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Comment by zwieback | Hacker News Reader

My hope is that there's a silver lining: farmers may finally accept that climate change is happening and start supporting policies to combat it. It's a long shot but I'm somewhat hopeful.

I live in the Willamette Valley, the heat wave has actually helped my fruit trees and blueberries but the eastern part of OR and WA are in pretty bad shape.

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Farmers have known about climate change and accepted it for years [0]. What's missing is the acceptance that it's anthropogenic. So instead of supporting any sort of helpful policies most farmers (which are really just huge agricultural concerns) just bitch about water rights, "city folk", and stick their hands out for government subsidies.

I don't expect much self reflection from that group. They finance state and federal representatives to double down on subsidies rather than any meaningful changes.

[0] https://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm

Apparently I am out of a loop: Farmers are denying climate change? If my livelihood depends on good climate, how can I not notice a good climate going bad?

I'd like to understand. Is this something beyond wilful denial?

Looks like that might be changing: 2020 Farm Groups Moving To Address Climate Change : NPR

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/20/936603967/farmers-are-warming...

Though apparently that wasn't the case 8 years ago: Why Don’t Farmers Believe in Climate Change? - Mother Jones

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/07/farmers-clim...

Farmers generally aren't climate change deniers in my experience, and I meet a lot of farmers on a regular basis as I work for one of the largest AG equipment suppliers in the world in r&d where we are constantly out testing new products or tech on farmers fields.

They are practical, evidence based and extremely in-tune with anything that can affect their bottom line.

I think the feeling is that farmers tend to be right leaning and conservative politically and are thought to be of the mindset to deny that climate change is real.

It's a combination of factors. If your farm depends on water, and it's a drought, it's hard to think of the long term when your may not financially survive the next few years. Droughts and other natural disasters have also occurred through all of human history, so scientists have only been able to say "this might be related" instead of "it was definitely caused by" climate change up until the last few years.

There's also more than willful denial considering the amount of propaganda that tries to claim that climate change either isn't real or is grossly exaggerated (there are even efforts to claim that it will be beneficial). The channels that tend to push this also tend to be very popular in rural areas. This isn't even just a climate change things- the same groups of people claiming there's a labor shortage also try to deport anyone who doesn't look like them.

I did a little more Googling and it's, of course, more nuanced than I thought. Even in Iowa, which is probably more conservative than most places, the attitudes are shifting:

https://www.extension.iastate.edu/news/iowa-farm-and-rural-l...

I think a big difference is the belief of the cause of climate change, a large percentage of farmers believes it's mostly or partly due to natural variations.

I think the parent — like most people (including myself until recently) — has a poor understanding of the professional makeup of rural communities.

There was never a period in American history where most rural people were farmers. That was a Jeffersonian daydream. In the colonial/early-American period, farms consisted of landowners, and a mix of slaves and poorly-paid employees. When slavery ended and the industrial revolution came along, tractors took over most of the work and the employees left for factories; the number of landowners (what we now call "farmers") is not very different now than in 1800.

Here's a census report on the actual careers of small-town America. Lot of community service (education, health care), a little manufacturing and retail… about what one might expect, really. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/blogs/201...

… so getting back to the point of climate change… on the one hand, since farmers don't make up the majority of rural communities, their opinions on climate change don't mean much politically. On the other hand, they do have a very direct and personal effect on the climate w/r/t soil practices (erosion, pesticides, etc), and there are some positive signs on that front.

Corporate farming (or big ag) outnumbers family farms to the point where family farmers are politically insignificant compared to corporate farming. With that in mind, "their" (i.e., corporate farms) livelihoods depend more on government subsidies than good climate.

I don't think you can generalize how family farmers feel about climate change, or even if they're single issue voters that may or may not care about something else more. Corporate farms are big business though, and big business tends to vote conservative in the US, and conservatives in the US tend to not take action to fix climate change. These two things may be related, too.

6:23 https://youtu.be/ig_YIEYk81U

PBS Frontline, Betting on Trump: Water (2017)

Just because they vote red doesn't mean they're onboard with literally everything on that platform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity

People who's livelihood depends on the climate are generally going to have opinions about the climate that track the evidence and scientific consensus.

This pretty much. Farmers don’t usually deny climate change but they also want their guns and independence.

But climate change is the single most important issue of our time. Even if I disagreed with a candidate on everything else, I'd still vote for them if their opponent was denying the existence of climate change.

What is it going to take for people to realize how serious this is?

If an abstract threat with the primary impacts expected to appear in dozens of years, if not longer, is your primary concern, you have it pretty good.

Not everyone has it so good. The way to get people to think about the long term is to understand which short term concerns are blocking the path.

The reason is, you’re wrong, it’s not the most important issue. Because there are other more important issues. There are more important long term issues. There are even some more important environmental issues, in terms of harm and our ability to engage productively with them. And your opinion about what to do about climate change is surely a thoughtless, harmful, uncreative regurgitation.

When the short term immediate consequences of climate change are greater than the immediate benefits of combustion energy. So never. Look at the gilet jaunes protests. No one wants to lose their job or limit the GDP growth of their country to protect the environment for their great grandkids or great great grandkids.

I wouldn't assume farmers automatically vote red. In ND for example, which is typically red for the presidential race, we often have democrat representatives in congress. Farmers will vote on what policies affect their bottom line, and it isn't always one way or the other.

A lot of people who don't "accept that climate change is happening" actually do when you talk to them and understand where they're coming from. What they often don't like are the proposed solutions to it. Which makes sense when you consider that those proposed solutions often involve completely upending their life.

using your brain, don't you think vague, exaggerated and detail-free statements like "completely upending your life" are part of utterly ordinary mental resistance-patterns? In other words, actively defeating consideration of detail and alternatives

If you are a farmer your entire life revolves around planting your crops with heavy machinery[0], fertilizing[1] your crops with heavy machinery, harvesting your crops with heavy machinery, and then transporting your crops to storage/processing by truck, rail, or barge. All of which require massive fossil fuel inputs. So I would say "completely upending their life" is a fair assessment.

Edit: Would love to hear your detailed alternatives though.

[0]: Requires lots of fuel.

[1]: Fertilizer is a produced from natural gas or mined using heavy machinery.

But if all of your competition has the exact same impacts, I don’t understand the problem. Unless there is some other way to get food besides farming?

That's sort of my point. Any change on the scale required to affect climate change would require a massive upheaval of the industry so it isn't going to happen anytime soon.

What's your take on the Willamette Valley becoming the next Napa? I've heard this being discussed as climate change and wildfires become more apparent in California.

I've heard this too but don't know a lot about wine. What I have noticed in my 26 years here is that there are more and more drinkable reds growing in the valley, you may not see it so much in the supermarkets but when you go on wine tours it seems like there's more selection of wines that need warmer weather so it does seem like a real possibility. The land is pretty densely farmed, though, so you'd either have to log some hills or displace other crops, not that that would be a problem if it promises to be lucrative.

Most wine today is fake and terroir isn’t as important as micro-aeration or various additives like oak chips or mega purple.

Since I hadn't heard about mega-purple: https://www.winespectator.com/articles/what-is-mega-purple-4...

Last year, when SF was posting photos of the orange sky I was driving up I5 in the Willamette Valley at 11am with my brights on because smoke had turned day to night.

Last year 4.4 million[1] acres burned in CA (~4% of the state), and 1.2 million[2] in OR (~2% of the state). These are huge numbers. Similar to CA, it's not just the acreage significantly increasing in recent years but also intensity and damage. The Almeda Drive Fire destroyed over 2,000 structures between Ashland and Medford, in highly accessible terrain with firefighting resources nearby.

Right now, the Bootleg Fire in Oregon is over 150,000 acres with 0% containment [3], putting it within the top 20 largest fires in state history at present and likely to grow.

From my layman's perspective, it seems that the brief window when CA's ideal climate moves slightly north has already come and gone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_wildfires [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Oregon_wildfires [3] https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7609/

Ashland and Medford were downright scary to drive through on the main drive north (not from there, don't remember the route number specifically). The only people out were crews and the occasional artist or photographer memorializing the human aspects of widespread fire wreckage. Just devastating.

How did the heat wave benefit your fruit trees?

Maybe not those two days of crazy heat but overall our spring and early summer was much warmer and drier. Normally I lose most of my cherries because of cold or moisture during or right after the blossom but this year I had a bumper crop on both my cherry trees and my plums are also doing great. Apples and pears are generally always great, this year I had some fruit drop after the two 100+ days but still going to be a good harvest.

Biden recently said no to raising the gas tax. So even if they vote blue, it doesn't seem to matter unfortunately.

Gas taxes are extremely regressive. All consumption taxes for non-luxury goods are regressive, and lower income people typically own old cars with worse gas mileage and/or use trucks to work blue collar jobs.

Poorer people use much less fuel than wealthier people. Gas taxes are not regressive. Poisoning the atmosphere is regressive.

> Poorer people use much less fuel than wealthier people. Gas taxes are not regressive. Poisoning the atmosphere is regressive.

That isn't always true. At least in my city, poor people have to drive to work, richer people often have the luxury of riding their bike or taking the corporate bus in (because they live closer to work (or even public transit) and/or their company provides them with perks that reduce their need for driving).

I guess you'll need to show some data because in every American city I've studied income is positively and strongly correlated with private vehicle travel. Poor people are not obligate drivers; they disproportionately walk and bike and take the bus. A typical result that I just drew from my PDF library says "higher income, higher educational attainment, and smaller household sizes tend to be associated with a higher probability of commuting by private vehicle and a lower probability of commuting by transit or active modes."

It flips on the USA west coast, mainly because of housing prices, poor people can afford to live mostly in places where getting to anyplace without a car is inconvenient. In fact, it’s mostly not true in the USA, but is definitely true in many countries outside the USA. A common expat joke is that rich Chinese drive and poor Chinese ride bikes, while rich Americans ride bikes and poor Americans drive. See https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-15/how-low-i....

I wonder if this is a statistical bias where we intuitively over sample one group while under sampling another and then average over the sample.

The urban poor is probably a lot more numerous than the rural poor, but when thinking about the poor we tend to think about the rural communities. I don’t know how the numbers but common belief is that in the rural areas the poor make up a larger proportion of the total population then in urban areas. However the urban population is a lot larger then the rural population.

So in absolute numbers there might be more urban poor (which are forced to commute by walking/biking/public transit, etc.) then there are rural poor. So—in absolute numbers—it is not unlikely—though counter-intuitive—that rich car usage outnumbers poor car usage by a lot.

On top of that, one can be forgiven for under count the number of working class folks which work close to where they live. The lower classes hold the majority of service jobs, which are often located in the residential neighborhoods. And then majority of all neighborhoods are not gentrified and have affordable (or at least not ridiculously high) rent.

> The urban poor is probably a lot more numerous than the rural poor

Actually, the suburban poor trump both urban and rural poor by far. That is, people who live in communities not in the urban core of a metro area, but within distance of one. They are much more attached to cars than the urban poor (who can't afford the parking fees anyways). These are the people stuck with crappy 1 hour commutes to their low paying job, whereas the urban poor...they are close enough to their jobs, but instead their housing is really expensive (or of bad quality). The suburban poor own a car, parking isn't much of a problem for them, and they make up a lot of the cars on the freeway during rush hour because their jobs provide them with much less flexibility in avoiding it.

The suburban poor might even own a cheap house, they are much more numerous in the USA than who I would consider rich. So think someone who is commuting in from Concord because they can't afford to live in SF, not those people living in SF itself. SF is generally a bad example because of parking costs (you can't afford to drive there), but outside of downtown there are still lots of jobs that people commute by car to. Here in Seattle, a lot of people drive to their jobs outside of the city core, coming in from outside of Seattle to do so (whereas people like me take the Google bus, my Amazonian wife just has to walk a block to the bus stop that takes her within a block of her office, because we paid a bunch of money for a place in Ballard).

A fellow Seattlite here (well Vashon to be precise). I don’t know the numbers so I believe your numbers over my previous guess. But when I was thinking about the urban poor I was actually thinking about the suburbs as well. The Seattle area has a lot people living and working in places like White Center, Burien and Issaquah. Even those that live in the suburbs but work downtown, a lot of them ride the Sounder from Everet or Pyuallup, or walk on to the ferries from Bremerton or Southworth. The few times I commute to downtown with the Water Taxi I see a lot of people coming from Southworth on the WS ferry and transfer onto the Water Taxi to Colman Dock (probably less now that Southworth has their own PO boat).

But like I said, I don’t know the numbers at all. Here on Vashon I would guess that there is little correlation between economic position and whether or not you commute by car any further then the nearest park-and-ride. Although those that bike all the way to the ferry are probably on the richer side if I were to guess. I my self can walk to the highway and catch a bus to the Water Taxi (which is a pretty nice commute tbh). However I belive you when you say that the suburban poor outnumber any other group and that they are overwhelmingly drivers.

Most jobs aren’t in downtown Seattle though. So you are stuck with a job somewhere away from a main transit route, you live away from a main transit route, taking public transit really isn’t a luxury in time that you can afford.

If you don’t want to drive, there are lots of things you can do in arranging where you live and having flexibility in where and when you work (eg buying a house in Ballard rather than Lynwood, working for a high tech company with a convenient office location - because it’s part of their effort to attract workers, etc…). Those options become more accessible the more money you make.

Have you only lived in large cities on the Eastern seaboard?

In fact I have not lived long on the East Coast. The SF MTA, in 2017:

"""Higher income households in San Francisco make more trips by automobile. Much of this difference is associated with variations in auto access by income, with only 10 percent of households with incomes over $75,000 reporting no access to a vehicle, compared to 40 percent of households with incomes under $75,000... households making incomes over $76,000 having a significantly higher private auto mode share than households making $35,000 or less."""

San Francisco is even less representative of most of the country. Visit Michigan, Florida, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas...

Higher fuel costs can be offset with stimulus checks and tax credits. But regardless, first we have to agree that significantly reducing fossil fuel consumption is a goal.

Coal for electricity generation alone accounts for >60% of all manmade CO2 emissions. We could get very far just phasing out coal and doing nothing else, yet rhetoric usually focuses on cars and aviation. Aviation is less than 5% of all emissions. Why is the focus out of line with the reality in this way?

You can buy a zero tailpipe emission car right now. You can even ride a bus, carpool, or bike. Or take an offer for a remote working job in preference over an in office one. An individual can’t change the fuel mix of their grid. Airline usage is a luxury. Natural gas power plants are already displacing coal fired one.

This is a really cheap refute. If gas taxes are regressive, then build the infrastructure so they won’t be. If poor people are dependent on cheap gas for driving to work, increase the bus coverage and frequency, build new rail lines (and electrify existing once) for congested routes, zone cheaper housing closer to where people work and build safe bike lanes, heck even subsidize electric cars if everything else is too radical. Do this along with raising gas prices and they won’t be regressive.

EDIT: And to raise the hammer home. Biden also said no to the Green new deal. The electrification of CalTrain, and the California High Speed rail are experiencing slowdowns because of lack of funding. ST3 in Seattle is at risk of being delayed because of lack of funding. Amtrak is getting the most modest of all expansions. Bus networks in mid-sized American cities are a poor as they ever were and no change in the maps. I think that gas taxes “being regressive” is not the real reason that Biden and other politicians are not raising the gas prices.

Voters reject public transit taxes because they can’t imagine themselves riding. There is a huge blind spot on the cost of roads. Never raising gasoline tax and continuing to mandate minimum parking just shifts the cost of driving from motorists to general taxpayers.

Even this, for me, seems like a lousy excuse a politician would make. Even if true, a good politician should be able to convince the general public that this is a good idea. So far politicians that advocate for public transit as a remedy for our inevitable step away from fossil fuels are hard to find.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bears mentioning here a one of few who does. Among my local politicians, state senetor Joe Nguyen goes a step further and advocates for public transit as social justice issue (as well as a climate one).

The badies are easier to find. California Governor Gavin Newsom stresses the importance of tackling the climate crises, yet is not funding necessary infrastructure project which would make the transformation easier. Europe is also full of the Gavin Newsom types. And this is sad because most people are in favor of radical climate policies. So convincing the public of a good climate policy should be easy (this is also [probably] true of the west coast states).

In my opinion, if dealing with the climate disaster is as important as these politicians correctly claim it to be, then they should commit to it. Failing to do so reflects how bad they are at politics and honestly they should probably find a new career where they will do less damage.

What makes you think Newsom has the power to fund anything?

Governors don’t control taxation. They control the executive branch, not the legistlature.

He has the power to influence the legislator, and he hasn’t been shy about using that power to speak against funding green infrastructure since he took office.

Climate change will be also regressive and hit poor people the hardest. So, even though gas tax may be regressive, no gas tax is likely even more regressive. It's just postponed by a few years/decades.

And there are mitigations we can take to help the poor, as sibling comments say.

Biden is doing a fine job raising gas prices - and prices of everything else - without adding new taxes.

Generous federal financial assistance is like a backdoor minimum wage increase. Hopefully inflation doesn’t nullify the bigger purchasing power those bigger numbers are assumed to confer.

I don't think this comment understands the reality of how great the US's food producing abilities are. US producers could add more new land to its agriculture output than all other countries combined. All that new land is in areas that already have infrastructure for that land to be productive. US farms continue to increase the productivity of their land. In some locations in the Midwest, farmers are able to increase their crop cycles.

The effects of climate change are probably a net gain for US agriculture, I don't expect the fight to come from them.

I hope you're right. That said, if the US government keeps bailing out farmers why change?

Edit:

Citation in case people people need one...

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/31/790261705/fa...

The USDA pumped 20bn in as recently as 2019. Partly for trade war and partly for flooding and other natural disasters. They didn't even need congressional approval, the USDA has a mandate to spend as it deems necessary.

The bureau of reclamation had much to answer for here. Why are we growing stupid things like low value alfalfa in the desert? Why are we growing rice in the desert? Because we are giving the water away for almost nothing, that's why. Large farming operations have been parasites feeding off taxpayer subsidized water, irrigation and hydro power for the last century.

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