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Climate Change & Its Discontents
Dec. 13th, 2025 09:55 amOf course, just as I discovered the glories of the treadmill, the gym shut down for a week. I suspect to make it pretty for the hoard of healthy lifestyle wannabes who will be thronging the membership rolls come January 1.
So, I went for a tromp along a nearby road, which at least has the virtue of being plowed and salted.
The road leads to a 10-mile parcel that was once dairy farms and is now mostly houses. The ones closest to Albany Post Road, the main drag, are McMansions and not particularly attractive, thrown up without any effort to integrate them into the landscape. Architectural mushrooms! Constructed from the flimsiest materials.
Did not want to listen to music while I was walking on a road, so I entertained myself wondering what those houses will be like in 50 years, 100 years.
###
Population numbers around here are rising because even though a round trip to New York City by automobile takes four hours, that's still considered a do-able commute. Plus people with pensions (cops, firefighters) retire here. And younger people here still procreate.
But still.
Overall, populations are decreasing, so I kinda have to think these McMansions are oversupply. And thus, will fall into massive disrepair after relatively few decades.
Unless climate change makes life in the Big Apple so unbearable that real estate inflation shifts to Ulster County. Hey! It could happen. 25 to 30 percent of Manhattan is landfill. New York City's sea level rose by one foot over the last century and is projected to rise another foot by 2039. Battery Park and large swathes of the Upper East Side could easily revert to marshland by 2100. At a certain point, it is no longer economically advisable to sink vast sums of money into levees & seawalls.
New Orleans is kinda the test run for the abandonment of American cities due to climate change.
I am guessing that in 25 years, New Orleans will be no more.
It's gonna happen to Venice a lot sooner than that.
So book those tickets to Mardi Gras and Carnivale now.
So, I went for a tromp along a nearby road, which at least has the virtue of being plowed and salted.
The road leads to a 10-mile parcel that was once dairy farms and is now mostly houses. The ones closest to Albany Post Road, the main drag, are McMansions and not particularly attractive, thrown up without any effort to integrate them into the landscape. Architectural mushrooms! Constructed from the flimsiest materials.
Did not want to listen to music while I was walking on a road, so I entertained myself wondering what those houses will be like in 50 years, 100 years.
###
Population numbers around here are rising because even though a round trip to New York City by automobile takes four hours, that's still considered a do-able commute. Plus people with pensions (cops, firefighters) retire here. And younger people here still procreate.
But still.
Overall, populations are decreasing, so I kinda have to think these McMansions are oversupply. And thus, will fall into massive disrepair after relatively few decades.
Unless climate change makes life in the Big Apple so unbearable that real estate inflation shifts to Ulster County. Hey! It could happen. 25 to 30 percent of Manhattan is landfill. New York City's sea level rose by one foot over the last century and is projected to rise another foot by 2039. Battery Park and large swathes of the Upper East Side could easily revert to marshland by 2100. At a certain point, it is no longer economically advisable to sink vast sums of money into levees & seawalls.
New Orleans is kinda the test run for the abandonment of American cities due to climate change.
I am guessing that in 25 years, New Orleans will be no more.
It's gonna happen to Venice a lot sooner than that.
So book those tickets to Mardi Gras and Carnivale now.
