Them There Libberls Shouldn't Oughtta Be There, Anyway

Yesterday, I blogged about a rather unsettling policy response to sea level rise (SLR) due to climate change being adopted by countries which apparently have resigned themselves to the seeming inevitability that we will do little or nothing to change our fossil fuel-dependent ways.

Like a lot of countries, the USA has many people living along its shores and in large, seaside metropolises, so the logistics of applying this retreat plan will be....interesting, to say the least. I suppose another general state of American affairs — that liberals mostly prefer urban lifestyles, whereas conservatives often opt for rural and suburban environs — could hold true elsewhere, and I could even imagine that disdain for those with opposing personal politics who have chosen different living arrangements is a universal phenomenon as well, but, for my international readers (all 2 or 3 of you) who may not be aware, I should stress that this animosity can be particularly strong here in the States. Nothing exemplifies the intensity more clearly than the schadenfreude some conservative climate change deniers experience when considering the negative effects SLR will have on more cosmopolitan surroundings.















Obviously, this exercise of copying and pasting obnoxious and worthless denier quotes could go on indefinitely, but, make no mistake, these people are so hopelessly confused they truly believe they are adding something of merit to the discussion. To them, the troubling implications of SLR for port cities and people living close to the ocean are just fodder for jokes, or just deserts, or both. That, of course, assumes they believe seas will rise. Blaming/taunting city slickers and writing off major towns on shorelines as superfluous and expendable is more than just a huge economic mistake, however. Perhaps paradoxically, the urban way of life on average has about 30% less of a carbon footprint than living out in the country. And, in fact, if places like New York do end up being abandoned and evacuated, the worst possible outcome would be to ask the residents to adopt, say, what might appear to be an ecologically-sound lifestyle of a Vermonter, surprisingly enough.

The key to New York City’s relative environmental benignity is the very thing that, to most Americans, makes it appear to be an ecological nightmare: its extreme compactness...Americans tend to think of dense cities as despoilers of the natural landscape, but they actually help to preserve it. If you spread all 8.2 million New York City residents across the countryside at the population density of Vermont, you would need a space equal to the land area of the six New England states plus New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia — and then, of course, you’d have to find places to put all the people you were displacing.

We need our cities for more reasons than might meet the eye, and certainly more than thoughtless deniers are capable of understanding. More importantly, they are entirely too vital to our civilization to concede defeat and begin this strange, disheartening retreat in ten years.