Really, you aren’t experiencing the increased cost of living?

Okay, here’s one right off the top of my head. How about high insurance premiums and high electricity bills that eat into your budget?

Climate change has made farming more difficult and expensive, which has lead to more subsidies, which has to be expressed as taxes and government loans, which is distributed over the entirety of right-wingers cutting federal expenses and centrists failing to replace them. The same story holds true for other industries, whether it’s the cost to keep sweatshop workers from dying, the cost to grow cotton, the cost to replace services destroyed by forest fires or hurricanes or floods, etc. Capitalism finds alternative routes, but these always cost more. This directly affects your quality of life, but in a distributed stochastic way that you can’t directly point to.

So maybe you’ve suffered from longer waiting periods in the justice system, maybe you’re annoyed that inflation has wiped out a considerable portion of your purchasing power (whether capital or income), maybe a lack of infrastructure maintenance has caused potholes or train delays, maybe you could have gotten a well-paying job as a high speed rail engineer or some other forward-looking government project that was never funded, maybe you got food poisoning because FDA checks got cut, maybe the covid restrictions could have stayed in effect longer and someone you know wouldn’t have gotten sick or died.

It’s like a cruise ship that is taking on water, with all the ship’s engineers focused on keeping the ship as stable and upright as possible rather than patching the hole or bailing out the water. They work harder and harder until at some point not even the full might of our regulations and charity and hoarded resources are able to keep it steady. And then everything goes wrong at once.

Climate change is affecting the quality of life and well-being of residents of U.S. communities and neighborhoods, posing a critical challenge for municipalities attempting to simultaneously address competing economic interests and public welfare concerns through climate adaptation policies.

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Defining the direct relationship between dwindling community access to amenities and climate change has been recognized as the foundation to socially just forms of adaptation (Markhvida et al 2020. For example, Albouy et al. (2016) demonstrates that under high emission scenario climate change, average US public welfare loss will be between 1 % and 4 % of income per year by year 2070–2099.

Climate change research has demonstrated that climatic stressors reduce the quality of life across a variety of contexts. Such conditions include disappearing coastal communities due to sea-level rise and storm surge (Alexander et al., 2012, McGranahan et al., 2007, Wu et al., 2002), increasing frequency of storms that destroys places of local cultural and social value that give meaning to communities (Arias-Maldonado, 2015, Hino et al., 2017, Quinn et al., 2019), and the growing inhabitability of places under duress from extreme heat waves, which are increasing the risk of illness and death (Depietri et al., 2013, Margolis, 2021, Telesca et al., 2018). These quality of life stressors affect one’s daily life, well-being, and emotional response to various social, environmental, and economic circumstances (Kaniasty, 2012).

In connection with these observations, scholars are closely examining how socioeconomic changes associated with urbanization (e.g., real-estate driven development) affect risk exposure to hazards and quality of life in urban coastal environments where these relations are acutely pronounced (Markhvida et al., 2020). This includes evidence of broader connections of climate change to displacement, urban economic development and risk exposure (Anguelovski et al., 2019, Keenan, 2018), and dislocation of communities who cannot afford to rebuild following hurricanes (Aune et al., 2020, Barile et al., 2020).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S22

Climate change impacts human health in both direct and indirect ways1 ,2 . Extreme heat waves, rising sea level, changes in precipitation resulting in flooding and droughts, and intense hurricanes can directly cause injury, illness, and even death3 . The effects of climate change can also indirectly affect health through alterations to the environment. For example, worsening air pollution levels can have negative impacts on respiratory and cardiovascular conditions4 .

Changes in temperature and rainfall can alter the survival, distribution, and behavior of insects and other species that can lead to changes in infectious diseases5 . Increases in precipitation, storm surge, and sea temperature can lead to more water-related illnesses6 . Climate change can also affect food safety, exposing people to contaminated foods that can result in foodborne illnesses7 . In addition, climate change can affect mental health and well-being8 ,9 .

https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/climatechange/health_impacts