You Can't Replace Iowa Featured
"What are going to develop that replaces Iowa?" — Bill McKibben responding to a conservative who thinks we can adapt to climate change.
Source: HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, interview with Bill McKibben on October 5, 2012
Notes: In a speech to the Foreign Relations Council in New York on June 28, 2012, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson admitted that global warming is real. However, he stated “Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around — we’ll adapt to that. It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.”
During his intereview with Bill Maher, Bill McKibben had this response to Tillerson's statement: "I think by crop production areas he means what the rest of us call farms. This is nonsense. Exxon has pleasantly melted the tundra for us, but you cannot just take Iowa and move it up (to the tundra). There is no soil there."
Later on this HBO show during the round table discussion, CNN conservative commentator Will Cain argued with McKibben that "The problem with environmental activistism is that you always assume an extrapolation from the present into the future. You thnk what will happen now will happen in the future. Malthus thought we were going to run out of food in 1700. We didn't. He did not project that we were going to invent fertilizer and steam engines to farm."
Bill McKibben's rebuttal: "What are we going to develop that replaces Iowa?"
Image Source: iowa.laxallstars.com
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Brian Ettling
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2012-10-10
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bybdkuchik
November 1, 2012
I wonder how Tillerson's engineering solutions will build back the lives of the people in New England and all of the other places in the world that are now and are going to suffer from the greed that he shares with his cronies. Just because your technology is dying, that doesn't mean that you have to take the entire world with it.
byTom Smerling
November 1, 2012
So true.... In Minnesota, everybody knows why the soil is so fertile near the Iowa border, and so barren in the north. The glaciers scraped all the topsoil off the land, leaving bare rock, and dumped it in Iowa. That's why the topsoil there is so deep and productive. And that's why nothing much grows in rocky Northern Minnesota except hay, at best. Bottom line: So you can't just migrate the corn belt northward....unless you plan on bringing the all that topsoil with you. Good luck with that one.