Thread by @jzellis

You see this headline and you probably think they mean other people, not you.

But you're wrong. It's not just some vaguely imagined poor brown people in some desert or jungle who are gonna die from climate collapse. It's gonna be people like you and me.

Why? Capitalism.

How does your food get to your grocery store? Do you know? On boats, mostly and most likely. It comes from California and Guatemala and Zimbabwe and lots of warm places around the world.

But what if it didn't?

What would you do?

At some point, due to climate chaos, the profit margin on a lot of crops will get narrow enough that it won't be profitable to pick em, box em up and ship em halfway across the world.

Long before you can't grow food, you won't be able to make enough of a profit selling it.

So those of us who have no idea where our food comes from or how it grows are gonna be in trouble. More trouble, in fact, than the poor folks who actually grow it and pick it, you dig? They're gonna be in a much better position to adapt and survive.

Do you get why?

Many years ago I was down in Louisiana and I visited an old 18th century plantation. The main house was a beautiful example of neo-Classical architecture... and it was sinking into the mud and falling apart. It required constant upkeep that it was no longer getting.

But the slave quarters on that plantation... I'm not exaggerating when I say you could have moved into them tomorrow. They were as solid as the day they were built. Why?

Because the slaves weren't given nails to build with. Nails could be melted down and turned into knives.

So they built everything using mortise and tenon joinery and wooden pegs. It was much harder work and much slower and probably hellish and backbreaking in the heat of a Louisiana swamp.

But it lasted a lot better than the master's house did. They couldn't rely on convenience.

Poor people are used to growing crops that get sent across the ocean, leaving them to grow their own food however they can. They've never had the benefit of global supply chains and next day delivery and walking into the store and knowing it'll have what they need, you dig?

Poor people don't sink their meager assets into investments, so if the stock market is wiped out, they only feel the negative effects as trickle-down capitalism... which are just as impactful on them as the benefits of trickle-down capitalism.

Not very, in other words.

When you ain't got nothin, you ain't got nothin to lose, as Dylan said. If you don't own land you're free to up stakes and move when chaos hits. Poor people are liquid, in every sense. They can flow with the changes in ways you can't. They're not ensnared by capitalism.

Will they suffer? Sure. They always suffer. But they're more ingenious and adaptable than rich global Northeners, who will spend more time writing mournful paeans to an old dying ecosystem than busting ass to survive in the new one that emerges from the literal ashes.

We debate about whether we should give up drinking straws. We're more concerned with our rights and our identities than we are with survival. That's across the political spectrum, by the way. Left and right. We are enamored of ourselves and our luxuries to a lethal degree.

I'm not saying there won't be monstrous inequities and iniquities and massive loss of life amongst the global poor - both within and without the developed world. I'm not saying there won't be racism and bigotry that screws over poor brown people, just as it does and always has.

I'm saying I'm betting on more of them getting through collapse than your average Westerner/Northener. I'm saying I know poor folks to be more adaptable. "Poor" is not a synonym for "stupid" , but "affluent" really is usually a synonym for "uncapable".

Here in Plentyworld, our HOAs will ban us from planting food gardens on our lawns. Our property managers won't let us cover the roofs of our apartment complexes with solar panels.

Property values are more important than survival, baby. And giving things away is Communist. 😂

We've painted ourselves, culturally and politically and economically, into a corner. We need a stable climate to keep ourselves in all the conveniences that, for us, have become necessities.

Without it, we're like a person on life support when the power goes off.

The only real difference between the affluent North and the impoverished South is that we have more resources and armies to throw at subjugating them when the fantasy we've sold them of neoliberal prosperity wears off and they don't want to keep starving in order to feed us.

I think you'll see more overt neocolonialism break out in the coming years and decades - even more overt than it already is. We'll tart it up as "protecting our resources" but they were never *our* resources. We just bought em.

And soon we'll start to simply take them.

But in the long run, I think we'll lose that game. You can only force people at gunpoint to pick so many crops for so long. The hopeful part of me thinks we might come to our senses and start growing and making things locally again... but not until we've done very bad things.

So yeah, don't assume you're gonna be a spectator to climate collapse. You live on the same planet as the rest of us, and no amount of money or property values or a good 401k can make wheat grow in a drought or cows get big when there's not enough alfalfa to feed them.

That's why I keep preaching resilience and learning and preparing for now, while you still have logistical, if not economic, access to limitless resources.

Never assume, when the bullets start flying, that you'll be the one they miss. Get under cover or wear a vest.

Alright, turned off replies again after 8 billion "lol hoax fuck you commie" replies. Y'all really need to find a new hobby, like jerking off with razor wire or using a gas oven like a VR helmet or something funny.