The area is rabidly reactionary and hostile to the idea of climate change. There is a stark divide between the classes here, and the poor are incredibly uneducated, religious, and angry, and thus, easy for reactionary forces to manipulate. Further, everything is very spread out, and despite there being a massive number of people here, everything is a 15 minute car ride away from everything else.

Little to no change has been taken or is planned. This is made worse because of the major economic drivers in the area other then farming are natural gas fracking, coal mining, chemical manufacturing, and shale oil extraction. These industries control the local legislative bodies and they have sat on their hands. From my window I can see a major railyard, and like clockwork everyday, there are multiple enormous coal trains pulling hundreds of carriages full of anthracite coal from coal mines in the mountains. Those carriages are headed to a major port city 150km away, where that coal is loaded onto cargo ships and sold across the globe.

Crop yields are lower, the summer months are near unlivable, as it is 35-42c from nearly late April to mid September. It used to be that we would get a maybe a few hot weeks (roughly 35c) in July and August at best, but it has gotten exponentially worse. This has exacerbated droughts, and farmers are forced to drain more and more groundwater. People are also forced to pump more AC in order to simply not die of heatstroke, as many of the houses have been built for decades to be highly insulated against the harsh and long winters that no longer exist.

Its gotten so bad that even a few of the far-right reactionaries have started mumbling about how “There isn’t as much snow nowadays as when I was a kid”. But I fear they will not wake up soon enough.

We are diving head-first into catastrophe.