5 ms·

Side note: I think it's going to be really interesting how governments decide to respond to rising oceans / temps (think places like Miami, Manhattan, any coas

by cj 3y ago

Side note: I think it's going to be really interesting how governments decide to respond to rising oceans / temps (think places like Miami, Manhattan, any coastal city at sea level). Seems like there's 2 options: 1) Encourage people to migrate to other cities and essentially "give up" on saving the city 2) Spend a lot of money trying to fortify existing cities I'm guessing it will start with #2 (technically it's already happening) and then eventually we'll get to #1 but only when the situation is truly dire after which it becomes a politically favorable philosophy. And then the question is how long do we think it will take for #1 to happen (assuming it will happen in the first place). 1-2 decades? Half a century? Multiple centuries? There must be some contrarian billionaires out there buying up tons of land in undeveloped areas with a multi-decade idea that the land will 100x in value if/when mass migrations occur. That said, I would guess that most easily habitable areas of the US are already pretty well built up. Maybe what's more likely to happen to migration to suburbs and eventually to rural areas, until those areas are in such demand that the suburbs become metros and rural becomes suburbs. /end of armchair science ramblings

autoexec 3y ago
If we were smart we'd at least stop using tax payer money to pay for fixing all the damage done in places where flooding is routine. People will probably need the government to pay them to move though since no one is buying a house that floods every single year. What we should be doing is locating rural areas expected to be least hit by climate change and building them up to accommodate the people who will be displaced including climate refugees from elsewhere. We could even be requiring refugees and certain immigrants to move into and live in certain areas of the country (for some number of years at least) to help get those places started. Sadly, immigration policy isn't being enforced much these days at all and it's kind of scary to think of what will happen when people start to become really desperate. When they're not just looking for better paying jobs and instead don't have clean water or homes to go back to. In any case, it's going to get a lot hotter and a lot more crowded in the near future, and it'll be a balancing act to get more and more people packed into spaces without it becoming more people than a given area can sustainably support. High population density is never good for the local environment and we don't want to make a bad situation worse by creating or allowing slums.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  > We could even be requiring refugees and certain immigrants to move into and live in certain areas of the country (for some number of years at least) to help get those places started. Yeah! These places will start out as camps, of course, but we'll later give them the resources to become cities. It certainly makes sense to concentrate immigrants and refugees in them. This is an honest representation of our values and in all sincerity I do predict more of it in the future.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    Ideally we'd build out infrastructure and make them into nice places to live before anyone moves there, but very few people are looking to move to a ghost town and without a population there'd be little to no local economy to start with. The new cities would mean a lot of new jobs though and with people being able to work remotely our new countrymen should be able to settle in quickly. I know Americans aren't at all used to the idea of being told where they can live (even if only for a few years), but careful planning could help distribute our quickly growing population a bit and help protect the environment while resources grow increasingly scarce all without creating ghettos. Sadly, I don't think we can avoid creating heavily segregated areas while unprecedented numbers of immigrants and refugees are coming in who'll need time to get acclimated and recover from the loss of their homes and previous lives, but we could still provide the areas with diversity (there'll be people from all over coming in) and hopefully they wouldn't stay filled with mostly just immigrants and refugees for long. The new cities, built in safe areas with all new infrastructure using what we've learned from our past mistakes and from the successes of others, could become very attractive for all kinds of people. Today there's an embarrassing number of places in the US full of crumbling infrastructure. Places where people don't have clean drinking water, broadband, or reliable electricity.
    - giraffe_lady 3y ago
      They will be ghettoes in something much closer to the original sense of the word than the current vernacular one. I simply do not trust the motivations, commitment, and competence of anyone who would try to accomplish this.
TinyRick 3y ago
In the US at least, I don't trust that the government will do anything meaningful preemptively - they don't have a great track record (with regards to climate change) in recent decades. Instead, it will likely be the insurance companies that dictate how/if things are rebuilt when catastrophes strike. Rebuilding won't be an option when no insurer will issue a policy for houses, office buildings, manufacturing, etc due to the expected future consequences of climate change. It's already starting to happen in Florida with multiple major insurance companies pulling out of the state.

by cj 3y ago

autoexec 3y ago

If we were smart we'd at least stop using tax payer money to pay for fixing all the damage done in places where flooding is routine. People will probably need the government to pay them to move though since no one is buying a house that floods every single year. What we should be doing is locating rural areas expected to be least hit by climate change and building them up to accommodate the people who will be displaced including climate refugees from elsewhere. We could even be requiring refugees and certain immigrants to move into and live in certain areas of the country (for some number of years at least) to help get those places started. Sadly, immigration policy isn't being enforced much these days at all and it's kind of scary to think of what will happen when people start to become really desperate. When they're not just looking for better paying jobs and instead don't have clean water or homes to go back to. In any case, it's going to get a lot hotter and a lot more crowded in the near future, and it'll be a balancing act to get more and more people packed into spaces without it becoming more people than a given area can sustainably support. High population density is never good for the local environment and we don't want to make a bad situation worse by creating or allowing slums.

giraffe_lady 3y ago
> We could even be requiring refugees and certain immigrants to move into and live in certain areas of the country (for some number of years at least) to help get those places started. Yeah! These places will start out as camps, of course, but we'll later give them the resources to become cities. It certainly makes sense to concentrate immigrants and refugees in them. This is an honest representation of our values and in all sincerity I do predict more of it in the future.
- autoexec 3y ago
  Ideally we'd build out infrastructure and make them into nice places to live before anyone moves there, but very few people are looking to move to a ghost town and without a population there'd be little to no local economy to start with. The new cities would mean a lot of new jobs though and with people being able to work remotely our new countrymen should be able to settle in quickly. I know Americans aren't at all used to the idea of being told where they can live (even if only for a few years), but careful planning could help distribute our quickly growing population a bit and help protect the environment while resources grow increasingly scarce all without creating ghettos. Sadly, I don't think we can avoid creating heavily segregated areas while unprecedented numbers of immigrants and refugees are coming in who'll need time to get acclimated and recover from the loss of their homes and previous lives, but we could still provide the areas with diversity (there'll be people from all over coming in) and hopefully they wouldn't stay filled with mostly just immigrants and refugees for long. The new cities, built in safe areas with all new infrastructure using what we've learned from our past mistakes and from the successes of others, could become very attractive for all kinds of people. Today there's an embarrassing number of places in the US full of crumbling infrastructure. Places where people don't have clean drinking water, broadband, or reliable electricity.
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    They will be ghettoes in something much closer to the original sense of the word than the current vernacular one. I simply do not trust the motivations, commitment, and competence of anyone who would try to accomplish this.

TinyRick 3y ago

In the US at least, I don't trust that the government will do anything meaningful preemptively - they don't have a great track record (with regards to climate change) in recent decades. Instead, it will likely be the insurance companies that dictate how/if things are rebuilt when catastrophes strike. Rebuilding won't be an option when no insurer will issue a policy for houses, office buildings, manufacturing, etc due to the expected future consequences of climate change. It's already starting to happen in Florida with multiple major insurance companies pulling out of the state.