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I feel like our country is extremely unprepared for what climate change is going to mean for everyone in a decade or two. It starts with insurance not covering

I feel like our country is extremely unprepared for what climate change is going to mean for everyone in a decade or two. It starts with insurance not covering large areas of the coast, water scarcity in dry regions, etc. Pretty soon you have expensive energy, mass migrations, widespread shortages, and politicians yelling jingoistic chants at rallies. Everyone acts like 20 years from now gas will be more expensive and we’ll get some coastal flooding. These people are hopelessly optimistic. it’s going to get really bad once the dominos start falling.

mdgrech23 3y ago
honestly the number of deniers is mind boggling.
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  Even here.
  - nemo44x 3y ago
    I think there's a difference between denying that carbon emissions into the atmosphere will create a warming and acknowledging that but not being a fear monger or climate doomer. That we don't need to quickly take drastic action that will upend numerous livelihoods and quality of life because we will be able to engineer things to limit effects of warming and probably limit it. You can acknowledge that there are problems to solve but that doesn't mean that we are doomed as some would have you believe. Even challenging the worst case models is OK as that's how these things work. There's just so many variables that blindly listening to the worst case people without considering other things is foolish.
    - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
      With all due respect, the models have been correct since the 70s and continue to be correct, we don't assume or operate on the basis of "worst case scenario", we use ensembles of models and operate on those. The models are correct, have been correct, will continue to be correct. We lived, we live, and will continue to live with the consequences of our inaction. There is literally nothing you can express to change the mind of a person unwilling to change their beliefs in direct presence of evidence, let alone challenge them when the evidence is indirect, more abstract, or existing in the broader environment beyond themselves. Frankly speaking, if all the droughts and floods of the past few years in Europe, US, China, etc didn't cause people to wake up, nothing will and they will eventually ponder how we got where we have. > drastic action that will upend numerous livelihoods and quality of life because we will be able to engineer things to limit effects of warming and probably limit it. With all due respect, that is absolute bogus. Even the most optimistic scenarios of changing our behaviour tomorrow disagree. We could have done things since the 90s to improve the situation, and it wouldn't have reached the current state. Whether we "succeed" is not a boolean value conditioned on the average global temp increase < 2.0C. What climate scientists express is that along the way to 2.0C, we will observe many irreversible tipping points, e.g. Ice-sheet of Greenland, change of oceanic currents, yada, issues with polar vortex e.g. increased splitting which causes heat-domes and people suffer and die from heat and so on. Frankly, I don't expect that anything will change and I have made peace with it. > "Their excellent climate modelling was at least comparable in performance to one of the most influential and well-regarded climate scientists of modern history," Prof Supran said, comparing ExxonMobil's work to Nasa's James Hansen who sounded the alarm on climate in 1988. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64241994 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64241994
- jasmer 3y ago
  Climate fear mongering is a driver of denial. Unwillingness to build nuclear power, which could possibly solve the problem, is a driver of suspicion, which is a driver of denial. Politicization of social sciences and campus activities, severely damages credibility, which drives denial. Corruption of global institutions (such as the WHO, in light of COVID origins) and the understandable yet also uncomfortable 'Don't Look Here' approach to NIH, Lancet relationship with Wuhan Biolab Research (it's complicated) generates deep suspicion, and fosters denial. Big Pharma + McKinsey designed scheme to addict millions with opioids without real consequences, and subsequent embracing of Big Pharma during COVID on totally unquestionable terms aka 'Trust The Science!', although rational from a policy perspective (it's a national emergency), is again, a huge driver of suspicion and therefore denial. Political voices basically have no credibility in most situations and won't be able to convince anyone remotely skeptical. I think things like 'Housing Insurance' frankly is one of the better means of social interdiction, it hits people right in the pocket book, and I would hope insurance companies just send out the letter with the graph saying 'well, this is where the weather is going, this is the expected damage, so this is your rate'. That's not political logic.
crooked-v 3y ago
I'm still surprised I can't find any halfway mainstream real estate search tools that include criteria for climate change predictions on water, fire, etc issues. Redfin will show you general stats inside specific listings, but won't let you search on them.
- mdgrech23 3y ago
  I think looking at more from a state/regional level would be the way to go
  - jagged-chisel 3y ago
    I live in a state with coast and mountains. I don't think grouping them together makes any kind of sense when searching the way the commenter suggests.
  - richiebful1 3y ago
    FEMA releases a county-level national risk index. I find it to be useful for understanding natural disaster risk as a whole. https://hazards.fema.gov/nri/map https://hazards.fema.gov/nri/map
- pseg134 3y ago
  Has it ever occurred to you that it means your ideas are very very outside the mainstream? Maybe you will be laughing at us in your water front cabin at the top of the Rockies but probably not.
  - yellow_postit 3y ago
    Alternative is there’s an incentive time horizon mismatch. Realtors and property listing sites want to close sales. Most homeowners want a multi year home. Beyond the edges of repeat customers it seems hard to see why a real estate company would have any motivation to provide this information unless they cover an area that will significantly benefit from climate change.
  - jackmott42 3y ago
digging 3y ago
> Everyone acts like 20 years from now gas will be more expensive and we’ll get some coastal flooding. These people are hopelessly optimistic. it’s going to get really bad once the dominos start falling. They're right... if they're from 30 years ago. Popular conception of climate change is wildly out of touch with reality, which is why you're right that it's going to get really bad really fast. Instead of adapting, we're largely ignoring or bandaging problems which continue to get worse.
- jasmer 3y ago
  If eco warriors rationally believe this fear mania, then why are they not screaming for a Nuclear Energy revolution aka large scale builout over the next 20 years to literally save the planet? Because we could absolutely do it, we wouldn't need to invent a single iota of new tech. It wouldn't even be that hard - we need to pick up where we left off in 1985 when the 'eco warriors' stopped the buildout. Why does the current Administration believe in 'science' only when it suits them? Or maybe there's more than 'science' going on ...
  - triceratops 3y ago
    > when the 'eco warriors' stopped the buildout No one listens to "eco warriors" now, what makes you so sure they were the ones that stopped the buildout?
    - jasmer 3y ago
      Far from not being listened to - the green movement absolutely killed nuclear development and research in the 1980's and continue to fear monger about that issue, in places like Germany, the fear is generationally entrenched. The buildout curve grows rapidly in 1980's and 1980's and then drops to 0 in the early 1990's [1]. Were the USA to have 'kept the pace' on that buildout, 60-85% of current electricity generation in USA would be supplied by Nuclear, much as it is in France. The denialism of the green crowd is existentially damaging to their credibility. With respect to climate change, far from 'not being listened to' - they're the most influential NGO movement maybe in history (aside from religious movements) - and influence government policy all over the world, at the highest levels, towards a fundamental reshaping of the economic basis. Mixed in with the 'climate movement' are all sorts of other ideologies, particularly those against consumption etc. which gives you hints as to why they won't chose a relatively clear 'almost solution' to their supposedly existential problems. If there's a funny bit of history it's that Greenpeace has caused climate change. They saved the Whales, which is nice, but they killed Nuclear (and continue to hold it back) which is bad. Look at the data from the EIA. Look at those numbers, rate of buildout, and the % contribution made to US energy generation mix. Extend the growth phase (which stopped in 1990) out 20 more years. What is the result? The result is relatively easy reach to Paris targets. [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/us-nuclear-industry.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/us-nuclear-indus...
bheadmaster 3y ago
Climate change activists have been crying wolf for decades now. Even if the wolf comes, nobody will take them seriously.
- anononaut 3y ago
  People won't like it, but it's the truth. > I feel like our country is extremely unprepared for what climate change is going to mean for everyone in a decade or two I've heard this regularly since the 80s. Go rewatch An Inconvenient Truth and see how it lands.
- klyrs 3y ago
  Oil companies did their own research and came to the same conclusion about climate change. But then they decided to lobby against effective mitigation. You're just regurgitating their propaganda.
- digging 3y ago
  The wolf is here and has been here. It's eating more and more sheep every year. But the sheep at the other end of the pasture don't know anyone who's been eaten, so they think the whole idea of the wolf was a scam to steal their grass.
  - bheadmaster 3y ago
    The wolf is not here - it's always only a decade or two away.
    - digging 3y ago
      It's up to you if you want to, in your head, define climate change as something that's always a little bit worse than what exists today, but that's not what anyone else means. Let me be clear: climate change is driving massive disasters around the globe and has been for years. We're in it. It will get worse, but we're in it.
      - 3y ago
morkalork 3y ago
In 50 years Canada will either be annexed forcefully and pipelines built to transport water south. Or most likely, pro-business politicians will be bought and our water rights sold for pennies.
- thehappypm 3y ago
  Pipelines pumping water uphill to Arizona sounds bad.
- JamesLeonis 3y ago
  > In 50 years Canada will ... be annexed forcefully > 2073 Lines up with Fallout
ch4s3 3y ago
This is the same thing Paul Ehrlich has been saying will happen in the next decade for 60 years. The average price of electricity per kWh has been trending down the whole time. Solar and wind are getting really cheap and lithium prices are dropping. In 20 years we might not even be worried about oil prices for most applications.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Are you under the impression that prices adequately reflect all of the costs of a good? Because... that's not true.
  - ch4s3 3y ago
    What do you propose in place of price?
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      Not sure I understand the question. The claim is: climate change is going to cause big problems in the United States. Your response was: energy is cheaper than ever. Energy being cheap does not mitigate the problems created by climate change, and there are many scenarios in which low prices make climate impact worse, such as oil prices falling and consumption increasing. It'd be nice to talk about this stuff in terms of prices because they're very convenient, but convenience does not necessarily make a good metric. The price shout-out is like an ancillary observation at best.
      - ch4s3 3y ago
        The claim was that among those problems, energy would become more expensive. My counter point is that energy is actually becoming cheaper and while we’re at it, less carbon intensive. Cheap energy is a great way to solve a lot of the other problems. And lower carbon energy can chip away at the root cause.
- jgon 3y ago
  Technology has allowed humanity to push back the frontier for a while now, but I can't believe that anyone could look around and think that the current regime is sustainable. Like a village that is feeling great about how full their bellies are now that they've eaten all their seed corn, I get the same feeling from proclamations like the one you've made above. Record levels of C02 in the atmosphere, each year with more and more devastating heat waves (my city just had several of the hottest days on record since records began in the 1880s), the green revolution allowing us to feed people by basically converting petroleum products into agricultural yield, crashing biodiversity all over, fish stocks disappearing, top soil depleting. Its just this cacophony in the background shouting "IT'S TOO MUCH" and its feels like our modern capitalist economy and government can't bear to face this so we just avert our eyes and keep chugging forward. I have some hope that we're starting to turn the corner as birth rates keep going down, and I am somewhat hopeful that things like renewables will keep pushing forward and contribute to helping us move in a better direction, but there's still a ton of stuff that won't be helped. You can't eat cheap electricity provided by solar panels, at least not in any sort of regime that feels believable (I don't think giant fields of green houses is a plausible replacement for modern intensive agriculture), and it still relies on all sorts of manufacturing processes that are in no way sustainable. That hope runs up against proclamations from people like Musk and my local government that WE MUST GROW at all costs. We need to triple our population by 2100 despite the fact that our infrastructure is already groaning at less that half the goal. I think its pretty clear that there is no sustainable QUALITY of life at 9 billion, and I can't see it being feasible anywhere over 5 billion, maybe. But the powers that be in society see that they could reign over a teeming mass of the impoverished and I truly get the feeling the sentiment is our billionaire class would rather reign over a ramshackle society of poverty where the gulf between them and everyone else is titanic instead of a sustainable society when the objective standard of living is higher but the gap is narrower, and so I'm not sure if we'll actually make any moves to improve things or just slowly work our way to a grinding cyberpunk dystopia. To summarize, it feels like people dunking on Malthus and Ehrlich are whistling past the graveyard, their stomach full of seed corn allowing them to put off thoughts of the future and all that matters in our society currently is the next quarter's results. Winter is coming and its not going to be pretty.
giantg2 3y ago
"I feel like our country is extremely unprepared for what climate change is going to mean for everyone in a decade or two." I mean, this water issue has almost nothing to do with climate change. Groundwater depletion is a huge concern on the great plains and other areas too. This is what happens when you have so many people and need to support their preferences (eg watering commodity crops instead of growing crops that thrive in dry areas, overpopulation in arid regions, etc).
- DirectorKrennic 3y ago
  Overpopulation is the fundamental root cause of climate change, and I'm tired of opinion columnists and most scientists denying it or deflecting. Malthus was right. He was only too early for his time. Technology and the Haber-Bosch process gave us more time. But the inevitable can't be delayed forever. No, we shouldn't try to support 8 billion people with the standard of living of Botswana. It would be much better for everyone involved to have 100 million people with an American/Western standard of living. Quality over quantity.
  - cmcconomy 3y ago
    I assume you're planning to be one of the 100k?
    - DirectorKrennic 3y ago
      Yes. Not going to elaborate on the why or how because I've spent enough time on the Internet to know where these arguments lead. Yes, I plan to be one of the survivors.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - friend_and_foe 3y ago
        So you want to kill the rest of us?
olivermarks 3y ago
I live in California, which has infrastructure built for 20m people and a current population of 40m and rising. 'Climate change' is not the issue, unrealistic population infrastructure capacity is. In California the ecology is that we have regular cycles of heavy rain every 5-7 years. The reservoir systems were originally built to store water for the dry years. Forestry management took into account tree disease and the fact forest floors have self cleansed with fire for millennia. Today we appear to have forgotten all this and are instead astonished and horrified if it rains/ doesn't rain and when there are fires during fire season. Arizona is in a far more serious situation with inadequate infrastructure capacity to sustain massive population increases, but currently the mania for housing anyone who wants to live in the west outstrips common sense. Obviously good ecological stewardship of our planet is a no brainer but it seems as though a lot of people just can't join up the historical dots on this and feel human migration to the more pleasant geographical and climate areas are a human right independent of 'tragedy of the commons' logic.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- themodelplumber 3y ago
  > Today we appear to have forgotten all this Not sure if that's the right wording. I live in CA too and the wave of remediations to your "fire event acceptance" and coastal water supplies has been pretty dramatic. I regularly see more activity to clear land around natural burn territory while out hiking, in addition to laser-scanning vegetation patrol helicopters that map down to individual leaves nearing PG&E lines. Citizens here also have better access to early warnings and fire monitoring tech. Coastal cities are implementing desalination plants with $80M+ of state DWR grants for this awarded so far. This includes brackish groundwater treatment. Torrance, Santa Barbara [1], and Catalina island now have new desalination infra up and running and contributing millions of gallons a day to local water supplies. Water resources are managed as part of a diversified portfolio-style contingency strategy. There's also a new interagency group / process to make the planning and setup more efficient than it would be otherwise. Even up here in rural NorCal we have received millions in state grant money for coastal works like this. 1. https://santabarbaraca.gov/government/departments/public-works/water-resources/water-system/water-sources/desalination https://santabarbaraca.gov/government/departments/public-wor...
chiefalchemist 3y ago
True. But the root of this problem pre-dates any wide-spread awareness of climate change. There are areas of the country (e.g., AZ, the south of CA, etc.) that are known to be historically drought prone, and in addition the supply of fresh water finite. But those historic lessons were ignored and we kept builting and building. Look at Vegas. What other species would do what we did there? You're correct, we're unprepared for the wrath of Mother Nature. But that's more or less always been the case, especially when it comes to the west of the USA. Climate Change is simply adding the explanation point to: So Stupid!
briffle 3y ago
It might happen faster than many think, State Farm stopped writing new Homeowners Policies in California. https://www.sfchronicle.com/california-wildfires/article/insurance-state-farm-18125433.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/california-wildfires/article/ins...
konschubert 3y ago
We need desalination. We’re not going to survive without it, so we might as well get going.
JustSomeNobody 3y ago
> I feel like our country is extremely unprepared for what climate change is going to mean for everyone in a decade or two. The general populace is definitely unprepared. Those with means know what is coming and they're "getting mine while the getting is good" before it all goes to shit. Which, of course, means making things worse.
DoreenMichele 3y ago
They've been predicting the end of the world any second now for decades. We also habitually overlook or downplay it anytime anything actually gets fixed. Y2K did not result in a global banking meltdown. Instead, it quietly fixed and VCRs stopped being conveniently programmable. When Iraq lit oil wells on fire on its way out of Kuwait, it was expected to burn for years and be a global climate catastrophe. Crack teams from around the world converged on the country, invented new techniques and thereby dramatically shortened the projected time for putting them out. In the aftermath, the desert bloomed like no one could remember seeing. That detail was a footnote in more dramatic stories. No one wakes up in 2023 and thanks whatever gods they believe in that those two apocalypses were averted. We just go online and handwring about the latest bad news and predict that it's unfixable and we're doomed.
- digging 3y ago
  Well, yes, it is incredible that those two apocalypses were averted due to hard work by many, many people. But why in the world would we sit around in 2023 patting ourselves on the back for surviving Y2k a quarter century ago when we've been racing closer to multiple other apocalyptic scenarios ever since?
Salgat 3y ago
If the dust bowl is any indication, you'll have a period of time where people suffer followed by new technology and investment to address the problem long term. As far as coastal flooding, many countries have already been dealing with this for a long time. Where worth it, technology can fix the issue, and where the value of the land and buildings aren't worth it, people will move.
- digging 3y ago
  > If the dust bowl is any indication I don't think the dust bowl is a good indication. Compared to ocean warming and acidification, it was a relatively local problem.
Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
There are still many people in the US (and elsewhere) that straight up don't believe in climate change and so there is nothing to prepare for. In some places (cough florida cough texas), even mentioning climate change gets you labelled as 'woke' and therefore as a nutjob wacky extremist leftist trans commi. Its not an atmosphere of rational debate and problem solving.
- buzzert 3y ago
  Why do you see climate change as a belief?
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
    googled the definition and belief is "an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists". Seems to fit the way I used the word in this context. Was there a better way to say it?
    - buzzert 3y ago
      Just wondering out loud why people use this word, but only for this issue. What else is so obviously true that one must have belief in it, lest they be considered a "denier"? Are there people who don't believe in the homelessness issue? Poverty-deniers?
      - Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
        Its not just this issue. There are people that don't believe the world is round. Literally a belief about the shape of the planet we have actual photos of. People also have 'beliefs' about 9/11, moon landing, etc. Beliefs abound.

mdgrech23 3y ago

honestly the number of deniers is mind boggling.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago
Even here.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  I think there's a difference between denying that carbon emissions into the atmosphere will create a warming and acknowledging that but not being a fear monger or climate doomer. That we don't need to quickly take drastic action that will upend numerous livelihoods and quality of life because we will be able to engineer things to limit effects of warming and probably limit it. You can acknowledge that there are problems to solve but that doesn't mean that we are doomed as some would have you believe. Even challenging the worst case models is OK as that's how these things work. There's just so many variables that blindly listening to the worst case people without considering other things is foolish.
  - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    With all due respect, the models have been correct since the 70s and continue to be correct, we don't assume or operate on the basis of "worst case scenario", we use ensembles of models and operate on those. The models are correct, have been correct, will continue to be correct. We lived, we live, and will continue to live with the consequences of our inaction. There is literally nothing you can express to change the mind of a person unwilling to change their beliefs in direct presence of evidence, let alone challenge them when the evidence is indirect, more abstract, or existing in the broader environment beyond themselves. Frankly speaking, if all the droughts and floods of the past few years in Europe, US, China, etc didn't cause people to wake up, nothing will and they will eventually ponder how we got where we have. > drastic action that will upend numerous livelihoods and quality of life because we will be able to engineer things to limit effects of warming and probably limit it. With all due respect, that is absolute bogus. Even the most optimistic scenarios of changing our behaviour tomorrow disagree. We could have done things since the 90s to improve the situation, and it wouldn't have reached the current state. Whether we "succeed" is not a boolean value conditioned on the average global temp increase < 2.0C. What climate scientists express is that along the way to 2.0C, we will observe many irreversible tipping points, e.g. Ice-sheet of Greenland, change of oceanic currents, yada, issues with polar vortex e.g. increased splitting which causes heat-domes and people suffer and die from heat and so on. Frankly, I don't expect that anything will change and I have made peace with it. > "Their excellent climate modelling was at least comparable in performance to one of the most influential and well-regarded climate scientists of modern history," Prof Supran said, comparing ExxonMobil's work to Nasa's James Hansen who sounded the alarm on climate in 1988. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64241994 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64241994
jasmer 3y ago
Climate fear mongering is a driver of denial. Unwillingness to build nuclear power, which could possibly solve the problem, is a driver of suspicion, which is a driver of denial. Politicization of social sciences and campus activities, severely damages credibility, which drives denial. Corruption of global institutions (such as the WHO, in light of COVID origins) and the understandable yet also uncomfortable 'Don't Look Here' approach to NIH, Lancet relationship with Wuhan Biolab Research (it's complicated) generates deep suspicion, and fosters denial. Big Pharma + McKinsey designed scheme to addict millions with opioids without real consequences, and subsequent embracing of Big Pharma during COVID on totally unquestionable terms aka 'Trust The Science!', although rational from a policy perspective (it's a national emergency), is again, a huge driver of suspicion and therefore denial. Political voices basically have no credibility in most situations and won't be able to convince anyone remotely skeptical. I think things like 'Housing Insurance' frankly is one of the better means of social interdiction, it hits people right in the pocket book, and I would hope insurance companies just send out the letter with the graph saying 'well, this is where the weather is going, this is the expected damage, so this is your rate'. That's not political logic.

crooked-v 3y ago

I'm still surprised I can't find any halfway mainstream real estate search tools that include criteria for climate change predictions on water, fire, etc issues. Redfin will show you general stats inside specific listings, but won't let you search on them.

mdgrech23 3y ago
I think looking at more from a state/regional level would be the way to go
- jagged-chisel 3y ago
  I live in a state with coast and mountains. I don't think grouping them together makes any kind of sense when searching the way the commenter suggests.
- richiebful1 3y ago
  FEMA releases a county-level national risk index. I find it to be useful for understanding natural disaster risk as a whole. https://hazards.fema.gov/nri/map https://hazards.fema.gov/nri/map
pseg134 3y ago
Has it ever occurred to you that it means your ideas are very very outside the mainstream? Maybe you will be laughing at us in your water front cabin at the top of the Rockies but probably not.
- yellow_postit 3y ago
  Alternative is there’s an incentive time horizon mismatch. Realtors and property listing sites want to close sales. Most homeowners want a multi year home. Beyond the edges of repeat customers it seems hard to see why a real estate company would have any motivation to provide this information unless they cover an area that will significantly benefit from climate change.
- jackmott42 3y ago

digging 3y ago

> Everyone acts like 20 years from now gas will be more expensive and we’ll get some coastal flooding. These people are hopelessly optimistic. it’s going to get really bad once the dominos start falling. They're right... if they're from 30 years ago. Popular conception of climate change is wildly out of touch with reality, which is why you're right that it's going to get really bad really fast. Instead of adapting, we're largely ignoring or bandaging problems which continue to get worse.

jasmer 3y ago
If eco warriors rationally believe this fear mania, then why are they not screaming for a Nuclear Energy revolution aka large scale builout over the next 20 years to literally save the planet? Because we could absolutely do it, we wouldn't need to invent a single iota of new tech. It wouldn't even be that hard - we need to pick up where we left off in 1985 when the 'eco warriors' stopped the buildout. Why does the current Administration believe in 'science' only when it suits them? Or maybe there's more than 'science' going on ...
- triceratops 3y ago
  > when the 'eco warriors' stopped the buildout No one listens to "eco warriors" now, what makes you so sure they were the ones that stopped the buildout?
  - jasmer 3y ago
    Far from not being listened to - the green movement absolutely killed nuclear development and research in the 1980's and continue to fear monger about that issue, in places like Germany, the fear is generationally entrenched. The buildout curve grows rapidly in 1980's and 1980's and then drops to 0 in the early 1990's [1]. Were the USA to have 'kept the pace' on that buildout, 60-85% of current electricity generation in USA would be supplied by Nuclear, much as it is in France. The denialism of the green crowd is existentially damaging to their credibility. With respect to climate change, far from 'not being listened to' - they're the most influential NGO movement maybe in history (aside from religious movements) - and influence government policy all over the world, at the highest levels, towards a fundamental reshaping of the economic basis. Mixed in with the 'climate movement' are all sorts of other ideologies, particularly those against consumption etc. which gives you hints as to why they won't chose a relatively clear 'almost solution' to their supposedly existential problems. If there's a funny bit of history it's that Greenpeace has caused climate change. They saved the Whales, which is nice, but they killed Nuclear (and continue to hold it back) which is bad. Look at the data from the EIA. Look at those numbers, rate of buildout, and the % contribution made to US energy generation mix. Extend the growth phase (which stopped in 1990) out 20 more years. What is the result? The result is relatively easy reach to Paris targets. [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/us-nuclear-industry.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/us-nuclear-indus...

bheadmaster 3y ago

Climate change activists have been crying wolf for decades now. Even if the wolf comes, nobody will take them seriously.

anononaut 3y ago
People won't like it, but it's the truth. > I feel like our country is extremely unprepared for what climate change is going to mean for everyone in a decade or two I've heard this regularly since the 80s. Go rewatch An Inconvenient Truth and see how it lands.
klyrs 3y ago
Oil companies did their own research and came to the same conclusion about climate change. But then they decided to lobby against effective mitigation. You're just regurgitating their propaganda.
digging 3y ago
The wolf is here and has been here. It's eating more and more sheep every year. But the sheep at the other end of the pasture don't know anyone who's been eaten, so they think the whole idea of the wolf was a scam to steal their grass.
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  The wolf is not here - it's always only a decade or two away.
  - digging 3y ago
    It's up to you if you want to, in your head, define climate change as something that's always a little bit worse than what exists today, but that's not what anyone else means. Let me be clear: climate change is driving massive disasters around the globe and has been for years. We're in it. It will get worse, but we're in it.
    - 3y ago

morkalork 3y ago

In 50 years Canada will either be annexed forcefully and pipelines built to transport water south. Or most likely, pro-business politicians will be bought and our water rights sold for pennies.

thehappypm 3y ago
Pipelines pumping water uphill to Arizona sounds bad.
JamesLeonis 3y ago
> In 50 years Canada will ... be annexed forcefully > 2073 Lines up with Fallout

ch4s3 3y ago

This is the same thing Paul Ehrlich has been saying will happen in the next decade for 60 years. The average price of electricity per kWh has been trending down the whole time. Solar and wind are getting really cheap and lithium prices are dropping. In 20 years we might not even be worried about oil prices for most applications.

ethanbond 3y ago
Are you under the impression that prices adequately reflect all of the costs of a good? Because... that's not true.
- ch4s3 3y ago
  What do you propose in place of price?
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Not sure I understand the question. The claim is: climate change is going to cause big problems in the United States. Your response was: energy is cheaper than ever. Energy being cheap does not mitigate the problems created by climate change, and there are many scenarios in which low prices make climate impact worse, such as oil prices falling and consumption increasing. It'd be nice to talk about this stuff in terms of prices because they're very convenient, but convenience does not necessarily make a good metric. The price shout-out is like an ancillary observation at best.
    - ch4s3 3y ago
      The claim was that among those problems, energy would become more expensive. My counter point is that energy is actually becoming cheaper and while we’re at it, less carbon intensive. Cheap energy is a great way to solve a lot of the other problems. And lower carbon energy can chip away at the root cause.
jgon 3y ago
Technology has allowed humanity to push back the frontier for a while now, but I can't believe that anyone could look around and think that the current regime is sustainable. Like a village that is feeling great about how full their bellies are now that they've eaten all their seed corn, I get the same feeling from proclamations like the one you've made above. Record levels of C02 in the atmosphere, each year with more and more devastating heat waves (my city just had several of the hottest days on record since records began in the 1880s), the green revolution allowing us to feed people by basically converting petroleum products into agricultural yield, crashing biodiversity all over, fish stocks disappearing, top soil depleting. Its just this cacophony in the background shouting "IT'S TOO MUCH" and its feels like our modern capitalist economy and government can't bear to face this so we just avert our eyes and keep chugging forward. I have some hope that we're starting to turn the corner as birth rates keep going down, and I am somewhat hopeful that things like renewables will keep pushing forward and contribute to helping us move in a better direction, but there's still a ton of stuff that won't be helped. You can't eat cheap electricity provided by solar panels, at least not in any sort of regime that feels believable (I don't think giant fields of green houses is a plausible replacement for modern intensive agriculture), and it still relies on all sorts of manufacturing processes that are in no way sustainable. That hope runs up against proclamations from people like Musk and my local government that WE MUST GROW at all costs. We need to triple our population by 2100 despite the fact that our infrastructure is already groaning at less that half the goal. I think its pretty clear that there is no sustainable QUALITY of life at 9 billion, and I can't see it being feasible anywhere over 5 billion, maybe. But the powers that be in society see that they could reign over a teeming mass of the impoverished and I truly get the feeling the sentiment is our billionaire class would rather reign over a ramshackle society of poverty where the gulf between them and everyone else is titanic instead of a sustainable society when the objective standard of living is higher but the gap is narrower, and so I'm not sure if we'll actually make any moves to improve things or just slowly work our way to a grinding cyberpunk dystopia. To summarize, it feels like people dunking on Malthus and Ehrlich are whistling past the graveyard, their stomach full of seed corn allowing them to put off thoughts of the future and all that matters in our society currently is the next quarter's results. Winter is coming and its not going to be pretty.

giantg2 3y ago

"I feel like our country is extremely unprepared for what climate change is going to mean for everyone in a decade or two." I mean, this water issue has almost nothing to do with climate change. Groundwater depletion is a huge concern on the great plains and other areas too. This is what happens when you have so many people and need to support their preferences (eg watering commodity crops instead of growing crops that thrive in dry areas, overpopulation in arid regions, etc).

DirectorKrennic 3y ago
Overpopulation is the fundamental root cause of climate change, and I'm tired of opinion columnists and most scientists denying it or deflecting. Malthus was right. He was only too early for his time. Technology and the Haber-Bosch process gave us more time. But the inevitable can't be delayed forever. No, we shouldn't try to support 8 billion people with the standard of living of Botswana. It would be much better for everyone involved to have 100 million people with an American/Western standard of living. Quality over quantity.
- cmcconomy 3y ago
  I assume you're planning to be one of the 100k?
  - DirectorKrennic 3y ago
    Yes. Not going to elaborate on the why or how because I've spent enough time on the Internet to know where these arguments lead. Yes, I plan to be one of the survivors.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - friend_and_foe 3y ago
      So you want to kill the rest of us?

olivermarks 3y ago

I live in California, which has infrastructure built for 20m people and a current population of 40m and rising. 'Climate change' is not the issue, unrealistic population infrastructure capacity is. In California the ecology is that we have regular cycles of heavy rain every 5-7 years. The reservoir systems were originally built to store water for the dry years. Forestry management took into account tree disease and the fact forest floors have self cleansed with fire for millennia. Today we appear to have forgotten all this and are instead astonished and horrified if it rains/ doesn't rain and when there are fires during fire season. Arizona is in a far more serious situation with inadequate infrastructure capacity to sustain massive population increases, but currently the mania for housing anyone who wants to live in the west outstrips common sense. Obviously good ecological stewardship of our planet is a no brainer but it seems as though a lot of people just can't join up the historical dots on this and feel human migration to the more pleasant geographical and climate areas are a human right independent of 'tragedy of the commons' logic.

deleted 3y ago
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themodelplumber 3y ago
> Today we appear to have forgotten all this Not sure if that's the right wording. I live in CA too and the wave of remediations to your "fire event acceptance" and coastal water supplies has been pretty dramatic. I regularly see more activity to clear land around natural burn territory while out hiking, in addition to laser-scanning vegetation patrol helicopters that map down to individual leaves nearing PG&E lines. Citizens here also have better access to early warnings and fire monitoring tech. Coastal cities are implementing desalination plants with $80M+ of state DWR grants for this awarded so far. This includes brackish groundwater treatment. Torrance, Santa Barbara [1], and Catalina island now have new desalination infra up and running and contributing millions of gallons a day to local water supplies. Water resources are managed as part of a diversified portfolio-style contingency strategy. There's also a new interagency group / process to make the planning and setup more efficient than it would be otherwise. Even up here in rural NorCal we have received millions in state grant money for coastal works like this. 1. https://santabarbaraca.gov/government/departments/public-works/water-resources/water-system/water-sources/desalination https://santabarbaraca.gov/government/departments/public-wor...

chiefalchemist 3y ago

True. But the root of this problem pre-dates any wide-spread awareness of climate change. There are areas of the country (e.g., AZ, the south of CA, etc.) that are known to be historically drought prone, and in addition the supply of fresh water finite. But those historic lessons were ignored and we kept builting and building. Look at Vegas. What other species would do what we did there? You're correct, we're unprepared for the wrath of Mother Nature. But that's more or less always been the case, especially when it comes to the west of the USA. Climate Change is simply adding the explanation point to: So Stupid!

briffle 3y ago

It might happen faster than many think, State Farm stopped writing new Homeowners Policies in California. https://www.sfchronicle.com/california-wildfires/article/insurance-state-farm-18125433.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/california-wildfires/article/ins...

konschubert 3y ago

We need desalination. We’re not going to survive without it, so we might as well get going.

JustSomeNobody 3y ago

> I feel like our country is extremely unprepared for what climate change is going to mean for everyone in a decade or two. The general populace is definitely unprepared. Those with means know what is coming and they're "getting mine while the getting is good" before it all goes to shit. Which, of course, means making things worse.

DoreenMichele 3y ago

They've been predicting the end of the world any second now for decades. We also habitually overlook or downplay it anytime anything actually gets fixed. Y2K did not result in a global banking meltdown. Instead, it quietly fixed and VCRs stopped being conveniently programmable. When Iraq lit oil wells on fire on its way out of Kuwait, it was expected to burn for years and be a global climate catastrophe. Crack teams from around the world converged on the country, invented new techniques and thereby dramatically shortened the projected time for putting them out. In the aftermath, the desert bloomed like no one could remember seeing. That detail was a footnote in more dramatic stories. No one wakes up in 2023 and thanks whatever gods they believe in that those two apocalypses were averted. We just go online and handwring about the latest bad news and predict that it's unfixable and we're doomed.

digging 3y ago
Well, yes, it is incredible that those two apocalypses were averted due to hard work by many, many people. But why in the world would we sit around in 2023 patting ourselves on the back for surviving Y2k a quarter century ago when we've been racing closer to multiple other apocalyptic scenarios ever since?

Salgat 3y ago

If the dust bowl is any indication, you'll have a period of time where people suffer followed by new technology and investment to address the problem long term. As far as coastal flooding, many countries have already been dealing with this for a long time. Where worth it, technology can fix the issue, and where the value of the land and buildings aren't worth it, people will move.

digging 3y ago
> If the dust bowl is any indication I don't think the dust bowl is a good indication. Compared to ocean warming and acidification, it was a relatively local problem.

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago

There are still many people in the US (and elsewhere) that straight up don't believe in climate change and so there is nothing to prepare for. In some places (cough florida cough texas), even mentioning climate change gets you labelled as 'woke' and therefore as a nutjob wacky extremist leftist trans commi. Its not an atmosphere of rational debate and problem solving.

buzzert 3y ago
Why do you see climate change as a belief?
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
  googled the definition and belief is "an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists". Seems to fit the way I used the word in this context. Was there a better way to say it?
  - buzzert 3y ago
    Just wondering out loud why people use this word, but only for this issue. What else is so obviously true that one must have belief in it, lest they be considered a "denier"? Are there people who don't believe in the homelessness issue? Poverty-deniers?
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
      Its not just this issue. There are people that don't believe the world is round. Literally a belief about the shape of the planet we have actual photos of. People also have 'beliefs' about 9/11, moon landing, etc. Beliefs abound.