Is Climate Change the Culprit?
New estimates from the US census show that five of 10 Americans identify with a race or ethnic group other than white, and suggest that the 2020 to 2030 decade will be the first in the nation’s history in which the white population becomes a minority.
Over the last decade’s first nine years, racial and ethnic minorities accounted for ALL of the nation’s population growth, and were responsible for population gains in states that had population gains with the exception of “The American Redoubt” (Redoubt meaning a place of retreat) where massive white migration has occurred due to population demographic changes in major cities and states where whites are now minorities. The American Redoubt is a political migration movement first proposed in 2011 by survivalist novelist and blogger James Wesley Rawles which designates Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming along with parts of Oregon and Washington, as a safe haven for white conservative Christians. Although populations in those states grew their birth rates dropped as most new residents were of retirement age.
Those states, Metropolitan areas, and counties that would have otherwise registered losses due to declines in their white populations can thank immigrants for maintaining their economic stability that otherwise would have crumbled due to a lack of workforce.. And while the U.S. and more than half of its states have shown absolute declines in populations under age 25, such declines were mainly due to increasing white losses among the youth population. These declines would have been even greater were it not for youthful gains among racial and ethnic minorities, especially the Black Afro-Latino and Hispanic population. In fact the US Census admitted that it has un- intentionally undercounted black people for decades by as much as 10 percent in some regions.
The 2020 census continued a longstanding trend of undercounting Black people, Latinos and Native Americans, while overcounting people who identified as white and not Latino, according to estimates from a report the U.S. Census Bureau. Afro-Latinos and Hispanics with a net undercount rate of 4.99% — were left out of the 2020 census at more than three times the rate of a decade earlier. The US Census claims that only 13% of Black people actually fill out the census while 75% of Caucasians do! Note: There were 50 million people in the U.S. who identified as Black or Afro Latino in 2019
Among Native Americans living on reservations (5.64%) and Black people had a potential gross undercount of 23.30%, the net undercount rates were numerically higher but not statistically different from the 2010 rates. According to the US Census Young children, non-English speakers, and low-income persons were among the list of hard-to-count populations for the 2020 Census. Probably because they rarely hire census takers from those low income and immigrant communities. U.S. Census Bureau pays its employees an average of $18.00 an hour. Hourly pay at U.S. Census Bureau ranges from an average of $15.54 to $26.21 an hour.
People who identified as white and not Latino were overcounted at a net rate of 1.64%, almost double the rate in 2010. Asian Americans were also overcounted (2.62%).So somehow whites and Asians were overcounted and everyone else just happened to be undercounted. How strange ios that? The US Census says overcounting happens when some people are counted more than once at different addresses, driving overcounts, while U.S. residents missing from the census fuel undercounting; So whites and Asians with multiple home addresses seem to get counted twice but poor people who have had multiple rental addresses over the past decade never seem to have that problem. Things that make you say…hmmm?
If present trends continue, it won't take another generation before the majority-minority milestone is reached in the United States, the causal factors are the progression of population growth rate that show white populations in the negative and states with the highest white populations having the lowest birth rates; fertility and mortality rates show that white population in America is the oldest; urbanization the loss of the middle class infrastructure forcing many to move from rural areas to urban locales; pattern of migration and differences in the economic factors responsible for the timing and speed of these drivers of demographic change such as climate migration, loss of farmlands and food availability, loss of mobility due to fuel costs and loss of access to home ownership due to mechanization, AI, robots are expected to take over 30 million US manufacturing jobs by 2035.
Many believe that racism is at the heart of this undercounting of minorities because the numbers inform the government of where money should be allocated and many Americans have a deep seated desire to keep minority populations economically disadvantaged. The question is; what will that mean when the white population becomes the minority? In response to the bureau reporting that American Indians and Alaska Natives living on reservations continued to have the highest net undercount rate among racial and ethnic groups, Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians, said the results "confirm our worst fears."
"Every undercounted household and individual in our communities means lost funding and resources that are desperately needed to address the significant disparities we face," added Sharp, who is also the vice president of the Quinault Indian Nation in Taholah, Wash., in a recent statement.
The historic undercount of Black Americans in the 2020 Census almost robbed Black communities of billions of dollars in federal funding and the equivalent of almost three seats in the House of Representatives, National Urban League President and CEO Marc H. Morial stated; “This isn’t simply an unfortunate accident,...It’s the result of a deliberate campaign of sabotage intended to steer political influence and public resources away from communities of color... “Black Americans have been undercounted in every Census since 1790, when we were counted as three-fifths of a person. But an independent analysis found that the 2020 undercount may be three times worse than the last Census in 2010, and the undercount of Black children under 18 may be 10 times worse. It seems the most terrifying thing that America at the governmental level fears, is admitting to white U.S. Citizens that they are now a minority and that it isn’t going to change for centuries perhaps not ever!
even though demographic change has remained a persistent attribute of human civilization for centuries, it has become even more politicized today as white majorities in some of the world’s largest democracies fear their numerical decline. Once 27 percent of the global population they are now less than 9%. Because of the growth of democracy globally democratic institutions have asserted that political power is increasingly subject to the makeup of national populations and the logic of majoritarianism. Expanded freedom of expression allows for a variety of language about ethnic identities. Greater freedom of assembly facilitates upward economic mobility and upper class enclaves along ethnic lines. Also because democracies distribute resources according to population data, they raise the stakes of economic advantages due to relative group size.
In this environment, white nationalism has experienced a rebirth. In the face of a demographic change that could destabilize the current ethno-European power structure and the uncertainties of globalization, nationalism offers a familiar security blanket to those fearful of non white power. In democracies particularly, nationalism asserts and oppresses precisely what demographic change threatens: a specific ethno-religious people’s social dominance and sense of entitlement to the control of the state. Newest statistics project that the nation will become “minority white” in 2035. Interestingly enough it is climate change that has sped up the demographic change by more than 10 years!
The groups most vulnerable to changes in climate are the elderly and children under 5 years old. The demographic change has already occurred in populations 5 to 30 years old where BIPOC people are the overwhelming majority. Groups that are particularly vulnerable to the health effects of climate change include: pregnant women, immigrant groups, indigenous peoples, the disabled, vulnerable occupational groups eg. blue collar jobs, farming, construction. electrical such as workers who are exposed to extreme weather. Due to the rise and frequency of extreme weather events, it’s important to emphasize the health threats and challenges imposed by climate change. While everyone will be faced with the health impacts inflicted by climate change, certain regions will disproportionately feel the health impacts, as they can be less climate-resilient. One of these regions is the Pacific Northwest it will see not only extreme heat events like the summer of 2020 on a frequent basis but also experience severe winter weather and storms.
The Pacific Northwest's extreme heat wave was an event that should only happen once in 10,000 years but scientist say we can expect more events like this as the globe continues to warm and people refuse to go green Because of man-made climate change records were broken across the region in June of 2021, as temperatures soared as high as 118 degrees Fahrenheit. Warming is projected to continue throughout the 21st century in the Pacific Northwest. For the 2050s (2041 to 2070) relative to 1950-1999, temperature is projected to rise +5.8°F to +8.5°F. No state in the U.S. has a more dire climate change outlook than Florida, a state that ranks as a top-five worst state for both extreme heat and flooding. But for most of the South the infrastructure access to clean water and food is superior to the rest of the nation. Extreme heat, heavy downpours, and flooding will affect infrastructure, health, agriculture, forestry, transportation, air and water quality, and more in the Midwest.Varying rainfall leads to flooding in some areas and droughts in others, both of which reduce agricultural production, increase food insecurity and food prices, and cause dislocation of poverty-stricken rural populations to already overcrowded urban areas that are ill-equipped to accept them.
Increased heat wave intensity and frequency, increased humidity, degraded air quality, and reduced water quality will increase public health risks.
Another factor to consider is the World Economic Forum finding that hot days lead to a reduction in birth rates eight to 10 months later. The effect size is largest at nine months: on average, each hot day reduces birth rates nine months later by 0.4% or about 1,100 births. Understanding how climate change will affect fertility is an important economic concern. According to World Bank estimates, in the United States and many European countries, a woman has fewer than two children on average by the end of her reproductive life. The Midwest has a highly energy-intensive economy. Energy use per dollar of gross domestic product is approximately 20 percent above the national average. Many of these states are ideologically against renewable energy options. As temperatures get hotter, the demand for air conditioning in the Midwest is expected to grow and the increased demand for cooling is projected to exceed 10 gigawatts which is equivalent to at least five large conventional power plants, requiring more than $6- $8 billion in infrastructure investments.
The Midwest also has great potential to produce energy from low-carbon sources. Currently more than one-quarter of national installed wind energy capacity is located in the Midwest but it is not enough. It would cost only $3 billion to set up an infrastructure of battery storage, wind and solar for the Midwest to supply all its energy needs and reduce the average citizens energy cost by 60 percent or more. Some parts of the Midwest have solar resources just as good as Florida. Up until recently, there was little consensus regarding temperature’s effect on fertility due to the dearth of experimental evidence. Recent studies have shown that days over 80 degrees Fahrenheit can cause a reduction of births especially in populations that have genetic ancestry from cold non tropical climate regions. Currently, the United States experiences nearly 40 hot days per year. A prominent global circulation model projects that if things do not change drastically, the United States will experience a tripling of the number of hot days to about 120 by the end of the 21st century.
Scientists project that this warming will cause the number of births to fall (in vulnerable populations) by about 107,000 per year. There will also be more summer births, due to the rebound, which will expose pregnancies to considerably hotter days during the third trimester and will threaten infant health. Vitamin D is a critical nutrient and black and brown people are able to get it directly from the sun without damage this is important for fetal health as vitamin D has many important functions in the body. A mother’s vitamin D supply is passed to her baby in utero and helps regulate processes like brain development.
A study published in The Journal of Nutrition showed that mothers’ vitamin D levels during pregnancy were associated with their children’s intelligence, suggesting that higher vitamin D levels in pregnancy may lead to greater mental aptitude.
Vitamin B9 is also essential to healthy births and increased sunlight lowers folate in people without eumelanin (Brown or Black pigment) folate and melanin compounds are synergistic; melanin, on the one hand, protects folate from UVR-related degradation, which in turn supports the influence of folate in melanogenesis. whilst vitamin D may be synthesized following UVR exposure, folate may be degraded. The vitamin D–folate hypothesis proposes that the two clines of skin pigmentation evolved as a balancing mechanism to maintain levels of these photosensitive vitamins and that lack of the ability to survive in a warmer climate because he did not have these clines is what caused the Neanderthals extinction. We can save ourselves if we have the will because demographic change is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Since the 1800s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels (like coal, oil, and gas) which produces heat-trapping gases. So the choice isn't between going green and using gas. The choice is between going green or having no future on the planet1
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