Should all occur as the climate activists fear, humanity will not cease, but adapt.
The climate-concerned Left has zeroed in on the American Southwest as one of the first regions that will demonstrably suffer the wrath of Earth (think Sodom and Gomorrah, but the depravity is alfalfa and golf courses) as she looks to rid herself of the flatulating bipeds that have polluted her waters and coagulated the air. A pair of recent pieces in the Atlantic titled “When Will the Southwest Become Unlivable?” and “Summer in the South Is Becoming Unbearable,” are of the same mind: life in swathes of the United States will be, or already is, untenable.
From the latter:
Southern summers have always been hot and humid. But the swings from one extreme to the next—drought to torrential rain, record-breaking cold to sweltering heat, storm to sun—have lately begun to feel apocalyptic. Summer is our season, the South at its best. But this new reality has taken the best parts of southern summers and made them unbearable.
The extremities feed into one another: The heat breeds severe thunderstorms in some parts of the country, and lights forests on fire in others; homes and cars are damaged, power is knocked out, and people are stranded. Power has become a particular issue in Texas, where the grid has been stretched past its limits by cold snaps over the past several winters as well as the current heat wave; right now, the saving grace is additional solar power from the beating sun, aided by wind power. And when the lights go out or the pipes burst, families are left to deal with the continued and increasing heat with no air conditioner, perhaps no water.
Instead of surrendering to a gradual increase of molecular two-step, Tom Zoellner has provided an alternative of sorts, written for the New York Times. His article is remarkable; it manages history-informed optimism about man’s demonstrated ability to endure in some of North America’s most beautiful, hostile country. It’s refreshing to read a piece on the subject where the writer isn’t a nuker, crank, or think-tank type. Rather, Tom appears to be a liberal who knows Arizonans and their passion for remaining that will inspire (or rediscover) the technologies to make thriving in the Sonoran possible.
Zoellner writes:
There’s reason for hope. Take Arizona, a state that’s often seen as the epicenter of the crisis because of its steep population growth and the fact that many of the same Arizona counties attracting new residents at a record pace are also the most water starved, experiencing severe droughts far out of proportion to the rest of the country. In spite of this, many environmental experts in Arizona are relatively sanguine about its future because of all the progress it’s made over the last 50 years to conserve its water supply.
Because of a reduction in farmland acreage and better household conservation, Arizona now uses 3 percent less water than it did in 1957, despite having a population that’s mushroomed more than 555 percent since then. Paradoxically enough, the steady march of master-planned communities to the horizon — an Arizona cliché — provides big hydrological savings because of the conversion of water-guzzling farmland into more parsimonious suburban uses, Sarah Porter, the director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, told me.
We now use treated wastewater on golf courses and parks. Phoenix is already building a facility to turn wastewater into high-quality drinking water by 2030. And Southwestern cities have an exceptionally simple solution for curbing residential water use: Charge more for it in the summers. After Phoenix started using this powerful incentive, the number of homes with front or back lawns went down from nearly 80 percent in the 1970s to about 10 percent today, according to Kathryn Sorensen, a former Water Services director for the city. “That’s a wholesale cultural change,” she said.
Read the whole thing here. (Note: The Times‘s lawn stat is a bit vague. Clarification from the Arizona Department of Water Resources: “City of Phoenix research shows that in 1990, 80 percent of parcels had turf covering a majority of their yards; now, only 7 percent do. And more than 40 percent of Phoenix residences have no turf at all.”)
Should all occur as the climate activists fear, humanity will not cease. Rather, we’ll adapt according to our regions. As with our diverse polities that make up these 50 states, so too will the structures and resources become more specific to the threats and advantages of a state’s or county’s surrounding environs. Sea walls on the coasts, lawnless pueblos in the Southeast, and Cape Cod cottages in the Midwest. We’ll become more like ourselves — maybe even a corrective to the homogenizing influences of our Google Chrome–based existence.
I suspect writers for the Post and Atlantic fear climate change’s effect in part because the country may cease to look like facsimiles of D.C., Manhattan, and their suburbs. It’s an embarrassingly parochial sentiment. Americans are the descendants of people who gathered here from the world over to make something of themselves they couldn’t at home. The descendants of those people who cut sod homes into riverbanks or raised houses on posts in the Bayou, will be just fine.