Sunday, September 23, 2007

Afraid of a little "Light Blue Line"

If you've been following the stories of those conservative turtles, tucking their heads into their shells when the facts and reality are presented to them, you know that there are some folks in town who are terrified of a little blue line.

The Light Blue Line is not a "pet project" of our City's Government, it is a project to remind us all in this community that we live in changing times; a reminder that we must learn to change our ways of living as our ways of living will be changing for us, whether we want to or not.
Sea level rise is "the thing that I'm most concerned about as a scientist," says Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

"We're going to get a meter and there's nothing we can do about it," said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Paris. "It's going to happen no matter what _ the question is when."

Sea level rise "has consequences about where people live and what they care about," said Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland scientist who has studied the issue. "We're going to be into this big national debate about what we protect and at what cost." - Newsday.com

So...what DO we protect here in Santa Barbara when the tide rises? Do the taxpayers bailout those developers out who build huge unaffordable timeshares in a zone that will be affected by the rise of the sea levels? Do insurance companies bailout those whose homes and business are affected by the rise? And how much is this really going to cost our local economy and those of us who live here. What is the cost of doing "nothing" and just hiding our heads in our shells.


We ALL will be affected and thusly we should ALL have discourse about it. That is what The Light Blue Line was all about. To start dialogue. To seek solutions. To deal with reality. However, there are those out there who run scared of public discourse; are terrified of the reality of changes in the world. There are some who are now crying "victim" by wanting a financial bailout for their "pet project" of destroying an informational project for the community.

A 1,000 foot long blue line painted on Santa Barbara streets apparently is just too terrifying for some folks. I can see these "Turtle-istas" trying to ban people from knowing where earthquake faults run through our city, too.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

FYI, you left out all the affordable density/mixed use that developers and city council are cramming into the downtown areas.

Unaffordable time shares don't float and neither do affordable henhouses.

Anonymous said...

Always mad about something you are. Sad you are.

Anonymous said...

and you left out the ridiculous economic model based on the unsustainable high-impact tourism industry that chews up low income workers and destroys the environment--ah, but those bed taxes....

Anonymous said...

Well done, Amphibian. Almost more than their political leanings, the lack of poignancy in using the Turtle as a vehicle to represent some mythical majority is laughable.

It seems the turtle blogger confuses "slow and steady wins the race" with "hard shelled, meek and relatively dumb deserves to lose".

George said...

How weird! Anon 3:44 pm is really Yoda!

Knew who he a conservative was.

Anonymous said...

Typical empty headed paranoid liberal reptile doesn't have an original idea in it's head and can't stand it when someone else does? Uh...good luck with the blog reinvention, maybe someone will read it now? Your envy is only too obvious. snicker

Citizen Stringer said...

How seriously should a comment be taken from someone who does not know the difference between an amphibian and a reptile?

Is that the new "conservative" science education standard?

Trekking Left said...

Hi Amphibian - Welcome to the dialog. It's nice to have you here fighting the good fight. And thanks also for linking to me.

Anonymous said...

"We're going to get a meter and there's nothing we can do about it,"

Isn't a meter a little less than the 23 feet the artist of the "educational" blue line project based his line calculations on?

I guess it wouldn't have been as effective a fear-mongering tactic if the line only covered Jerry Beaver's projects.