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Comment by caeril | Hacker News Reader

Review some electoral maps. The OP was referring to secessionary scenarios, in which case most of Inland California, including the San Joaquin Valley, belongs to Team Red.

Even so, produce does not comprise a material percentage of the US caloric intake. Grains, tubers, grain oils, and meat definitely do.

Beyond food, there's mining and energy. Without the coasts, The US would be significantly inconvenienced. Without flyover country, the US would be dead.

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American agriculture is entirely dependent on petroleum, of which the US imports millions of barrels a day.

Inland farmers require foreign oil as an input to the caloric production you describe, which means that to survive they need the ports and pipelines of North America as well as the cooperation of oil-rich nations.

Recently become a net exporter of all petroleum products, with Texas, North Dakota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Alaska and California being the largest producers. At least in the near term I don't think the flyover states are as reliant on imports as the coasts if you were to put them in separate categories.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=51338 https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-u-s-oil-production-b...

Pretty sure if there was such a split, gulf coast states and their ports would go with the inland farmers. So petroleum would be imported around the Mississippi. Likely a split would have the ‘red’ states net exporting petroleum.

Don't forget the massive subsidies to corn farming etc. generated by Federal mandates for biofuels.

Both sides would either devolve into unlivable hellscapes or realize ideological moderation is the only way to run a sustainable government. You can't run a government if it's all "death to red! never mind all the minorities there who've been suppressed" or "death to blue! my kids will hate me and leave at the first opportunity, but I won't care until it's too late."

This is why I said all the current informal federal-based stuff would come back through treaty. I think most people on both "sides" are reasonable, so the split would never actually happen. And if it did, people would quickly miss all the stuff from the other side of it.

It's on a level with considering what happens if the sun disappears. It can't happen without something freakish happening, and none of us really knows how it would go.

> Both sides would either devolve into unlivable hellscapes

One side would devolve into an unlivable hellscape. The other side would devolve into the 1890s-1910s or so, without access to modern imported goods.

Nobody would "win". It's obviously a horrible scenario. But one side would definitely lose.

> It can't happen without something freakish happening

Nations collapse from political schism all the time. We just have short memories.

Modern farming is completely dependent on those ports you so eagerly gave away. How many millions of people would die of starvation and from the inevitable resource wars while the few people who know how to farm the old-fashioned way figured out how to make it work on land that's been made dependent on abundant imported fertilizer and pesticides?

I do not believe the people yelling "secession!" are prepared to revert to a pre-WWI world.

Modern farming is indeed dependent on imports. But modern-"ish" farming, with tractors, combines, and some degree of mechanization can still be done and maintained without microprocessors, sensors, and precision pumps and machine tools.

And if your supply requirements decrease by 150MM people, that makes the job substantially easier to manage.

> I do not believe the people yelling "secession!" are prepared to revert to a pre-WWI world.

Ah, but they think they are. Which is really the only thing that matters, since beyond a certain point, it's too late.

you are aware the gulf coast has a lot of ports for imports and exports. most gas comes out of "flyover country" and ends up at gulf export sites (see henry hub) and that's the big input to producing ammonia fertilizer.

> The other side would devolve into the 1890s-1910s or so, without access to modern imported goods

Subsistence farming is great for feeding an army so you can rebel against your government

Both sides would either devolve

I first read that as downvote, you know the internetizen apocalypse

You guys are really delusional. You think the economic powerhouses (SF, LA, etc) in CA will just let half of CA secede?

California produces almost 14% of all the crops grown in the US. A large portion of that are nuts and high calorie items like avocado and soy. You want food oils? Grains? Meats? CA exports all of those. CA is the 4th biggest producer of cattle in the US, 10th biggest poultry producer. 9th biggest producer of potatoes (Washington is #1, another coastal state). 2nd biggest rice producer.

As far as energy, you realize Texas is also not one of your flyover states, right? And even if it wasn't, we import plenty of energy from pipelines to coastal states so it can be sold or refined. CA has nearly the same refinement capabilities as Texas itself.

Fly over states are land. Undeveloped land is not extrinsically valuable.

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