Destabilized Saturday Edition #13
The third horseman returns, secular blood libel, first date magic, Gen X and the Brimley Line
My apologies there wasn’t a post on Wednesday, this week was chaotic and got taken over by our house buying process. Back to it next week!
Speaking of housing, in considering the impact of climate change on a home’s future value, which I’ve been thinking a lot about, I’ve concluded the key is relative future increase in vulnerability. The logic goes like this: climate change will make every home on the planet more vulnerable to damage – from flooding, fires, landslides, settling foundations, etc. – but it will have a larger impact on some homes than others. As heavier rains, drier droughts, and rising seas diminish the appeal, safety, and livability of more vulnerable homes, the aggregate value of the less affected, less vulnerable homes will increase.12 This is economics 101, as well as the exact dynamic of the current housing market frenzy: when demand increases or holds steady and supply decreases, prices will increase.3
The takeaway for home-buyers is that the question shouldn’t be, “Will the risk of climate damage to this home increase in the future?” (The answer will always be yes.) Rather, the question we should ask is, “Will the future increased risk of climate damage to this home be catastrophic, or will it be manageable?” If it’s the former, the home’s value will get crushed; if it’s the latter, the value will not only endure but, because of the supply-demand imbalance, it will actually be enhanced.
That’s right: climate change will likely increase the value of homes in locations that are safer from climate impacts than other places. Even though no place will be perfectly safe from climate impacts, those that are relatively safer will benefit, including in the form of higher real estate values.4
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Some may critique this line of analysis as bloodless or even callous, and in one sense I agree, especially in a country where homelessness is a significant problem. But ultimately it’s also reality, and not talking about reality won’t improve it. More importantly, the insights of the analysis are neutral, their meaning and impact depend on how they’re applied and by whom.
For example, the movement to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty needs to stay aware of these climate-driven housing value dynamics in order to help those working to build wealth and permanently escape poverty avoid the mistake of buying a highly climate-vulnerable home. It’s a mistake that will be easy to make because home-buying has traditionally been a good way to build wealth, not to mention the physical manifestation of the American dream. In the future, though, it will be more like a gamble that in some cases will grow wealth, but in others will destroy it.
The critical factor will be relative climate vulnerability.
My Work
The printing press changed everything, so will the internet
In 1998, at a conference of religious leaders in Denver, renowned media ecologist Neil Postman gave a talk called Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. For the fourth of his five items, he observed: “Technological change is not additive, it is ecological.” He went on,
I can explain this best by an analogy. What happens if we place a drop of red dye into a beaker of clear water? Do we have clear water plus a spot of red dye? Obviously not. We have a new coloration to every molecule of water. That is what I mean by ecological change. A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe. After television, America was not America plus television. Television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry, and so on.
It’s no accident Postman referenced the printing press, the first technology to enable large scale one-to-many communication, in a speech given in the early years of the consumer internet, the first technology to enable large scale many-to-many communication. As we will see, the printing press had an utterly transformative effect on the world. It was arguably the crucial, and at least an essential, ingredient in bringing about no less than the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the modern nation-state.
Interesting Reads
The Return of the Third Horseman
The Ukraine War is having dozens - hundreds - of follow-on impacts across the world, with the most dramatic about to be felt in the world of food. Whatever you think will happen, the reality is almost certainly worse.
Let’s start with a point of reference:
In 2010, dry weather across Western Siberia prompted concerns about the Russian wheat crop. In preparation for a poor harvest, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered temporary export limitations for wheat, Russia’s primary agricultural product. Within weeks global wheat prices had doubled; Prices tripled in Russia’s primary export market, the Middle East. Those increases contributed to the series of protests, riots, coups, revolutions and wars we now know collectively as the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War.
What’s happening this time around is far, far worse.
Many of us know about the QAnon conspiracy theory world which posits a vast liberal/Democrat conspiracy of sex trafficking and pedophilia which will finally be undone by a violent cleansing of America by Donald Trump. Conventional media seems entirely incapable of grappling with, explaining or describing the way that the “mainstream” GOP has increasingly promoted and mainstreamed these beliefs with a spectrum of indirect to increasingly explicit messaging.
…What we are talking about here is a kind of secular blood libel with deep roots in our politics which has evolved into a new form as a sort of incitement against the forces of political liberalism generally.
Tweets of the Week
Extreme Weather Watch
(46.0 degrees Celsius = 114.8 Fahrenheit, and 38.0 C = 100.4 F)
(300-500 mm of rain = 12-20 inches)
Creeping Authoritarianism Watch
Republicans’ Q-Anon-inspired, slanderous “grooming” narrative is creating a permission structure for violence:
It’s likely that when the most climate-vulnerable homes in a place are destroyed, the next-most vulnerable homes in that place will see their values fall, even though the overall supply of homes would have decreased while demand remained constant, which would, all else equal typically cause prices to rise.
The process of homes becoming unlivable will lead to immense human suffering. Nothing about this analysis of home values is meant to obscure that reality or distract from its moral command.
Of course, the number of people wanting to buy homes, the number of homes available, and many other factors also matter.
This has profoundly unjust, unequal effects globally, namely that the countries responsible for the most carbon emissions are those in the global north (U.S., Europe, China - see chart below) that, while not entirely safe, are relatively safer from climate change.
