The best take I saw on this, it’s because too many in the West, and America specifically, assume they’ll be able to buy their way out of the consequences of climate change. They, or their governments, have the money to buy the resources needed to make it a non-issue for them.
So the real tipping point from a political economy perspective is going to be when that resource crunch hits because the places where those resources normally get extracted from become uninhabitable, plus the people fleeing those areas (already starting) cause a migrant crisis that will make the Syrian one look positively microscopic. That’s when the panic will set in and the faith in the status quo will implode.
All the economists who keep saying "it makes no sense to do anything right now because advances in technology will make it cheaper to address in the future" get the
Mmm, yes, economists, the people most qualified to know what future technological developments will look like. What, engineers? No, we don’t need to ask those nerds.
It's hard to point to any one voodoo concept from the trash-heap of orthodox economics that is singularly the most damaging, but that one has got to be a top contender.
True. People are used to existing alongside awful atrocities and devastation and being mostly insulated from it if not beneficiaries of it as middle class in the global north. they expect this dynamic to always exist, especially since their propaganda tells them that this hierarchy is natural. the south will no doubt be hit worse, but there very little protecting the affluent as well.
The best take I saw on this, it’s because too many in the West, and America specifically, assume they’ll be able to buy their way out of the consequences of climate change. They, or their governments, have the money to buy the resources needed to make it a non-issue for them.
So the real tipping point from a political economy perspective is going to be when that resource crunch hits because the places where those resources normally get extracted from become uninhabitable, plus the people fleeing those areas (already starting) cause a migrant crisis that will make the Syrian one look positively microscopic. That’s when the panic will set in and the faith in the status quo will implode.
Someone just asserted to me over on reddit that capitalism will sell people insulated houses with AC. I asked three questions back
How will people in places like Missouri and Bangladesh pay for that?
Do you that houses cost about 50tons of carbon per?
How many tens or hundreds of millions of houses do you think the capitalists will build?
They completely ignored the first two questions and only responded to the third with "as many as it takes".
All the economists who keep saying "it makes no sense to do anything right now because advances in technology will make it cheaper to address in the future" get the
Mmm, yes, economists, the people most qualified to know what future technological developments will look like. What, engineers? No, we don’t need to ask those nerds.
Economists have something even better than technical expertise: the future discount rate.
It's hard to point to any one voodoo concept from the trash-heap of orthodox economics that is singularly the most damaging, but that one has got to be a top contender.
There's going to be blood like we've never seen.
I hadn't even considered wet bulb death zones also being important resource extraction regions. Man the late 2020s are going to be spicy.
True. People are used to existing alongside awful atrocities and devastation and being mostly insulated from it if not beneficiaries of it as middle class in the global north. they expect this dynamic to always exist, especially since their propaganda tells them that this hierarchy is natural. the south will no doubt be hit worse, but there very little protecting the affluent as well.