CatoblepasAfter all, how far inland could a hurricane go?
SoupAlso that argument is dead on arrival because they expect you and businesses and the entire city to pack up and leave as if it would cost nothing. They also have literally said “just sell your house and move” but like TO WHO?! Who would buy that house if it’s in such a fucked area?!
If anyone ever says “just move” you know they have zero concept of the word “community” or “moving costs” or “nuance”. They just don’t want to address the cause of the problem because they’re, at best, cowards.
The problem is a town was built where there should not be one. Flood plains WILL flood. Rebuilding is pointless. It will just be destroyed again. At some point we have to cut our losses.
“A” town didn’t flood, there’s wreckage across the entire southeast. It’s not because people in the south are too stupid to know where to build, it’s because climate change is making hurricanes stronger further inland, resulting in century and thousand year floods happening.
And those type of floods will only increase in frequency. This is the new normal. People will need to move if they don’t want to be rebuilding every couple years.
Move where? Are you suggesting we just abandon everywhere within hundreds of miles of the coast? People living hundreds of miles inland and not in a flood plain are affected by this as well. Look at an elevation map of North Carolina, and then tell me which side you think would be safer to be on: the side with mountains, or the low lying side by the ocean?
Because it was the western part of NC that got fucking wrecked. Suggesting that people should have foreseen this as inevitable when they chose to be born into communities that have been in the same place for literally hundreds of years without experiencing floods on this level is unrealistic, as is expecting people to just up and move with money they may not have to places where they have no community.
Expecting that we can just offload the price of climate disasters on those affected by going “oh well you should have just lived somewhere else” isn’t just inhumane, it’s ostrich head in sand behavior. Your community isn’t safe from climate change, either. You better hope people haven’t run out of empathy by the time you or your family need help.
Hah and abandon NYC, Boston, DC, SF, LA, Sydney, plus entire countries like Holland, the UK, India with its billion people, etc? This is madness. There is nowhere safe to go and the numbers of people to be displaced are staggering
OpenStars“One rule for thee, another for me” is indeed a not great proposition. Unfortunately, NC voted for Trump that did so much to cause that quoted thought to flourish, and also to harm the climate further e.g. withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord.
Democrats were the ones who have historically offered aid to those affected by massive natural disasters, and Republicans are the ones who claim that such aid should not be offered, except ofc when it happens in their own area (e.g. Chris Christy advocating for rich people:s second, beach homes in NJ vs. his earlier thoughts when it was poor people in New Orleans that lost everything).
So let’s hope that NC wakes up to facts, as opposed to e.g. voting for Trump a third time in a row, and thereby further deepening this hole that we are digging ourselves into.
Politics matters, as in literally life and death.
A drought in south america has caused out of control wildfires that dumped 210 megatons of CO2 in the atmosphere. That’s just from wildfires. The runaway effects are becoming more evident and unfortunately people will have to finally give up on huge swaths of land or be killed.
Save the planet, hang a CEO
CryptagionismisogynistWe should have started building sanctuary cities a decade ago. Unfortunately the wealthy in the world are choosing a Noah’s Ark model for climate change because they delusionally think they will survive this.
theneverfoxIt’s both - yes, places are getting hit with types and scales of natural disasters they could not have anticipated, but they’re also rebuilding in places that will get hit hardest when they do it again
Consider the idea of a 100 year standard - you’re building to the level where it won’t hold up to the storm of a lifetime. Let alone the fact that storms keep getting worse… It boggles my mind
Poor people live where they can afford to, however they can. In trailer parks, in a tent, in a log cabin, however they can. Even knowing that someplace is likely to flood again, someone will choose to live there. For someone who has a minimum wage job, no savings, and with most houses costing a significant fraction of a million dollars, they don’t have the choice to live in a floating sky castle or 20,000 leagues under the sea or on a moon colony, so they’ll choose to live even somewhere where life is difficult.
Agreed though that people should not pay the full asking price for such a place, as if it would not flood, that is… probably happening, but not wise at all.
So move further inland. You people act as if the entire fucking continent became Atlantis after one fucking storm.
On top of what the other person said people still need to live in those places. It is actually crazy to say that the entire south-eastern seaboard of the United States should just be permanently evacuated wholesale. We could slow, or even stop, a lot of this by just admitting that climate change is real and doing something about it and it would be a helluva lot cheaper than turning several states in ghost towns.
I’m not saying to abandon the whole southeast, but something in the range of 15 million US homes are built in flood plains. A large portion of these are in Texas and Florida. It is absolute madness to keep building and rebuilding in these areas.
Even if we drop global CO² emissions to zero tomorrow, it will take more than a century to even begin to see trends reverse. In the mean time lowland areas will continue to flood over and over.
Well dang. If only we knew about this back in the 70s, we’d have some time to focus on green energy, increasing efficiency, reducing excess, and building homes/communities that could withstand the changing climate.
And also the 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, and now 20s. The decision to ignore everything continues forward forever.
The “fuck around” phase is over. We are now on “find out”.
I’m just mad our grandparents got all the fun FA, and we’re stuck with the FO.
During the pandemic, Trump dragged his feet in developing a response to it - leaked conversations mentioned how individual #1 liked the fact that it was primarily affecting highly liberal areas such as NYC and LA, while leaving conservative strongholds such as Idaho and Utah alone, and had asked about delaying the federal response a bit so as to let the people in the former stew in it a bit more, for his political advantage.
Also I note that that same individual #1 was in charge of nationwide disaster recovery efforts - even going so far as to take the binders of ready-made plans and throw them into the garbage.
So this whole “it is not the job of the government to use its tax collected revenue to take care of We The People” is very much by design. i.e. not merely a factual matter but a political one, in having to choose between deeper tax breaks for the wealthy vs. preparedness. And Individual #1 made that choice, in conjunction with Congress, that now applies to us all.
In fact, the former swing state turned Republican stronghold NC is one of the very reasons why climate change is hitting us so strong and fast, unprepared and seemingly even unawares.
Perhaps “admitting that climate change is real and doing something about it” is something that NC will now change its mind about, so that the federal government can do differently?
But I somewhat doubt it. It is very hard to help someone who seems dead set against being helped, nor allowing the rest of us to help ourselves as well (see e.g. medically necessary abortions).