Here is what creates cognitive dissonance and drives inaction. The BP spill came with apocalyptic rhetoric about the destruction of the gulf and gulf coast. Yet, within a few years, things are near normal. Please, I’m not saying it wasn’t a tragic, disruptive, damaging event. Just that the reality has diverged wildly from the story told at the time. This creates distrust and inaction for every new apocalyptic prediction. No doubt, at some point, an apocalyptic prediction will come true, and we’ll be caught with our pants down.

> No doubt, at some point, an apocalyptic prediction will come true, and we’ll be caught with our pants down.

We consistently have this problem with preventative measures. Someone accurately predicts that something terrible will happen unless we do something about it, we spend a large amount of time and money preventing or mitigating it, then people ask why we spent all that time and money when the thing turned out not to be that bad.

It turned out not to be that bad because we spend all that time and money.

The problem is it's also easy to spend time and money on wasteful pork barrel projects to prevent threats that don't actually exist but line the pockets of government contractors, and then they make the same argument for not cutting them.

What we need is a better way to separate the legitimate problems (e.g. climate change) from the hype (e.g. terrorism). Because if you're going to pay a bunch of money for something that also serves as a jobs program, it might as well be addressing the real problem instead of the fake one.

Hyperbolic discounting is a very common way to be irrational. Humans are not very good at thinking long-term. Bezos became the world's richest person in part by extending his time horizon by a few years longer than most CEOs.

Really?

It's because wealthy people tend to have physical assets and political power there. They don't want to pay more for insurance for their assets in the short term (property/catastrophe coverage) and in many cases they would be difficult or impossible to liquidate and transfer to somewhere not effected.

This has been the case in coastal areas, with property developers at least. They have it very badly, where they typically are small-ish family operations at the core and they operate with high leverage as land banks.

Simple answer with horrible consequences, discontinue all FEMA insurance. This of course will never happen because many elected representatives from both parties have coastal properties that require it in order to get a mortgage.

But if you did the above, it really doesn't matter whether climate change is real or not, all the risk will be on the homeowner going forward. That ought to be enough to change behavior in the long run.

Simple. Lousiana has a big oil and gas industry:

https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=LA

I call it the truth distortion field when any large industry impacts what politicians say. Here’s some background:

https://www.nemil.com/tdf/introduction.html

I think there's been a brain drain happening in a lot of red states in recent decades. The educated people who have the ability and will to leave often do, leaving behind an increasingly ignorant population. It's coincidental that this same geographic region will be most affected by sea level rise, although nowhere on earth will be immune to the effects of climate change.

Funny, Florida is getting an influx of people exiting the Northeast due to the local tax cap changes of the current administration and our high prop and local taxes here. It's all over the press.

Thus I'm skeptical. And "brain drains" refer to skilled employees leaving, not some intelligence or education level which you're implying.

I've always seen brain drain used to reference the educated leaving an area. Frequently calling out professors and other educators leaving as part of the brain drain

"Skilled" work is increasingly correlated with educational attainment.

Skilled employees have intelligence and education level.

For Republicans, there's a correlation between level of education and climate change denialism:

Climate change divides Americans, but in an unlikely way: The more education that Democrats and Republicans have, the more their beliefs in climate change diverge.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/14/upshot/climat...

It's mostly a flight to jobs in cities. A counterpoint is blue metro areas in red states (e.g. Texas, Kansas City, North Carolina)

Do you have any evidence for this claim?

Here are a couple articles I've found about MS and NE:

1. https://mississippitoday.org/2016/07/13/mississippi-brain-dr...

2. https://www.omaha.com/news/education/higher-education/nebras...

College-educated workers want and need to live in more urban areas that have employers in future-forward industries. From a cultural aspect, I think these people also want to live in municipalities (up to state government) that are run by people that share their values. Among the educated, these values are increasingly progressive.

I can't speak for the rest of the state, but I can tell you for certain that northern Mississippi (and at least some parts just south of it) has generally been booming. In fact, the "Gold Rush" may have slowed down quite a bit by now, but for a while there it was hard to keep people from surrounding states from pulling up stakes and moving there, for various reasons. Wages are somewhat lower, true, but then so is the cost of living. And if you pick the right location, you can be within easy driving distance of a "more urban area" while still living "out in the country", if you want to.

His own smug sense of superiority should suffice.

I guess if you insult one commenter you get downvotes, but if you insult half of the population no one bats an eye?

HN is a special place

That has nothing do with why people want payouts from obviously disatrous externalities from pollutors.

Because there’s been a huge and dedicated propaganda machine to saying the opposite. And it’s worked.

Many people don't vote their interests. They vote their identity and values.

Rational self-interest is an assumption that enlightenment liberals and market fundamentalists alike have overplayed. It has its applications, and it may even be a somewhat valid assumption for individuals carefully looking at the terms of an economic deal they have make-or-break decision making power over. For collective civil action, my guess is its influence is somewhere between minimal and a wash.

You can sue BP, can't sue the atmosphere.

Not with that attitude!

Your premise is incorrect. The parts of the country most affected are the coasts--and they are blue.

If we exclude Alaska then about half the coast encompasses Texas through North Carolina. This is also the part of the US coast that is most low lying and will see the greatest encroachment from rising sea levels.

Half of your “red” coastline consists of Florida—the vast majority of the coastal population of which is blue (see any 2016 electoral map).

Your point about red vs blue isn’t at issue here. These are all still the coastal states that are the most vociferously denying climate change. You’ll find it pretty hard to argue that any of them are more in favor of climate change action that the other coastal states regardless of whether they show up blue or red on an election map.

Of course. But we didn't really start off by arguing about state-level beliefs. You claimed the people most affected by sea level rise least believe in it--presumably as a dig at republicans (haha they're so blinkered by ideology they can't even see their own self interest!) And I claim that, no, republicans mostly do not live on the coasts, are not the most affected, and thus there is no tension between their ideology and their self-interest.

The northeast and west, perhaps, but not the south and southeast.

It's "cojones" :-)

:-) I blame a former manager. His automatically generated username (first two letters of first name + surname) was cajones, so that’s what he got called. And now I’ve automatically spelt it wrong ever since.