Friday, March 2, 2018

Climate Refugees

Climate change is a thing (to most people, there are also climate deniers but that happens on just about every issue of national importance these days).  Most people are oblivious to this unless you live somewhere like Cape Town but I think this is a topic that we cannot keep overlooking or just crossing our fingers and hoping for the best. 

When I first moved to Las Vegas there were 1.95 million people and now there are 2.15 million people--that's a huge increase in less than a decade.  The problem with this--other than congestion on the roads--is that we live in a desert and our main source of water is the Colorado River which is both finite and shared with Arizona and California which are also seeing dramatic increases in population.  This is obviously going to become a problem eventually.  In addition, our summers are becoming hotter and longer and whether that indicates climate change or the cyclical nature of weather, the bottom line is that living in a very hot desert with dwindling water supplies is an issue.

There are already several examples of climate change refugees (examples here, here, and here) and while most people won't even give a second thought to people who live a world away, as this article points out, pretty soon this issue may be on our own doorstep.

There are several things you need to consider if you don't want to make yourself and your family climate refugees (ie: you don't leave the place where you live which is being bombarded by climate issues such as flooding or drought until your home has lost most of its value and you can no longer buy property insurance due to the overwhelming costs in your area):

If you do decide to move proactively, you will want to use the above maps to determine the best place to move to.  You can also Google 'best place to live when TSHTF' and find oodles of articles that people have put together which talk about how they determined their own best place to live based on a number of factors.

Among the factors that I am looking at for our possible move include:
  • An area with few natural disasters (like flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc)
  • An area with good natural resources (water, trees, soil that perks, etc)
  • An area a couple of hours away from a large city
  • An area with good internet 
  • An area with good gun laws
  • An area with a population of 20k to 50k and stable
  • An area with access to military services (base, VA, healthcare, etc)
  • An area with reasonable taxes (income tax, property tax, sales, tax, etc)
  • An area with a reasonable climate
  • Nice to haves would include being nearer to family, a few casinos nearby, and I don't have to shovel snow in the winter.
Note that these factors work for us, younger people would need to look at things like access to education, availability of jobs, nearness to a major airport if you travel a lot, etc.

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