone and not, I mean, never be told. Right. And so, you know, we've got to be able we've got to start thinking in terms of getting good information. Flood warning systems out buyouts saving the prairies and wetlands on the west side of Houston is absolutely essential. Those those are tremendous amounts of floodwaters. I mean, just huge amounts of floodwaters. The settlers, when they were leaving Houston back in the mid-1800s, you know, they've written about water that's ankle to knee deep for the first three days, leaving Houston. Wow. Well, that's the area where we've been developing, and much of that water that was stored out there had been dumped back on the rest of the city. So, you know, we've done a great job of engineering those evacuation of water systems. We've done a very poor job of understanding the downstream impacts and perhaps more importantly, having the political will to do something that frankly might be opposed by the development community.

Speaker2: [00:40:43] No, I just was going to say, Jim, I mean, this is we haven't yet calculated the cost of this storm, but one has to imagine that they're going to be astronomical in terms of property damage. And there are some of these are some of these areas that are flooding badly over the past couple of days. We're also flooded out in the 2015 and 2016 spring storms, too, so we're obviously seeing this as a new normal of flooding. Partly, that's a matter of overdevelopment, but also partly it's a matter of climate change and more water coming on subsidence issues like that. So do you think that this kind of a storm will finally be enough to catalyze some new thinking in the development, community and industry and local politics to take these issues more seriously?

Speaker3: [00:41:24] Well, I think one thing that will hopefully do is cause industry to become more engaged in drainage and flooding issues. You know, I have been told that at one point in time, there was sort of a pact between industry and sort of the rest of the leadership in the city that if the industry would not be annexed from a taxation standpoint and if they would be basically left alone, perhaps with the State for Air Pollution Regulation, that they would pretty much leave the drainage land development decisions to engineers, to developers and their lawyers. And and that's got to change because there's tremendous talent in those industries that could be brought to bear. And I think they'd be willing to ask some of the hard questions that frankly, our politicians are currently unwilling to ask because there's a lot of things that could be done differently if we had the political will. But my goodness is just, you know, you, you don't see that political will, and that's got to change. And I think this event will change it. And I'd also add, if it doesn't change, we may be basically killing the golden economic goose that has been so important for Houston. Because if you've got a place that becomes so risky to live, that is basically uninhabitable for many of us, it's just, you know, jobs. People will go elsewhere.

Speaker1: [00:42:55] Right, right. It becomes a total wash as it were a total loss. Well, that that's right. Yeah, I mean, it's been interesting. I mean, despite the fact that we weren't supposed to be walking around and we did get yelled at by some police driving by this afternoon, we were wandering around midtown with our daughter, who is eight. And I just realized how much attention this storm has brought to the subsurface, right? We all of a sudden we're thinking about drainage much more than we normally would, and I thought, here's a great job for her. She can become a drainage engineer because that's going to be one of the jobs of the future, especially in places like Houston. I mean, it really makes it's it's not just about water arriving on the surface and irrigation and all these ways that we often think about water, potable water, water we use for agriculture. But what happens to that water after it goes through the Earth and and comes out the other side?

Speaker3: [00:43:50] Well, I think there's I mean, I teach sustainable design and at rice in the civil and environmental engineering department. And I mean, that is the designs of the future is going to be taking sort of the natural cycles, the natural circles, if you will, like the water cycle and carbon cycle and integrating those into the designs of the future and basically combining economic thinking and ecological thinking and social thinking, which is by definition, sustainable design. Yeah. And you know, those are going to be the solutions, but I emphasize. That economy is a piece of it in economics, not just putting the cheapest engineered solution in there, but looking at the total sum and then the understanding how those economics work. Well, you know, the key to sustainable design is combining ecological, economic and social thinking and putting. Most engineering designs have really never been approached so that holistically. So I think that's going to be the challenge to the engineers of the future is to get it right from not only a hydrologic standpoint, but with regard to the natural cycles they're working with. I think the circular economy is going to be the economy of the future, and that's going to be one. We're very concerned about trying to understand the natural cycles and then basically inform our economic system to those natural cycles, at least some in some regards, and also integrating the social structure of the community, the full participation of all of us in decision making. And that's a huge thing that we're very bad about in this community is actually soliciting and listening to the opinions of the public. Many engineers are very scared of that, as are many governmental officials.

Speaker1: [00:45:43] It's really heartening, Jim, to hear you say that the economy of the future needs to be one that's cyclical and that's in tune with environmental and ecological systems. I think that's fundamental. And it was also really great to hear you say that we've been depending on engineering too much in the past. That that's been a downfall is that we haven't listened enough and we haven't used enough of these non structural solutions. And that's a term that I haven't heard before, but that I'm going to embrace the non structural solutions, which is the social, the political, the policy. You know, every summer I teach a course on called the social life of Clean Energy that looks at renewable energy programs and how they work and how they articulate with social systems. And I often have a number of students from China in that class, and one of the things we always invariably talk about is the different ways in which a democratic process or democratic government produces different possibilities for renewable energy infrastructures than, say, a more authoritarian regime like China and the Chinese government. So one of the one of the arguments that the students make is, you know, we were able to build Three Gorges because the government did it and there was not a lot of response and blowback. So that conversation always articulates around this question of is it better to have, you know, a kind of authoritarian governmental regime? Or is it better to have democratic input? So this is all a lead up into a question I want to pose to you that came out in an op ed that was just published today and that comes out of your new book, and I'm going to read a little.

Speaker1: [00:47:18] I just want to read a little passage from that for our listeners. So you say that the Texas coast is different in some aspects from other areas of the U.S., as well as different parts of the world? We on the Texas coast cannot depend, cannot depend on government regulation to solve these problems, if it even could. And Texans don't like regulation are unlikely to pass new government regulations to protect the coast. So if we are going to save this wonderful resource for future generations, it will be because we are creative and nimble, something that government regulation often is not. We in Texas may be in a better position to accept this change than those in many other parts of the world, simply because we are so obstinate about government and so accepting of independent thinking and entrepreneurship. So it's really interesting how you're making. You're making a kind of inverse argument here where it's a lack of regulation is actually going to create the situation that allows Texas or the Texas coast to make responses to climate change and and superstorms that we might not see otherwise. Is that is that the essence of what one of the points you want to make?

Speaker3: [00:48:22] Well, that is I think there is a very reason because we've got to rethink these things. We kind of have to come up with better ways of thinking through and for example, take five minutes of our most anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. It may be possible to, for example, pay farmers to restore native prairies, to perhaps go to different methods of raising cattle that actually can sequester upwards of anywhere from one to four tons of carbon dioxide per acre per year. And then have the oil companies pay for those carbon dioxide, essentially storage rights. And in that way, we would set up a totally different agricultural community. We would keep land from being developed for real estate development and particularly along the coast, where 90 percent of our land is undeveloped. And we could set in motion an economy that begins to put the oil companies back into some type of balance with the natural system. And, you know, I can envision that is a market solution that can be done totally independent of regulation because of, frankly, consumer demand for carbon neutral products. So I mean, I just think there's a revolution of things out there that are yet to come, and I think we've got to be creative and think of it and then try to enable them.

Speaker2: [00:49:48] Yeah. So this is the main thesis of your forthcoming book, which is called a Texan plan for the Texas Coast. Is that right?

Speaker3: [00:49:55] That's correct. What I've talked for decades about ecology in my spiritual connection with the ecological system and ethical duties to protect the environment. And I find that, you know, I can lose a lot of audiences in the Houston business community. But if I can talk about ecology and money, everybody in the room will at least listen. So I think part of me in a lot of environmentalists have really disliked me for being becoming willing to have this conversation. But I think we've got to find ways of communication that don't use words and terms that immediately, frankly turn the other side off. I mean, it's very hard to open deaf ears if you can get people's ears open and begin to to communicate. Then I think we can, I think a lot possible. So for me, so much of this is is the word choice. It's about trying to find pathways that are different. I mean, I've been interviewed by a lot of people about this flood. And one question they all have is they want to talk about our lack of zoning issues. And while I think there may be well, implications of that, you know, that's not going to be the solution to try to have a frank discussion that will turn off many in the crowd just because it's a Houston tradition not to zone. I think that's a battle that probably is not going to be worth the effort. There are better solutions that are out there. What you're trying

Speaker2: [00:51:20] To do is to reconnect in the economic system back to the natural system. And the divorce of those two systems has been a huge part of the problem that we faced in Houston and many other parts of the world where economic growth is pursued as an end in its own right without thinking about its long term, sustainable or even short term sustainability.

Speaker3: [00:51:38] Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of the things I emphasize in my course are all of those growth curves that we've all seen, all of which are at least, you know, linear relationships going up, if not logarithmic relationships going on, going up. And the fact that that that is the model that the Earth can't sustain. Instead, we need to bend those growth curves and turn them back into the circle and do so in a way, a circular economy is one that takes these consumption trends. Our product use trends, pollutant emission trends and turns those into complete cycles that put these back into the natural system or at least reuse those resources we've dedicated to those products. So waste material becoming someone else's input is a key aspect of that.

Speaker1: [00:52:29] Right? Yeah. I mean, one of the points that you make really elegantly in the new book, Jim, is this idea the kind of relationship between empty world thinking and full world thinking that you're borrowing from Herman Daly? And you say that this full world is a new kind of frontier, a new type of frontier, and that in order to flourish, we're going to need to adapt to the the, you know, the realities of this full world. So what is that adaptation or that kind of settling of a new frontier of the quote unquote full world? What does that look like for you?

Speaker3: [00:53:04] Well, I mean, I'm I'm still drawing me, obviously trying to figure that out a bit. I mean, the book was sort of a somewhat rambling discussion of that, but one part is that so many of our thoughts were in our thought processes and frankly, our theories of economics and our theories of faith and religion, and our theories of how evenly we think about it and integrate science into government and even government structures. I think all of those institutions were born at a time when really it seemed like there were no limits. There was the Earth's capacity for at least certainly the Western model that I grew up in. You know that there was basically, you know, unchallenged unconstrained. So you've got we've got a value set that in a way of approaching problems. That basically was that comes out of that system. We're now into a different place. It's sort of like coming to the frontier of Texas back in the 1850s and with what you knew from England. And I mean, that would probably get you killed back in those days. And so many of our frontier mindsets is about, you know, taking, you know, in dealing with nature and and, you know, meeting various types. Of harms out there and figuring out how to deal with them where we've got new harms that we're dealing with, we're dealing with climate change.

Speaker3: [00:54:34] You know, we're dealing with limitations of certain resources. Texas is going to be water short in the future. You're going to be short. If we're not careful, we can dry up our rivers in the Texas hill country by over pumping groundwater. Houston had to stop pumping groundwater because we were sinking into the into Galveston Bay. So those are the things we've got to be flexible and begin to think differently. The idea that water that gets to the bay fresh water is wasted basically is ingrained in the Texas legal system and the bays have no rights to water. Yet you can destroy an economy of the coast by taking too much water out and making the bay's too salty to be to fulfill their estuarine purpose. So all of those are sort of new frontier elements in the book. I try to talk about that with regard to what supply with regard to natural hazards like hurricanes and flooding generally. With regard to solutions that involve ranching and restoring native prairies and sequestering carbon dioxide with understanding climate change impacts and which areas of the coast are going to be most vulnerable to sea level rise, we're habitat may need to expand. You know, we talk about burning and birds on the Texas coast being perhaps the source of economic activity. Talk about fishing in the same way.

Speaker3: [00:56:02] Talk about some of the certification programs that have been out there, the lead program. Some of the entrepreneurship type of programs that would probably culminate with the living building challenge. And then the faith based community is changing as well. And Pope Francis has written one of the most elegant documents and probably one of the most important religious documents of a long time incorporating climate change and frankly, respect for the Earth and Earth systems. I mean, he has embraced the circular economy, probably without ever saying that exactly right. So those are the elements. I mean, those are the elements are explore in the book, and I just think those are just key kind of changes that are coming. And, you know, those have the potential to begin to define the full world. It's a different faith based community. It's a different economic community. It's a different way of thinking about recreation and think about getting a gift. How many worthless gifts have you received over your life? And then perhaps someone could give you the gift of sequestering your carbon footprint or perhaps restoring a Martian piece of a marsh or an oyster reef in your name? I mean, those to be really meaningful gifts. So maybe that would change, you know? But those are the fun things to investigate. Yeah, I like that.

Speaker2: [00:57:23] Can I just maybe it's a way of ending, because that's a beautiful way of tying so many of the ideas together in the book. Jim, I want to leave that there. But I also wanted to say, you're probably somebody who's well aware of many important environmental initiatives going on in Houston and in our area now. I would imagine that, you know, people, many people listening to this podcast have been hearing about some of the terrible things happening recently. What do you think are some of the environmental initiatives in Houston that that people could support or should support right now?

Speaker3: [00:57:50] Well, I mean, I think there's some wonderful, wonderful job of restoring the Galveston Bay to area and being a spokesperson for it. So they do great work and they're studying carbon sequestration and marshes and hopefully will be part of this carbon trading system. We're hoping to develop over at the speed center at Rice. Houston Audubon Society is currently outside of Houston, is actively investigating carbon sequestration with prairie restoration and trying to combine that along with preserving, trying to study how much rainwater goes into the soil and they're finding amazing infiltration rates up. One of my funnier moments in this research was my good friend Phil, obedient in hydrology over in the civil and environmental engineering department, and head of the speech center was just blown away when he went out and tested the ability of the natural prairie to absorb rainwater, and that they found infiltration rates as high as 11 inches, 12 inches an hour out there. Wow. Which is huge. It doesn't mean that mean all that water is going to go in there because you can saturate at some point, but it's incredibly absorptive. And the idea that that could be part of our flood control. You know, it's just a, you know, an amazing it's actually a very important thought, but we need to find ways to keep farmers and ranchers from being frankly selling their land to make money in real estate development because they're basically going broke as farmers, right? So we combined to combine support of an agricultural industry with sort of ecological. Conservation and frankly, offering perhaps the only meaningful way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere really becomes interesting.

Speaker2: [00:59:34] Absolutely. Well, Jim, thank you so much for taking the time. I know you're you're getting a lot of requests to speak to a lot of places right now. So I really appreciate taking the time to talk to us and give us some insight and some context to what's going on with Harvey right now. This has been extraordinarily informative.

Speaker1: [00:59:50] Yes, thank you. And stay

Speaker3: [00:59:52] Dry. No kidding by staying dry and I really appreciate it. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation.