I mean, I’d rather the USA still be the superpower than China, but I’m much more concerned with maintaining and strengthening our fledgling democracy and attempting to gracefully exit stage left from being the dominant empire, rather than going out in a blaze of glory star-spangled catastrophe.
Yeah I’ve given up all hope of us doing anything meaningful on it, or humans period, until it’s way too late. I expect it to mostly be every man for himself in USA#1 and we’ll all hope there’s still some land left to try to survive on, and that the tornadoes, wildfires, floods, etc don’t pick our town/neighborhood.
If I’m able to buy a house, I plan on getting solar and getting off the grid with battery backup in case of extended outages, getting the air filters for my HVAC system that are graded to keep out wildfire smoke, and setting up a comfortable and possibly fortified space in the basement to ride out tornado warnings.
I don’t think the wildfires will get to PA anytime soon, but shit, the smoke from the west coast bothers my asthma a bit on the big ones, so anything in the Southeast will be a nightmare. I had four tornado warnings last year, and a total of two the previous three years. I experienced zero in this part of the country my first 32 years alive. Last year a small section of the town I’m in flooded, and a few roads near me flooded.
So for a while moving forward I expect increases in the frequency and strength of natural disasters, and hopefully that’s as bad as it gets for a while and we hit a miracle and manage to do something to slow it down or reverse it.
My guess is that there won’t be meaningful resolve in the US to do anything until home insurance becomes unaffordable for the middle class. Like, as far as I’m concerned, insurance companies still have their heads in the sand.
In the last six years, the cost of homeowners insurance in Florida has gone up 32.5%. I highly doubt that’s enough to offset the actual current risks of catastrophic storm damage. We’re having longer hurricane seasons, and larger and more powerful storms. Meanwhile, I don’t own in PA but I haven’t heard a single person complain about rates going up, so I assume they haven’t noticeably. Meanwhile we’ve got floods and tornadoes happening, and I would be shocked if those were freak one-offs. But that’s what the vast majority of people still think they were.
These weren’t just small tornadoes that ripped a few shingles off, either. There was an F3 here and another F3 in South Jersey, and I believe a strong F2 as well. The F3’s tore up commercial buildings here and mobile homes, and the one in South Jersey tore up some high six figure to low seven figure homes. A few completely collapsed.
Anyway, at some point insurance companies are going to recognize the risk, premiums will skyrocket, and a lot of people won’t be able to afford them. You can’t have a mortgage without homeowner’s insurance, so… Something’s going to have to change in a big way, and it’s not going to be good. That’s when I think people will say, “OK, maybe we should try to do something about this.”
But it’ll probably be way too late. This should happen first in coastal parts of Florida and along the Gulf of Mexico.
