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The US has a disadvantage in some ways because it has a lot of stationary capital invested. For a concrete example, take coastal warehouses in New Orleans: those are not prime pieces of real estate. Moving those (or, more realistically, building new ones) costs more here than it would in a developing country. And many of the most productive parts of the US lie in coastal areas. Even e.g. the US's high level of current agricultural productivity faces similar challenges; although anthropogenic CO2 will have neutral to net positive effects on theoretical agricultural production, the investments we made in infrastructure for it were made over the past hundred years, not the next hundred years. New infrastructure will face a heavy regulatory burden: imagine a piece of once marginal land that rapidly becomes more potentially productive. Developing it will be more expensive or even impossible compared to a century ago.
Countries that are less hidebound will be able to respond more quickly to changing times. Even if large parts of Bangladesh end up underwater and thousands of Bangladeshi low-skilled workers end up dead, it's easy enough to throw up new shantytowns and factories in unaffected areas.
I thought the progressive line was that the third world would bear most of the cost and that was unfair. The total sea level rise since industrialization is at most a foot (30cm). I don't see this overwhelming the capacity of a country like the US. Likewise, changing the crops and the location of the field will hardly prove a challenge.
Well, I'm not pushing the progressive line here.
But, to state it, the progressive line is that there will be more loss of life in developing countries. This is likely true; in the West, most deaths will be related to vulnerable populations dying off in heat waves, but that will be more than counteracted by fewer people dying due to the cold (which comprise ~90% of temperature related deaths in the West). However, loss of life doesn't mean much economically or in terms of geostrategic power. Bangladesh isn't hurting for unskilled labor, and most of the people who would die aren't especially economically productive.
Changing crops and field locations isn't a game of Civilization; modern agriculture is sophisticated and is integrated with existing infrastructure, policy regimes, and local labor pools. Suppose an area gets the potential for high agricultural productivity, but to actually achieve that productivity needs water rights that are contested by local urban areas and environmentalists. This isn't at all insurmountable, but it's a friction that less developed and sclerotic places don't have to face.
It's not going to overwhelm the capacity of the United States. It will just be a headwind compared to developing countries. Climate resiliency is good, but it also means making it so we can actually respond effectively to climactic changes as opposed to obstinately demanding clearly unrealistic stasis.
So it's less the environment that's the problem, and more the environmentalists. My point exactly. Their proposed cures, such as their obstructionism and multiple percent of gdp green packages, will do more harm than the actual disease.
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