Plantagenet wrote:Climate change is much more complex —- and infinitely more important
Michael Morell, who served as acting chief of the foreign intelligence service between November 2012 to March 2013, warned the US was failing to pay attention to longer term issues.'We tend to focus on the immediate, not the longer term'
Nuclear exchange with Russia was still a threat that had the capacity to “destroy” the country, the 59-year-old told the politics podcast Pod Save the World.
“The second is a naturally occurring or manmade biological agent that kills 60 to 70 per cent of the population,” he said. “We don’t spend enough time on that.”
“And then the third, and some people may laugh at this but it’s absolutely true, is climate change. It’s an existential threat to the United States of America and if you don’t believe me look at Puerto Rico. This is an existential threat to us and obviously we’re not paying enough attention.”
Plantagenet wrote:Public pensions are a simple actuarial problem. It’s pretty easy to forecast future outflows from pension funds, assume various rates of return on the invested assets, and calculate how many years until the assets run out. Then it’s up to politians and the courts to sort out what happens next.
Climate change is much more complex —- and infinitely more important
Cheers!
Phaster wrote:OP
...big question is what happens if various public pensions “fail” and severely weakens the (global) economy? Then shortly thereafter climate change requires large amounts of political, social and/or financial capital to build up various infrastructure (for human beings to adapt)
[/quote]phaster wrote:
...big question is what happens if various public pensions “fail” and severely weakens the (global) economy? Then shortly thereafter climate change requires large amounts of political, social and/or financial capital to build up various infrastructure (for human beings to adapt)
Newfie wrote:Does anyone remember 2008 when both Bush and Obama said we were on the brink of the world financial system locking up? The liquidity crisIs?
Why The Government Sells Flood Insurance
Hurricanes Harvey and Irma caused billions of dollars in destruction in Texas and Florida. The bill for repairing those properties will be enormous and much of it will be paid by taxpayers because many of those homes are insured by the federal government.
SIMON: Let me put it this way. If the National Flood Insurance Program were a private insurance company, would it still be in business?
MIHM: No. It would not. In fact, there was a private insurance industry for floods. After the Mississippi floods of 1927 vanished, they basically got out of it.
http://www.npr.org/2017/09/16/551457535 ... -insurance
Flood insurance problem: same houses, over and over
As communities in Louisiana deal with the aftermath of disastrous flooding, attention is being given to the looming challenges for a federal program that provides insurance compensation for victims. The National Flood Insurance Program is more than $20 billion in debt, owing in part to a spate of heavy flooding around the nation in recent years.
A lot of payouts from the program have gone to the same properties time and again, according to a recent report released by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
https://www.marketplace.org/2016/08/31/ ... lood-study
onlooker wrote:Related to what Dissident stated, the iron clad 2nd law of thermodynamics Entropy manifestng as decay and disorder is evident throughout the Cosmos over time. To expect human societies to be spared is naive.
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