Did NEPA Drown New Orleans? The Levees, the Blame Game, and the Hazards of Hindsight

This Article highlights the. hazards of hindsight analysis of the causes of catastrophic events, focusing on theories of why the New Orleans levees failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and particularly on the theory that the levee failures were caused by a 1977 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) lawsuit that resulted in a temporary injunction against the Army Corps of Engineers\u27 hurricane protection project for New Orleans. The Article provides a detailed historical reconstruction of the decision process that eventuated in the New Orleans storm surge protection system, focusing both on the political and legal factors involved and on the standard project hurricane risk assessment model that lay at the heart of the Army Corps of Engineers\u27 decisionmaking process. The Article then offers a detailed analysis. of how and why Hurricane Katrina overcame the New Orleans levee system. As this analysis demonstrates, the argument that the NEPA lawsuit played a meaningful causal role in the Katrina disaster is not persuasive. Parallel lessons are then drawn for forward-looking disaster policy. The same problems of uncertainty and complexity that confound the attempt through hindsight to attribute causal responsibility for a disaster also confound the attempt to predict using foresight the variety of outcomes, including potentially disastrous ones, that may flow from policy choices. Focusing narrowly on any single parameter of complex natural and human systems is likely to dramatically distort environmental, health, and safety decisionmaking, whether the parameter is a standard project hurricane when planning a hurricane protection plan, or the equally mythical lawsuit that sunk New Orleans when attempting to allocate responsibility for the plan\u27s failure some forty years later

Did NEPA Drown New Orleans? The Levees, the Blame Game, and the Hazards of Hindsight

This Article highlights the. hazards of hindsight analysis of the causes of catastrophic events, focusing on theories of why the New Orleans levees failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and particularly on the theory that the levee failures were caused by a 1977 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) lawsuit that resulted in a temporary injunction against the Army Corps of Engineers\u27 hurricane protection project for New Orleans. The Article provides a detailed historical reconstruction of the decision process that eventuated in the New Orleans storm surge protection system, focusing both on the political and legal factors involved and on the standard project hurricane risk assessment model that lay at the heart of the Army Corps of Engineers\u27 decisionmaking process. The Article then offers a detailed analysis. of how and why Hurricane Katrina overcame the New Orleans levee system. As this analysis demonstrates, the argument that the NEPA lawsuit played a meaningful causal role in the Katrina disaster is not persuasive. Parallel lessons are then drawn for forward-looking disaster policy. The same problems of uncertainty and complexity that confound the attempt through hindsight to attribute causal responsibility for a disaster also confound the attempt to predict using foresight the variety of outcomes, including potentially disastrous ones, that may flow from policy choices. Focusing narrowly on any single parameter of complex natural and human systems is likely to dramatically distort environmental, health, and safety decisionmaking, whether the parameter is a standard project hurricane when planning a hurricane protection plan, or the equally mythical lawsuit that sunk New Orleans when attempting to allocate responsibility for the plan\u27s failure some forty years later

Disallowances and overcapitalization in the U.S. electric utility industry

Regulation of an industry often produces unintended consequences. Averch and Johnson (1962) argue that certain regulation of electric utilities provides utilities the incentive to purchase an inefficiently large amount of capital. Another possible and related unintended consequence of electric utility regulation is that regulatory cost disallowances on capital may also increase utilities' incentives to overcapitalize. The authors provide theoretical evidence that capital expenditure disallowances will increase the Averch and Johnson effect in some instances and thus may have contributed to the overcapitalization problem that regulation was designed to discourage. Our model shows that disallowances can reduce the rate of return on investment and thereby increase the Averch and Johnson distortion.Electric utilities ; Energy industries