policy – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: policy

longshore transport and littoral drift

[Dauphin Island, Alabama, at the south opening of Mobile Bay.] Continuing the theme of Sandy-inspired rumination on the risks and rewards of littoral urbanization, a pair of articles by Justin Gillis and Felicity Barringer at the New York Times utilize the example of Alabama’s Dauphin Island — a hurricane-battered barrier island near the port of […]

blowing the fuse

[Detonation at the Birds Point inflow crevasse, during the night of 2 May 2011.] As sand boils appeared in Cairo, the swollen rivers continued to rise.  The city was under mandatory evacuation orders, and the flood gauge was expected to reach 63 feet — not high enough to over-top the city’s levees, but high enough […]

the economist on american infrastructure

[“Enroute high” aeronautical chart of the airspace around Washington, DC, via the US Division of the International Virtual Aviation Organization and SkyVector.com.  American airports rely on obsolete ground-based air traffic control,a system whose “imprecision obliges controllers to keep more distance between air traffic, reducing the number of planes that can fly in the available space” […]

biofuel skepticism

Biofuel skepticism — both cellulose alcohol and algae — albeit from a source with an obvious (and stated) agenda. While I’m skeptical of these skeptics’ agenda, the environmental and political problems that have resulted from pushing first-generation biofuels (corn ethanol, palm oil) here and abroad suggest that its worth at least listening to the skeptics […]