Reply #33: Peak Oil will be an economic catastrophe. Climate change will be worse. [View All]

[hunter]

The loss of agricultural productivity and rising sea levels will displace very large populations, even within the United States.

I doubt we will treat our own refugees well, much less refugees from other nations.

People living in places unaffected or enhanced by climate change will not welcome those displaced by rising sea levels or drought. That these refugees are fellow U.S. citizens won't matter, they will be about as well received as the "Oakies" were in California during the Great Depression.

The displacements caused by hurricane Katrina and Rita didn't go well. As domestic disasters of that scale start happening with increasing frequency the situation will not improve.

Not long from now we will have a president who is very similar to FDR or else the United States will not survive as a "first world" nation. This generation's FDR might very well be the next president.

As it stands now, I think the United States is going to become more and more similar to the rest of the Americas. The political systems and power structure of the United States will begin to look much more like Mexico than Canada. Except for the English language road signs, the U.S. economic infrastructure will begin to look more and more like the Mexican infrastructure.

People who have lived in dysfunctional nations might be better off than those who have not. The conservative U.S. "American Family Values" crowd may begin to wonder why recent immigrant communities seem to be better off than they are, and it will be because immigrant communities have more experience dealing with economic adversity, and have the social tools to create communities that are able to fend for themselves when the government fails them.