"The Climate Corporation charges roughly forty dollars an acre to insure crops, and its customers farm more than ten million acres. Many of them give little credence to terms like “climate change” and “global warming.” That doesn’t bother Friedberg. “You don’t need to talk about climate change per se,” he told me. “Statistically, you are looking at a series of numbers. If it were a roulette wheel, you could say, ‘It’s coming up black more and more frequently.’ Can I attribute that to black being overweighted by the croupier? Or to the pit boss, or to the machine being broken? It doesn’t matter. Some people will argue that ice ages have waxed and waned for tens of millennia and that this is part of a natural cycle. That doesn’t change the fact that black is coming up more frequently and you will get less out of an acre of corn than you used to. The price for that land simply cannot be justified by the income it can generate.”
He went on, “It’s going to take a few climatic events in a row, I guess, and then everyone will say, ‘I’m not going to keep buying Kansas real estate at this price,’ or, ‘I’m not going to keep developing in this harbor zone in Florida.’ If you mark down all the stuff to what the discounted value should be — holy shit.” He practically shouted, “It is bad. I am convinced it is going to happen because, the math says it has to happen in at least one or two or three parts of the world. And if it happens at any of them at any point in the next ten years, it will make the housing crisis look small.”
Now I don't care where you stand on climate change or its causes but the facts are black and white: The Climate Corporation and other insurance companies believe climate change is real and they believe its coming. And insurance companies are not in the business of making loosing bets.
Yes, it's true that gloom and doom predictions help to sell more insurance but no one is selling insurance or even taking odds that climate change won't come. Please, show me any odds maker who is willing to take bets that climate change isn't coming. That, my friends is how you know something is real. When no one in the insurance or gambling business will bet against something then that something is as real as it gets.So why am I writing about climate change on a blog that doesn't usually tackle such issues? It's true I'm a liberal but I'm doing it for plain old fashioned conservative reasons.
You see, despite the fact that it's December I spent much of my day today working in my gardens getting things ready for Spring. While a liberal I live pretty much the same as most Preppers live. It's not that I'm so worried about attacks in-so-much as it is I just grew up living that way because we were poor and didn't know any different. And by the time we figured out there were other ways to live we were pretty much settled into living like we do.
And when you live mostly off the land you understand your connection to the land in ways that many who might be reading this, liberal and conservative, might never grasp. So get this through your thick heads: Climate change is coming. It might not be global warming, it might not be global cooling, it might not be droughts and it might not be monsoons but climate change is coming one way or another. Climate change has happened before and it will happen again.
Take this past summer for example. I prepared for everything. I have the finest soil in the land, perfect Ph levels, adequate water stored to get me through an entire year of drought, organic insect controls, you name it... And what happens? It rains and rains and rains and rains day after day after day after day throughout the entire growing season. I was even prepared for that, I thought. I have sumps in the garden with electric pumps to pump the excess water out of the ground but despite the fact that my pumps ran night and day the ground remained so saturated the majority of my crops died.
Most Greensboro summers we expect droughts. That, my friends, is an example of climate change. Perhaps not what you were expecting, certainly not what I was expecting but climate change just the same.
So with all that said I'll now tell you how the quote above has anything to do with Greensboro:
Climate change in whatever form it comes in is yet another reason Greensboro should be investing in Aquaponic farming locally. Should what Friedberg is saying come true (and remember, no one is taking bets against him) food prices will skyrocket everywhere. Would having the lowest organic food prices in the country not attract people and businesses to move to Greensboro? What's wrong with that idea? With the Dam Scam being what it is, it’s not like we’ve any shortage of water and with Greensboro under contract to buy 53% of the water it just makes sense. Besides, we can’t eat data centers like those proposed for Project Haystack at the Guilford County Prison Farm.
