Until global warming knocks out the internet, what does it matter really.
Yep, Dekster! I have an analogy. I'm from Michigan. Years back when the NE canneries closed due to European products, I didn't pay attention. And when the textile mills of the Carolinas closed as businesses moved off-shore, it mattered little to me. But when Lee Iaccoca traveled to Japan because of the Toyota car sales in the USA, I did sit up and take notice. And it was already too late! I still chuckle at the news report, by Frank Reynolds I think, when he said Iaccoca was upset because Japan sold over 100,000 cars in the USA in the last year (I forget what year). Anyway I remember thinking.."No, 100,000 Americans BOUGHT Japanese cars last year!" They couldn't sell them if we didn't buy them. So with this in mind..this link is for the nayy-sayers. I think the deniers think this stuff happens overnight or something.
Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun
The textile mills closed in no small part to the facts that "Made in the USA" wasn't enough of a motivator to get people to pay twice as much for towels, and that the Mills were old using old technology and unable to compete with new mills with high speed looms that were far less labor intensive than the American looms and produced far more yards of cloth an hour than the American looms. Textiles could possibly have been saved in a much different form, but the writing was on the wall, One of the few areas of textile manufacturing that was still profitable were custom design fabrics like used to make Disney "Little Mermaid" sheets and the like as American textiles finishing was still much better than the weaving and people were willing to pay a premium for kids' merchandising products. I think I read somewhere that Disney, Martha Stewart, and a hand-full of very high-end interior designers were the only ones who required their products be finished in the US because of the superior American quality control in that last step. .
And the problem with Global Warming isn't that there is global warming. It is that the theory that man caused it and man can stop it is where the folly lies.
Dekster, I didn't know that about our lost mills, but I know the Michigan plants were growing old and outdated, so the story is similar for autos. It is cheaper to build anew than to upgrade, and the plants were used up. New and robotic became the future...elsewhere. But I would nuance your statement about the folly of the theory that man caused it and can stop it. Seems like the pressure is to quit exacerbating it. There is irrefutable evidence that these cycles have happened Earthwide for millennia and recovered naturally. But this time, the balance is more in our hands. The Earth always heals. And it will heal itself after we are gone. The trick is to keep us here and healthy enough to be able to keep it habitable for our kind.
It isn't cheaper necessarily to build new. It makes sense. If you shut a plant down to refurb/renovate, then the plant is not making anything at all and you are hemorrhaging cash and workers are going other places, and your competition is eating up your market share and taking over your contracts.. Instead, you build a new factory while keeping the old one running, and then move your production into the new factory and close the old one you don't need any more. The 100 year old factory then can be either sold to someone else, or in the case of our mill, it was disassembled and recycled. The old machinery went into metals recycling, and the bricks and old wood were reclaimed for construction projects. In our case, it got worse because the new factory in Mexico was a failure, the company went bankrupt, and someone bought up the name and the intellectual property of the company and it continues on in Pakastani mills. As for Global Warming, it favors humans. If the temps were going the other way, that is when we would have to worry, but we wouldn't be able to do anything about that either.
