How We'll Adapt to Climate Change

For years many conservatives have been denying climate change even exists, and when they finally break down and admit it does, they say it'll cost too much to do anything about it and, as Rex Tillerson of ExxonMobil (and Putin buddy) says, we'll find some way to adapt.

What form will adaptation take? Let's look at an example. The American Southwest has been hammered by drought for years, a condition that has been worsened by higher temperatures due to climate change. We're already beginning to see the fallout across the country:

[Minnesota-based] Dakota Premium Foods said Wednesday that it will temporarily cease production at its South St. Paul beef processing plant due to “extremely short cattle supply.”

The shutdown is effective immediately and will idle 300 workers. Dakota Premium said it does not know how long the plant will remain closed.

The U.S. beef processing industry has wrestled for the past two years with a shortage of cattle, due primarily to drought conditions in the Southwest. As drought burned out pasture lands, ranchers greatly cut back on their herds.

“We regret that the current limited cattle supplies, the smallest numbers since the early 1950s, [have] forced us to make this very difficult decision,” Dan Mehesan, president of Dakota parent ­American Foods Group’s fresh meat division, said in a statement.

A recent report on climate change (Risky Business) from businessmen and former Secretaries of the Treasury, both Republicans and Democrats, outlined many of the economic woes climate change will wreak.

It won't be long before cattle production will become impossible in many parts of the Southwest because the rivers are drying up (due to lack of snowpack in the Rockies) and the aquifers are running dry (due to excessive pumping to irrigate crops, water golf courses in Phoenix and Tucson and run the fountains in Las Vegas). A single beef animal requires 2,000-7,000 gallons of water a year (more the hotter it gets). Putting them in expensive air-conditioned barns won't help; hay shortages have plagued ranchers for years now.

How will we adapt? Ranchers will declare bankruptcy. The price of beef will go up. Meat packers will go out of business. Americans will eat fewer hamburgers. Some cattle ranching will move to areas that are currently productive farmland, but which will become more arid and become fit only for pastureland. The communities in the stricken areas will become ghost towns. Agricultural production and American exports will decline.

So, even if cattle production is eventually relocated elsewhere, the economic disruption and dislocation will figure in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and the human misery caused is incalculable.

But it's not just cattle ranching that will be affected. California's Central Valley has been stricken by the same drought. That's an even greater problem:

[California's] $45bn (£26bn) farming industry produces almost half the fruits, vegetables and nuts grown in the US, and to do that it uses 80 per cent of California’s water. Almonds alone account for 10 per cent of the state’s water use – not surprising, given that California produces 80 per cent of the world’s almonds.

And it isn't just California. The plains states are also suffering from a years-long drought. In other words, the United States is losing the most productive farmland in the world.

Adapting to climate change will mean millions of people will lose their jobs and millions of acres of land will become unproductive deserts. The people affected will have to look for work in other states, mainly the north, because the South and Southwest will become unbearably and dangerously hot in the summer.
The "adaptation" that wealthy oil executives and their conservative apologists speak so blithely about will leave millions Americans out of work, forced to abandon their homes for other states, falling into bankruptcy and poverty.

Wouldn't it make more sense for us to adapt by having Mr. Tillerson's company help pay for the damage that his company's product is causing?

And that's why we need a carbon tax and/or a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. It's a far more efficient way for us to adapt than throwing every other sector of the economy out of whack and rendering our most productive farmlands infertile.