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by a4a4a4a4 1263 days ago
You realize there are entire towns and villages whose lives depend on this tourism, right? I'm not saying it's a perfect solution to fly snow in, but you can't discount the impact this has on the population if the resorts close down.
4 comments

There are entire towns and villages on the floodplains of rivers whose course meanders over time. There are lots of resorts and cottages on shallow coastal barrier islands that are inundated frequently by hurricanes and rising oceans. If you put down a deep well in an arid region, you can often find an aquifer with enough water to last a small town or farm for a few decades that replenishes on a scale of millennia.

The earth changes. Humanity doesn't have a responsibility to a resort owner keep things the same as they were when we started keeping good records.

Typical human behavior to constantly seek to push their luck, past the point of sustainability. Any resource-based community, tied to a single commodity, must know it is living on borrowed time.
It's really easy to be so philosophical when you're not going to lose your livelihood
What other occupation do you think they should have living far from the big cities? It’s either builders, farmers, public sector or some shop or motel or all of them.
Well thats true forever and even for non-human animals.
There are very few groups of people I would feel less sorry for.

I grew up in one of those tourism towns. It's like old school strip mining but for society. Instead of poisoning watersheds it poisons society. It turns businessmen into swindlers. It turns culture into caricature. It turns the economy into a disgusting web of perverse incentives in which every actor is constantly dealing in way that would give a mafia run dumpster company pause. Good riddance.

The survival of a few villages is an issue that pales in comparison to the issue of climate change.
Written from the comfort of your warm home with your secure, easily replaceable tech job. It's very easy to be philosophical when it's not your entire life and family history at stake.

Answering questions like "what should people do instead?" is important to figuring out how we can move away from things that damage the climate. If you just tell people "your life and livelihood isn't as important as X" isn't going to get that person to agree with you.

I don’t really appreciate the spin you’re putting to my comment, but I think you’re just missing the point.

The point of my comment is not to trivialize the livelihoods of the inhabitants of “a few villages”. As you correctly point out, that would be crass and unfair.

The point of my comment is that climate change is an existential crisis at a scale much larger than “a few villages”: it’s fairly likely to result in an extinction event. For all villages.