When It's Too Far

There are big changes coming due to the Climate Crisis and over the next decades a lot of them are going to be caused by something that seems to be getting very little notice.  It goes by the neutral name of transportation.

Transportation of goods and people by means of cars and trucks, airplanes, ships and (to a lesser extent) railroad, together account for the largest share of greenhouse gas pollution.  They also cause a lot of other pollution with very real detriments to human health, as well as to other categories of the living environment and even the built environment.

But instead of minimizing the amount of transportation necessary, our global economy has exploded it over the past few decades.  Goods and even fresh food are shipped over immense distances.  Goods that were made in America and sold in America are more often made in China and shipped here (in ships that often go back nearly empty.)  Fruits and vegetables that used to be grown in abundance here in California are now trucked here from Mexico, shipped and flown here from South America and who knows where else.

This transport all contributes to making global heating worse for the future.  As a cause, it cannot go on as it now does.  But probably before it is limited because of its causal contribution--or because it becomes too expensive-- it will lessen because of the effects of global heating.  It is already doing so, especially in foodstuffs from the U.S. because of the current drought in our grain-growing states.

So much is being transported so far because it's cheaper to do it that way that to build or grow nearer to the intended customers.  Capitalism alone cares not for the future and seldom even considers it.  It does not reckon costs to be borne by the future.  Above all it doesn't reward prudence, and it usually ignores redundancy, or an alternative means to achieve necessary ends, especially when the primary means no longer functions.

 For decades and with increasing speed in the past few decades, the world has become structured according to cheap transportation, so that there is less land immediately available to grow food nearer where it will be consumed.  Less capacity to manufacture goods, and so on.

In several ways--felt pretty much all at once--this system will no longer function as it has in recent years.  The poor, especially in other countries, are already feeling this.  Then the effects will move up in class and appear in richer countries.  Some observers have already charged that food riots and other violent manifestations of  food scarcity and drought are seldom reported as such, or news of them is actively suppressed, since these are very threatening to the established order.  But the established order better figure out that these problems are big and real, and start addressing them.