HUGE funding cuts by Bush + HUGE hurricane caused in part by Bush-supported pro-global warming policies = Worst Natural Disaster in US History.
Yes, it doesn't take a climatologist or an economist to see that we can lay a great deal of the blame for the Katrina devastation at the feet of one guitar-strummin', dog-carryin', vacation-takin' man: George W. Bush.
Here are the facts:
Knight-Ridder on Bush's funding cuts:
Federal flood control spending for southeastern Louisiana has been chopped from $69 million in 2001 to $36.5 million in 2005, according to budget documents. Federal hurricane protection for the Lake Pontchartrain vicinity in the Army Corps of Engineers' budget dropped from $14.25 million in 2002 to $5.7 million this year. Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu requested $27 million this year.
Both the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper and a local business magazine reported that the effects of the budget cuts at the Army Corps of Engineers were severe.
In 2004, the Corps essentially stopped major work on the now-breached levee system that had protected New Orleans from flooding. It was the first such stoppage in 37 years, the Times-Picayune reported.
Pulizter Prize-winning journalist Ross Gelbspan speaking on Democracy Now about the causal link from Bush policies to global warming to Katrina:
It's very clear that global warming does not make more hurricanes, but it makes hurricanes much stronger. And that's because hurricanes take their energy from the temperature of surface waters. In the case of Katrina, it started as a category one, I think 70 mile-an-hour winds when it glanced off South Florida, but as it moved through the Gulf where surface temperatures are about 80 degrees, it became enormously more powerful. I think the winds reached about 170 degrees, and that is a big reason for this incredible devastation that we have been seeing. It's very interesting that also Sir David King, who is Tony Blair's science adviser, made a direct link between hurricane intensity and global warming, and coincidentally, there was a piece of research done by Dr. Kerry Emmanuel at M.I.T. that came out just a couple of weeks ago that found that tropical storms had become 50% more severe in the last 30 years, again because of rising temperatures.
We have to cut our emissions worldwide by 70%, and that threatens the survival of the coal and oil industry. We need a rapid global transition to clean energy. Unfortunately, the White House, under the Bush administration, has become the East Coast branch of ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal. And those companies and those industries are really calling all of the shots for climate and energy policy in this White House.
9/11, Iraq, Katrina: how many dead Americans on Bush's watch?