#147 Floaters

As news comes done the pike about another hurricane, this one perhaps stronger than the last, it makes me stop and wonder if this whole global warming thing is getting out of hand. The ice caps are melting, the hurricanes are strengthening and getting more frequent, the smog is thickening and the ozone hole is expanding. Perhaps we should take another look at that Kyoto protocol thing we opted out of. The big reason America chose to bow out of Kyoto, other than the horrid prospect of letting someone else actually have a say in or national destiny, was that the costs to business would be too great.
Maybe I’m the dimwit so many people like to call me but, isn’t the cost to business of having your shoreline factories swept into oblivion kind of high too? Isn’t relocating your shipping and manufacturing centers a hundred miles inland a big chunk out of your debit column? How is having to throw up a levee around New York going to build up the bottom line of the financial district? Roads underwater? No problem, we’ll just build interstate commerce trucks with taller tires.
Better insulate those power transmitters while we’re at it. The Northeast power grid may not function quite as well with its coastal sections shorting out. Hell, they could have brown-outs all the way to the Great Lakes, and I’m just talking about power.
And how about cellphone transmission? Cell towers need power and if the main supply is cut off and the emergency back-up generators are swamped by water, cellphones don’t work.
One of the biggest lessons we can take from hurricane Katrina is what happens when floodwaters swamp everything in sight. Our based-on-dry-land infrastructure collapses and bobs to the top like a floater in a cesspool.
People may disagree about why, but sea levels are rising. The other night the president was talking about shipping mobile homes as housing to the hurricane-stricken gulf area. My first thought was, oh yeah, they’ll hold up real good come next hurricane. Like a trailer park in a Kansas tornado. But then, I thought: Wait a minute. He may have something here. It’s the foundation that gets us in trouble. Mobile homes don’t have any. If some entrepreneur could invent a floatation collar for the bottoms, they could just ride out the storm on the top of the waves. Floating mobile homes, yeah, that’s it, they could call them “flo-bile homes.” U.S. ingenuity will get us out of this crisis yet. Global warming? Flobile homes.
America, ya gotta love it.