In an email sent on Dec 17, I said that it was unlikely that we can meet or beat 2 deg C, but that it is possible and that it is worth while trying. Today's email tries to take the next step in this argument. While doing everything possible to work toward effective mitigation, I want to argue that we should also keep in mind the possibility that we may not be able to return to a stable climate. It is emotionally difficult to contemplate failure, because it means incredible future pain and suffering for people who are alive today, people whom we know and love. And because all this future suffering seems so unnecessary! The resources and technologies necessary to turn the economy around are available today, the main obstacle is our own social relations. My goal is not to be angry or cynical about all this, and not to resort to wishful thinking, but to stay realistic and sober. You, the readers, will probably be better able to see than I myself how successful I am, and will learn from my mistakes.
There are many things which have to be considered: drugs and crime, guns, diseases, family planning, also the separation between mental and physical labor. Today I want to discuss the stream of climate refugees which Utah has to expect. Everything South of Salt Lake City is projected to have diminishing rainfalls and increasing temperatures. The watershed around the Great Salt Lake will be affected too. There will be dwindling snowpack, more precipitation will fall as rain, and more precipitation will come in intense downpours. But Salt Lake City will be better off than the area South of it, because the quantity of precipitation will not diminish much, maybe it will even increase. When life has become impossible in Southern Utah, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico because of fires and sand storms, many people will move west, towards the coast. But many of them will head north towards Salt Lake City, because it is still a little better off, and because many of these refugees will be Mormons heading for the Mormon mother ship. The Mormon church is centralized and community oriented. Mormons care for everyone in their ward, not only the Mormons. The church will probably develop their own procedures how to house and integrate the new arrivals into their communities. I think the secular institutions should try to emulate this. They should institute bureaucratic procedures for refugees. I think the principle must be that refugees are welcome but the refugees will have to work. Utah has big families. Not all children are biological children but some are adopted, and it is a matter of honor for the parents to treat the adopted children as well as the biological children. We have to expect the blending of families to become much more the norm, because parents lose their children and children lose their parents. Refugees will be part of this mix. In order for this to work, we must aim to eradicate illiteracy world wide, so that the refugees are not illiterate peasants but well educated people, people who will enrich the cultural life (because traveling will no longer be affordable), and if they are peasants, they will know how to adapt the traditional agricultural practises to the fast changing environment, and how to grow food locally. Where will they live? I think home ownership will no longer be very desirable, because it is so easy to lose your home to the natural disasters, and people must be much more mobile than today. The church owns lots of land and buildings in SLC (for instance the campus of the University of Utah is located on church-owned land), and the church also inherits land from successful Mormon land owners. Right now they are reluctant to be the developers themselves and are willing to sell the land if needed. I think the church will see the necessity to develop more of this land themselves for charitable purposes. I expect then to build affordable apartments, and if someone cannot pay their rent, they can work it off. Perhaps some areas (the soil in SLC is very fertile) will be zoned for urban agriculture, with tiny houses encircled by gardens (similar to German Schrebergaerten which I still witnessed when I grew up in the 1950s in Germany.) An increasing part of the work will be done in emergency brigades: restoring homes after floods and mudslides and fires, planting fire scars outside the city with cover crops as quickly as possible so that the soil does not blow away in the wind, covering the agricultural fields with plactic foils to protect from unseasonal frosts or sand storms (this can only be done with the kind of small scale labor intensive urban agriculture which will by then have penetrated into the cities). For this, the more hands the better, and refugees can be a welcome addition to the aging local labor force. All this will only be a holding pattern, because things will gradually deteriorate even more. But I think the time horizon which I am talking about is a time horizon for which it is still possible to prepare. The buildings we build today will still be around in 2050. If we can make life better and prevent the slide into chaos for a decade or two, this will be a big achievement. How does all this sound to you? Do you think the scenarios I described here are realistic and desirable? Hans G Ehrbar _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
