07-10-2022, 01:14 AM
(07-09-2022, 11:26 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: Something I think we should all agree on: plans to curb global warming will never work if the poor end up with drastically higher prices.
Everyone will face higher prices; those prices will be starker for the poor. High prices change human behavior. I have known of people who got out of the climatic paradise of coastal California for the climatic Hell of Iowa.
Palm trees grow in San Francisco, which reflects not so much hot summers but the absence of a real winter. January in San Francisco is even warmer than January in Houston, and summers are around the temperatures ideal for outside activity.
(Iowa)
Iowa has a humid continental climate throughout the state (Köppen climate classification Dfa) with extremes of both heat and cold. The average annual temperature at Des Moines is 50 °F (10 °C); for some locations in the north, such as Mason City, the figure is about 45 °F (7 °C), while Keokuk, on the Mississippi River, averages 52 °F (11 °C).[84] Snowfall is common, with Des Moines getting about 26 days of snowfall a year, and other places, such as Shenandoah getting about 11 days of snowfall in a year.[85]
Spring ushers in the beginning of the severe weather season. Iowa averages about 50 days of thunderstorm activity per year.[86] The 30-year annual average of tornadoes in Iowa is 47.[87] In 2008, twelve people were killed by tornadoes in Iowa, making it the deadliest year since 1968 and also the second most tornadoes in a year with 105, matching the total from 2001.[88]
Iowa summers are known for heat and humidity, with daytime temperatures sometimes near 90 °F (32 °C) and occasionally exceeding 100 °F (38 °C). Average winters in the state have been known to drop well below freezing, even dropping below −18 °F (−28 °C). Iowa's all-time hottest temperature of 118 °F (48 °C) was recorded at Keokuk on July 20, 1934, during a nationwide heat wave;[89] the all-time lowest temperature of −47 °F (−44 °C) was recorded in Washta on January 12, 1912.[90]
(from Wikipedia)
Nobody lives in Iowa for the fire-and-ice climate. One lives there for economic reasons or extreme sentimentality about kin and community. Why would anyone live in Iowa instead of San Francisco? The difference in rent can buy the air conditioning, heating oil, and winter clothes that one needs even if one takes a big pay cut with the move. If I were to design a Hell, then I would impose Iowa winters and Iowa summers with no transition between the two except for tornadoes. Waterloo has a record high of 100F and a record low of -4F... in April alone. You could get frostbite and heatstroke in the same month. Of course, shoveling snow is excellent exercise. (I live in Michigan, which is much the same, and I use the shovel as a plow)..
Prices are signals. You are much more likely to eat hamburgers than lobster if you are poor. Poor people are the market for cars in the latter years of the operating range of those cars' lives. Poor people may have to share a slum apartment that even a middle-class person would find appalling. Poor people are more likely to neglect their health (which reflects that poverty is a contributing factor to early death in America). Poverty is misery in a society that demands mass poverty but ridicules those who endure it.
Gas-buggies replaced horse-drawn vehicles not because the gas buggies were faster or more comfortable but instead because gasoline was much cheaper than oats. If motor fuels got expensive enough and oats remained at real costs as they were in the 1910's, then we would start to see horse-drawn vehicles outside of Amish country.
Birth rates collapse in urban areas where space is expensive (middle-class parents want their ki8ds to have play areas and privacy in their bedrooms), but they either abandon middle-class values or have no kids. Such is so irrespective of ethnicity, national heritage, or religion. It is so in Munich and Mumbai, or Tokyo and Toronto alike. Peasant families raise lots of children (and those children endure hard lives). Global warming will force population growth down -- way down -- but not fast enough. People won't catch on until their children become cannon fodder in wars that brutal, callous regimes wage after Trump-like demagogues become full-blown dictators. That will likely be when kids born in the 2060s who expected a paradise of mind-numbing entertainment find themselves in the worst of all combat situations as soldiers -- or committers of horrific war crimes and crimes against Humanity. A 20th-century gangster like Hitler won't seem so bad by contrast when the genocides go into the tens of millions, famines reach levels that Mao Zedong would consider personal failure, and wars are waged with complete disregard for the survival of soldiers until it is too late. World population might fall by a couple billion due to wars, atrocities, persecutions, famines, and plagues. Maybe people start to recognize that life is precious again around the end of the 21st century and when soils in what was recently boreal forest get the sorts of nutrients characteristic of the rich mid-latitude farm areas, and food scarcity abates. Maybe with lesser energy use due to a shrunken population global warming might abate some, and some desertified lands (like much of southeastern Europe) become fertile again and the oceans retreat to restore some rich alluvial plains to farming. Survivors will have learned some critical lessons the hard ways -- for which there is no preparation.
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.