waauw wrote:Climate changes affect natural disasters, natural disasters affect government expenditures and finally government expenditures affect your taxes.
Similarly, climate changes affect weather patterns, weather patterns affect food production, food production affects food prices and finally food prices affect consumers.
The key here is "affect" natural disasters. The actual impact can drastically change depending on a variety of factors. On the national level, if you could factor out the effect from the general noise of natural natural disasters, the fact remains that the bulk of the federal spending is a direct cause to man made factors (poorly maintained levees, large populations in natural flood zones, and so forth). On the local level, most natural disasters have to have the right conditions. Let's take a good snowstorm. Too warm up there and it's just a rain storm. Too cold up there and it's too cold to get the snow started. Deviate from that happy medium and no snow hits the roads, no salt needs to be applied and no workers have to work overtime.
That's why "cost" is so complex. That snowstorm that didn't happen because of either an abnormal heat or cold zone just saved me from the cost that I would have had to pay had we gotten 12" of snow. This year, for example, we got very little snow on long Island. That's a savings.
Food prices are still more impacted by fuel costs than by global warming. In fact I'm pretty sure that the effect of global warming on food prices in the United States is less than the margin of error. Not that it matters much because we actually import a lot of food, not due to global warming but because we are used to fresh fruits and vegetables during the non growing season of winter.
But since we are talking about factors that impact the price of food, how about these apples.
The massive subsidization of the Ethanol industry (including the requirement for at least 10% blends in cars) has a significant impact on corn production in the United States. Now I wouldn't go as far to suggest that the elimination of this requirement could so dramatically change the nature of the corn crop so that exports of Corn to Mexico could return the nation to a new golden age, (you still have to kill off half of the politicians ... wait, what country was I talking about again ... oh never mind) but it would certainly make corn massively cheaper.
Not to mention that the proposals going through congress will bring us back to a great and glorious STONE AGE, which is a massive cost.
