Impact of Climate Change Is Hitting Home, U.S. Report Finds

[Erich]

However, I think is it wrong for people to willy nilly select homes very far away from work when they can find homes just as good and ones that fill all their specs much closer to work

People don’t “willy nilly select homes very far away” because they necessarily want to. More often than not they select homes farther away from work because they get (a) more house for the money, (b) better schools, (c) lower taxes, (d) less crime, etc.

It’s expensive to live in the heart of places like NYC, LA, SF, Chicago, DC, Miami, Boston, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Philly, etc.

 

[lynnvinc]

People don’t “willy nilly select homes very far away” because they necessarily want to. More often than not they select homes farther away from work because they get (a) more house for the money, (b) better schools, (c) lower taxes, (d) less crime, etc.

It’s expensive to live in the heart of places like NYC, LA, SF, Chicago, DC, Miami, Boston, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Philly, etc.

Sorry, but I know of plenty of cases. And yes there is the issue of “more house for the money” – which I tried to explain to my young niece was misleading. I tried to impress on her that if there’s a good house close to work that costs more or is a smaller (but you can still afford it and it’s a nice & adequate home), pick that one.

Instead they found a McMansion on the other side of a huge city and it takes both of them 2 hours to get to work in separate cars – a 5 BR+office, 4 ba spacious home in a new housing development…for two people. Now they are extremely stressed out with all the driving, and perhaps some of their health problems could be attributed to the pollution from all that driving (for privacy reasons I don’t want to get into it, but their problems have been linked to local auto pollution in the literature). Perhaps they could have found a 4 BR, 3 ba (or 3 BR, 2 ba) home not-as-spacious but less costly to heat/cool home close to work in an older neighborhood for the same price; it would have kept its value (in fact it may have gone up faster, since the area near their work was pretty much built, and their far distant house area is a bunch of farmland). Then later as they saved (incl less car expenses) they could have plowed that into some mansion close to work and lived happily ever after.

I’ve seen that pattern many times, and I feel heart-broken when people do that. Yes, it’s often “more home for the money,” but at what real cost? They probably just don’t think about life on planet earth or the impact they are having, even harming themselves and their family life; they just follow what others are doing and focus mainly on keeping up with the Joneses.

Over the past few decades if people had only invested in things that would reduce their harmful impact on the lives of people and others of God creatures (which would have saved them $$$ and lowered their living costs) – caulked their windows, insulated, water-heater-jacket, low-flow showerhead, efficient appliances/cars, reused, reduced the buying of junk, selecting whatever feasible from the 100s of eco-things to do – instead of speculating in real estate (buying McMansions they couldn’t quite afford on balloon mortgages – then having to heat and cool some 500-2000 extra sq.ft they have absolutely no use for AND fill it with furniture and do-dads) our economy would not have tanked so badly in 2008. Greed, avarice, pride, arrogance. Lack of concern for life on planet earth.

Then there’s another problem with new homes - the formaldehyde outgassing, which can cause a host of health problems. We’ve always made sure we buy a home at least 10 years old, after our experience in the mid-70s of building a new home and my husband’s health being adversely affected by it.

 

[lynnvinc]

News flash scientists discover sun heats earth details at 11.

Climate scientists had no idea that the sun heats the earth? They didn’t know about the short-term (approx. 11-15 year) solar cycles between maximum and minimum irradiance (involving sunspot activity), the earth’s wobble, the odd shaped orbit (with the earth near to and farther from the sun at various times, the slowly increasing irradiance as the sun heads towards its self-destruction in some 5 billion years, etc, etc?

That’s sort of weird that they didn’t know about those solar heating factors, and I – dufus lame-brain that I am – did. In fact in 5th grade back in 1957 I did my class report on the sun, and included info on sunspots. I took an old basketball and paper mache and poster paint and made a sun for display.

 

[Erich]

Then there’s another problem with new homes - the formaldehyde outgassing, which can cause a host of health problems.

Yes there are plenty of cases of people “willy nilly selecting homes very far away” because they get “more home for the money” (whatever that means to them). There are also plenty of cases of people selecting homes further away from “the middle of things” because of better schools/lower taxes/less crime further away. Ask anyone who moved out of central NYC, LA, SF, Chicago, DC, Miami, Boston, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Philly, Baltimore, Memphis, St. Louis, Detroit, etc.

And of course older homes come with their own problems. Many lack natural light, have poor traffic flow, no play space (and, in many cases, insufficient storage… as anyone with kids can probably attest, the smaller you are, the more things you need), small awkward kitchens, outdated electrical systems, aluminum wiring, foundation cracks (while older homes may have been built better from the ground up, many times their foundations are inadequate to the task), etc… to say nothing of possibly having to correct past renovations (and the corresponding exposure – and health problems related – to lead paint, asbestos (in floor coverings/duct insulation/siding, etc.) Finally, problems in older homes are often well hidden. More often than not, serious damage doesn’t show any symptoms until the damage is significant and expensive.

Anyone who owns a house built prior to 1950 knows just how hard it can be to keep it maintained and updated.

 

[Erich]

our economy would not have tanked so badly in 2008

You can thank Presidents Carter and Clinton for that.

• Under President Jimmy Carter, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was passed. It required federal financial institutions to encourage banks to give home loans to persons with little credit and low income. Economist Russell Roberts said that the CRA played a major role in creating the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the U.S.
• Under Bill Clinton, the CRA was expanded and Clinton set targets for low-income home ownership at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Banks were forced by the federal government to provide bad loans to unqualified people.
• Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) was Chairman of the Financial Services Committee in the House of Representatives. In 2003, he said of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: “These two entities – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.” In the late 1980s and early 90s, Frank was engaged in a sexual relationship with Herb Moses, who was Fannie Mae’s assistant director of product initiatives! Bill O’Reilly exposed Frank’s involvement in the mortgage crisis. Frank looked the other way, while our economy was being destroyed by federal policies created in the Clinton and Carter Administrations.
• Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) was head of the powerful banking committee in the Senate. He and Barney Frank consistently resisted attempts by the Bush Administration to closely regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Dodd also got preferential treatment from Countrywide on two mortgages. Countrywide was one of the biggest subprime providers.
• Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd received thousands of dollars in contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the years. Dodd has received $133,900 since 1989; Frank received $40,100. (While in the Senate, Barack Obama received $105,849).
• As long ago as 2003, President Bush was trying to get the House and Senate to carefully monitor the actions of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. His efforts were rejected by Democrats.
• Obama associates headed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the years that the crisis was getting out of control. Obama friend Franklin Raines ran Fannie Mae and collected $50 million from it. Obama friend Jamie Gorelick worked for Fannie Mae and earned $26 million; Jim Johnson, formerly Obama’s vice president search committee chairman, hauled in millions from his work with Fannie Mae as CEO.
• ACORN, the socialist group that routinely engages in voter fraud, was involved in pushing for risky loans to people with bad credit histories or little money for down payments. ACORN intimidated banks in Chicago and elsewhere to give risky loans! Obama actually trained ACORN workers when he was a community organizer in Chicago! ACORN used provisions of the Community Reinvestment Act to delay or halt efforts of banks to merge or expand until they had lowered their credit standards!

 

[lynnvinc]

You can thank Presidents Carter and Clinton for that.

I still think it was mainly due to good ole American greed, the desire to make a killing in the stock market and realty market, such as by turning home buying into risky specuation in real estate people could not afford (if the home value were to go down).

Now imagine if instead of speculating in real estate, people bought more modest homes close to work/schools well within their range of affordability, even if values were to go down. And imagine if instead of plowing their money into “keeping up the the Joneses” items, they plowed it into making their home energy and resource efficient – maybe even building a passive solar home – reducing their energy bills by 25 to 75%, then at the very least they would have been able to weather the economic downturn better, and perhaps the economy would not have tanked so badly.

We’ve known about global warming for at least 25 years, and we’ve known that we should do those things I describe, but instead there has been this “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall destroy the world” attitude. It’s as if the idea of global warming has actually made people even more prodigal, profligate, and inefficient.

 

[Erich]

I still think it was mainly due to good ole American greed, the desire to make a killing in the stock market and realty market, such as by turning home buying into risky specuation in real estate people could not afford (if the home value were to go down).

If it hadn’t been for Carter and Clinton greasing the skids (by requiring federal financial institutions to encourage banks to give home loans to persons with little credit and low income, i.e. forcing them to provide bad loans to unqualified people), there would have been a lot fewer (if any) folks buying homes they couldn’t afford.

Provisions of the Community Reinvestment Act were used – not by the persons unqualified by virtue of little credit and/or low income – to force banks to lower their credit standards. So, who was being greedy?

 

[lynnvinc]

If it hadn’t been for Carter and Clinton greasing the skids (by requiring federal financial institutions to encourage banks to give home loans to persons with little credit and low income, i.e. forcing them to provide bad loans to unqualified people), there would have been a lot fewer (if any) folks buying homes they couldn’t afford.

Provisions of the Community Reinvestment Act were used – not by the persons unqualified by virtue of little credit and/or low income – to force banks to lower their credit standards. So, who was being greedy?

You may be right, at least in part, but what I had in mind was middle class and wealthy people buying McMansions they could not afford on balloons, figuring their values would be going up.

Also there was the issue of the financial greedy right hand not knowing what the financial greedy left hand was doing, and no one having the big picture of what was going on, … except Gillian Tett, educated in anthropology, working for the Financial Times, and using ethnographic methods to investigate. She was one of the few that came to realize back in 2006 we were headed for a crisis. See her book, Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillian_Tett, and vimeo.com/17854712

Whatever the reason for the 2008 crash, we can pretty much say it was an artifical problem that did not have to happen – there were no material reasons for it, like natural resources being wiped out.

However, getting back to the OP, climate change will be wiping out our subsistence base increasingly on into the distant future – and that’s if we drastically reduce our GHG emissions starting now. It will only be much much worse if we do not – a killer musical chairs of diminishing life-sustaining resources on into the future until most of life, perhap even all, is wiped out.

 

[Erich]

However, getting back to the OP, climate change will be wiping out our subsistence base increasingly on into the distant future – and that’s if we drastically reduce our GHG emissions starting now.

Believe it or not, we’ve been reducing our CO2 emissions. Of course, Obama’s down economy is certainly a contributing factor (the down economy affected the transportation sector most of all, with a 9.9 percent drop in energy consumption, because of lowered demand), but still…

At the end of last month, a comprehensive survey of U.S. energy trends by Bloomberg New Energy Finance found that U.S. carbon emissions are at their lowest in nearly 20 years, as reported in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper and in the online publication EnergyMic, among other places. At about 5300 megatons CO2 equivalent in 2012, they are almost 13 percent lower than at their peak when the global financial crisis erupted four years ago, and barely more than 5 percent higher than in 1990–the baseline for cuts in the Kyoto Protocol, which the United States repudiated.

A week ago, EPA reported that 2012 carbon emissions from power plants were down 4.6 percent from the year before, mainly because of coal plants switching to suddenly-abundant natural gas.

 

[lynnvinc]

Believe it or not, we’ve been reducing our CO2 emissions. Of course, Obama’s down economy is certainly a contributing factor …

I thought you were blaming Carter and Clinton…

However, the reductions have not been nearly enough of what we need to do, and can do cost-effectively, saving us $$ and helping the economy, as mentioned in my earlier posts.

 

[tomarin]

Believe it or not, we’ve been reducing our CO2 emissions. Of course, Obama’s down economy is certainly a contributing factor (the down economy affected the transportation sector most of all, with a 9.9 percent drop in energy consumption, because of lowered demand), but still…

Great point, Erich. When you think about it, a stagnant economy is a great way of “going green.”

 

[tomarin]

I thought you were blaming Carter and Clinton…

However, the reductions have not been nearly enough of what we need to do, and can do cost-effectively, saving us $$ and helping the economy, as mentioned in my earlier posts.

How does one know when one is doing enough?

 

[lynnvinc]

Great point, Erich. When you think about it, a stagnant economy is a great way of “going green.”

Yeh, and people can climb up their ladder upside down and walk on their hands to do roof repairs. (Now just wait…Bec I’ve said that, someone’s going to try it.)

I can think of 100s of other less painful ways, actually quite felicitous ways, to reduce GHG emissions than plunging an economy into a depression.

 

[Erich]

I thought you were blaming Carter and Clinton…

For the housing bubble, yes. But there has been an astonishing increase in regulation in the last four years – which constitutes an enormous tax, if you will, on the economy and it is also an enormous burden on job creation.
In calendar year 2011 alone, the Obama administration issued 32 new major regulations. Those are regulations with anticipated costs exceeding $100 million a year. Those 32 regulations will impose a minimum of $10 billion in new regulatory costs along with almost $7 billion more, in what are one time implementation costs.

If you look at where the bulk of the regulations are, they are in Dodd-Frank, financial regulation, Obamacare, and the EPA. And all of those impose constraints on the access to capital, as well as the ability to invest and innovate new products and services.

 

[lynnvinc]

How does one know when one is doing enough?

Well, we know the pre-industrial levels of GHGs brought us some 10,000 years of holocene climate, allowing for agriculture to thrive and civilizations to arise and the population to bloom, so I suppose the ideal level would be that level of atmospheric CO2 – 260-270 ppm. So we’d do well to aim for that, or get as close as possible to it.

At this point, given a chance, the earth could uptake some of that 396 ppm we are at now. If we wait decades until a good portion of plant life on land and in the sea is killed off thru climate change & soil and ocean acidification and other toxicities cause by global warming, we can’t really rely much on nature to help us out.

Previously scientists were staying we could go up to 450 ppm before it would get dangerous, but now they are saying the dangerous level is 350 ppm, and probably below that (in other words, we’re in overshoot now, tho there’s a lot a lag time for the effects to play out). See arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0804/0804.1126.pdf

What we need to do now is everything we can, esp the no-regrets things that save us money and stregthen the economy, to reduce our GHG emissions. Just from a logistics view it will take years and decades to do that, before we have to consider more difficult measures – or maybe new tech will help keep making it easy for us and/or we’ll find some carbon sucking mechanism like biochar that will assist.

 

[Erich]

The longest ice core record comes from East Antarctica, where ice has been sampled to an age of 800,000 years. During this time, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has varied between 180–210 ppm during ice ages, increasing to 280–300 ppm during warmer interglacials.

300 ppm is higher than 260-270 ppm – and humans had nothing to do with it.

 

[EmperorNapoleon]

300 ppm is higher than 260-270 ppm – and humans had nothing to do with it.

Humans also weren’t emitting 130 times more carbon dioxide than every volcano on Earth combined during that time period.

 

[lynnvinc]

The longest ice core record comes from East Antarctica, where ice has been sampled to an age of 800,000 years. During this time, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has varied between 180–210 ppm during ice ages, increasing to 280–300 ppm during warmer interglacials.

300 ppm is higher than 260-270 ppm – and humans had nothing to do with it.

Not sure what point you are trying to make. CO2 levels have been at 6,000 ppm millions of years ago, obviously not caused by humans. Climate scientists are well aware of this.

 

[Erich]

My point is, that your “ideal level” of atmospheric CO2 is way lower than what has occurred naturally, without human intervention. Sort of like someone deciding their “ideal weight” is 30 pounds less than what they would weigh if they ate a normal diet (e.g. the folks who set out to get a supermodel body through a strict diet regimen, only to end up in an anorexic spiral).

Someone asked earlier, “How does one know when one is doing enough?” By your (and other global warming alarmists’) standards, we cannot possibly ever “do enough” – not even if we set our calendars back to pre-Industrial Revolution times.

 

[lynnvinc]

My point is, that your “ideal level” of atmospheric CO2 is way lower than what has occurred naturally, without human intervention. Sort of like someone deciding their “ideal weight” is 30 pounds less than what they would weigh if they ate a normal diet (e.g. the folks who set out to get a supermodel body through a strict diet regimen, only to end up in an anorexic spiral).

Someone asked earlier, “How does one know when one is doing enough?” By your (and other global warming alarmists’) standards, we cannot possibly ever “do enough” – not even if we set our calendars back to pre-Industrial Revolution times.

Well, as I said, humans have thrived very well in the Holocene climate with about 260 ppm of CO2. There are extremophiles that can exist in other climates. I think they say there could even be some microscopic extremophiles in the atmosphere of Venus.

It all depends on whether you value extremophiles over humans (and other creatures & crops that do well in a Holocene-type climate). I tend to value humans more – even tho they can be quite mean and nasty at times