So let’s see what Mitt Romney, climate change denier, has to say about this: Bloomberg headline: "Corn Belt Shifts North With Climate as Kansas Crop Dies"Article here.
The article continues:
While farmers nationwide planted the most corn this year since 1937, growers in Kansas sowed the fewest acres in three years, instead turning to less-thirsty crops such as wheat, sorghum and even triticale, a wheat-rye mix popular in Poland. Meanwhile, corn acreage in Manitoba, a Canadian province about 700 miles north of Kansas, has nearly doubled over the past decade due to weather changes and higher prices.
Shifts such as these reflect a view among food producers that this summer’s drought in the U.S. -- the worst in half a century -- isn’t a random disaster. It’s a glimpse of a future altered by climate change that will affect worldwide production.
Perhaps as an investor, Romney might consider this more important:
Agribusiness giant Cargill Inc. is investing in northern U.S. facilities, anticipating increased grain production in that part of the country, said Greg Page, the chief executive officer of the Minneapolis-based company.
Maybe the farming folks in Kansas, Nebraska, Texas and Oklahoma who vote for Republicans all the time need to ask themselves whether Romney plans to write off their states when the rising frequency of drought and increasing heat from climate change makes farming more and more difficult and less and less profitable in their states. Can they expect senators like Jim Inhofe to accept reality and actually start saying that government needs to help folks transition out of farming since he’s one of those who kept denying reality so long that all chance of saving agriculture in his state has gone? The aquifers are running down and the rivers are drying up, or periodically flooding with the “Storms of our Grandchildren” as Jim Hansen puts it, as the fact of climate change inexorably bears down on them. And if they keep voting against government, who will be there to help them when they have to give up and have to try something else, somewhere else?
When will Kansas and what was once and will be again be called “the Great American Desert” states recognize that reality trumps ideology, whether you like it or not? Romney isn't just moving jobs and money to China, he and the Republicans they keep voting for are moving them out of the very states they live in as the realities of climate change shift agricultural investment away.
Romney’s ridicule of Obama’s pledge to do something about climate change should be plastered over a picture of the dying cornfields of Kansas, and the caption should be this headline.
And in case folks from the dying current corn belt want to know where they might save a few bucks to pay for the help they are going to need, here's another Bloomberg headline:
US jails more people than any other country
Denying reality costs money and hurts like hell. We waste more money and lives on pointless and damaging wars against drugs and wars for oil than most folks realize. It's past time to transition to wind, solar, geothermal and other sources of power, and way past time to figure out better ways to spend our money than jailing folks for non-violent behaviors, or in trying to change human behaviors (like having sex and getting high) that are deeply rooted in our evolved selves. After all, folks from the desertifying states, you're going to need that money before too long to transition to another way of life, or another place to live.