Close Menu
Technology Mag

    Subscribe to Updates

    Get the latest creative news from FooBar about art, design and business.

    What's Hot

    Samsung’s One UI 8 might shut down bootloader unlocking on Galaxy phones

    July 28, 2025

    The controversial legal tactic The Trump Organization is using to take down fake merch

    July 28, 2025

    Sony calls Tencent game ‘slavish clone’ of Horizon in new lawsuit

    July 28, 2025
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
    Subscribe
    Technology Mag
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram YouTube
    • Home
    • News
    • Business
    • Games
    • Gear
    • Reviews
    • Science
    • Security
    • Trending
    • Press Release
    Technology Mag
    Home » Everything’s About to Get a Hell of a Lot More Expensive Due to Climate Change
    Science

    Everything’s About to Get a Hell of a Lot More Expensive Due to Climate Change

    News RoomBy News RoomJune 27, 20244 Mins Read
    Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Reddit WhatsApp Email

    Agricultural yields for important commodities produced in those states (fruits, nuts, corn, sugar, veggies, wheat) are withering, thanks to punishing heat and soil-nutrition depletion. The supply chains through which these products usually travel are thrown off course at varying points, by storms that disrupt land and sea transportation. Preparation for these varying externalities requires supply-chain middlemen and product sellers to anticipate consequential cost increases down the line—and implement them sooner than later, in order to cover their margins.

    You may have noticed some clear standouts among the contributors to May’s inflation: juices and frozen drinks (19.5 percent), along with sugar and related substitutes (6.4 percent). It’s probably not a coincidence that Florida, a significant producer of both oranges and sugar, has seen extensive damage to those exports thanks to extreme weather patterns caused by climate change as well as invasive crop diseases. Economists expect that orange juice prices will stay elevated during this hot, rainy summer.

    (Incidentally, climate effects may also be influencing the current trajectory and spread of bird flu across American livestock—and you already know what that means for meat and milk prices.)

    It goes beyond groceries, though. It applies to every basic building block of modern life: labor, immigration, travel, and materials for homebuilding, transportation, power generation, and necessary appliances. Climate effects have been disrupting and raising the prices of timber, copper, and rubber; even chocolate prices were skyrocketing not long ago, thanks to climate change impacts on African cocoa bean crops. The outdoor workers supplying such necessities are experiencing adverse health impacts from the brutal weather, and the recent record-breaking influxes of migrants from vulnerable countries—which, overall, have been good for the U.S. economy—are in part a response to climate damages in their home nations.

    The climate price hikes show up in other ways as well. There’s a lot of housing near the coasts, in the Gulf regions and Northeast specifically; Americans love their beaches and their big houses. Turns out, even with generous (very generous) monetary backstops from the federal government, it’s expensive to build such elaborate manors and keep having to rebuild them when increasingly intense and frequent storms hit—which is why private insurers don’t want to keep having to deal with that anymore, and the costs are handed off to taxpayers.

    When all the economic indicators that take highest priority in Americans’ heads are in such volatile motion thanks to climate change, it may be time to reconsider how traditional economics work and how we perceive their effects. It’s no longer a time when extreme weather was rarer and more predictable; its force and reasoning aren’t beyond our capacity to aptly monitor, but they’re certainly more difficult to track. You can’t stretch out the easiest economic model to fix that. And you can’t keep ignoring the clear links between our current weather hellscape, climate change, and our everyday goods.

    Thankfully, some actors are finally, belatedly taking a new approach. The reinsurance company Swiss Re has acknowledged that its industry fails to aptly factor disaster and climate risks into its calculations, and is working to overhaul its equations. Advances in artificial intelligence, energy-intensive though they may be, are helping to improve extreme-weather predictions and risk forecasts. At the state level, insurers are pushing back against local policies that bafflingly forbid them from pricing climate risks into their models, and Florida has new legislation requiring more transparency in the housing market around regional flooding histories. New York legislators are attempting to ban insurers from backstopping the very fossil-fuel industry that’s contributed to so much of their ongoing crisis.

    After all, we’re no longer in a world where climate change affects the economy, or where voters prioritizing economic or inflationary concerns are responding to something distinct from climate change—we’re in a world where climate change is the economy.

    Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn WhatsApp Reddit Email
    Previous ArticleSay Goodbye to Jabra With the Last Elite 10 Earbuds
    Next Article Windows on Arm puts Intel on notice

    Related Posts

    Florida Is Now a Haven for Unproven Stem-Cell Treatments

    July 28, 2025

    The ICJ Rules That Failing to Combat Climate Change Could Violate International Law

    July 27, 2025

    There’s Neuralink—and There’s the Mind-Reading Company That Might Surpass It

    July 26, 2025

    Trump and the Energy Industry Are Eager to Power AI With Fossil Fuels

    July 25, 2025

    A Top NASA Official Is Among Thousands of Staff Leaving the Agency

    July 24, 2025

    Newly Discovered ‘Infinity Galaxy’ Could Prove How Ancient Supermassive Black Holes Formed

    July 24, 2025
    Our Picks

    The controversial legal tactic The Trump Organization is using to take down fake merch

    July 28, 2025

    Sony calls Tencent game ‘slavish clone’ of Horizon in new lawsuit

    July 28, 2025

    Yet another Pixel 6A caught fire

    July 28, 2025

    Your Whistle pet tracker will stop working next month

    July 28, 2025
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Pinterest
    • Instagram
    • YouTube
    • Vimeo
    Don't Miss
    News

    The UK is slogging through an online age-gate apocalypse

    By News RoomJuly 28, 2025

    People across the United Kingdom have been faced with a censored and partially inaccessible online…

    Microsoft starts rolling out Xbox age verification in the UK

    July 28, 2025

    Sony details its ‘FlexStrike’ wireless PS5 fight stick

    July 28, 2025

    Can we ever trust an AI lawyer?

    July 28, 2025
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram Pinterest
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of use
    • Advertise
    • Contact
    © 2025 Technology Mag. All Rights Reserved.

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.