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A Huge Part of the Country is No Longer Safe to Live In
There are a lot of hard choices to be made
We have had some pretty terrible weather years lately, but 2023 is shaping up to be a doozy. And it’s hitting us earlier than usual. There are two named tropical storms in the Caribbean, the earliest on record for that. Much of Texas is experiencing 100+ temps, failing electric infrastructure is leaving thousands without lifesaving AC, concert goers in Colorado were hit with tennis ball sized hail, injuring many, the Texas town of Matador was destroyed this week by tornados, and there are more all over Tornado alley.
In Canada fires have been burning for weeks and their smoke has been measured at toxic levels hundreds of miles away. Major insurers are refusing to issue new homeowner policies in Florida, California, and the southwest, leaving many with no financial protection for their biggest asset.
Droughts are still limiting access to Colorado river water, the main source for the entire southwest corner of the country, including our second largest metro, LA.
None of this is temporary. Let that sink in. Huge areas of the US are rapidly becoming unlivable and rebuilding is no longer an option for many. It’s not rocket science to predict a massive population shift as entire areas see populations being forced to seek safer places to live.
A lot of this is striking because there has been a myth that we had more time. Everything was going to happen in 2030 or 2050, comfortably far-off dates. There’s just one problem with that- it’s not true and never was. Someday we may learn the extent of the fake science and lying the fossil fuel companies have been flooding us with for decades, as they pursue never before seen profits.
Frankly, it is the crime of our lifetimes and it did not have to happen. Legitimate scientists have been warning us that this crisis was imminent for those same decades and offering up solutions to help deal with it. But those solutions take more decades and we ignored them.
And it was all based on short term greed and desire for political power, power funded by those same fossil fuel lobbies. You might say it is the perfect storm of global disasters and it was engineered by massive businesses…
