As with COVID-19, anthropogenic global warming (AGW) will be a concern of Big Business. Big Business does not want its assets inundated and ruined. Real estate and fossil-fuel interests could end up in great ideological struggles against each other -- and even war. Some strange alliances that seem unlikely now will emerge. Consider the unlikely alliance between organized labor, heavily Catholic and 'ethnic', with Southern racist agrarians. Those people had practically nothing in common in culture, and their sole shared common interest was their distrust of Big Business (attempts to smash organized labor as institutions and disdain for high-tariff protectionism). Such was the New Deal coalition to a large extent and it succeeded because the two disparate groups rarely met each other except at political conventions of the Democratic Party.
So who will speak for peasant farmers in places like Bangladesh? Quite possibly big slumlords in giant cities. Should AGW be neglected, then the worst effects (mass inundations and desertification of prime farmland with resulting shortages of food) will hit hardest around the time of the next Crisis Era -- the Crisis of 2100. Humanity will have mostly gone through an era of myopic greed and neglect of social decencies in the name of economic growth and mindless hedonism. Many people will say to themselves
"Let us live for the moment, for there may be no tomorrow".
That all too often proves a self-fulfilling prophecy even in good times for many... but in bad times, such ill prepares people, economically, morally, or intellectually for what follows.
Remember: no technology has any fix for food shortages. Humanity could adjust should climate change offer fertile lands in subarctic regions in which, due to overall warming, people could do successful agriculture and get a yield of one crop a year (as in climates with real winters but also four months of real summer), but even that requires the development of suitable topsoil and the melting of permafrost and/or the draining of swampy upper levels of the ground.
So who will speak for peasant farmers in places like Bangladesh? Quite possibly big slumlords in giant cities. Should AGW be neglected, then the worst effects (mass inundations and desertification of prime farmland with resulting shortages of food) will hit hardest around the time of the next Crisis Era -- the Crisis of 2100. Humanity will have mostly gone through an era of myopic greed and neglect of social decencies in the name of economic growth and mindless hedonism. Many people will say to themselves
"Let us live for the moment, for there may be no tomorrow".
That all too often proves a self-fulfilling prophecy even in good times for many... but in bad times, such ill prepares people, economically, morally, or intellectually for what follows.
Remember: no technology has any fix for food shortages. Humanity could adjust should climate change offer fertile lands in subarctic regions in which, due to overall warming, people could do successful agriculture and get a yield of one crop a year (as in climates with real winters but also four months of real summer), but even that requires the development of suitable topsoil and the melting of permafrost and/or the draining of swampy upper levels of the ground.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.