Do Natural Disasters benefit the midwest?

[earthling]

Well a Risk Management 101 message - control what you can but prepare to adapt to what you can't. We can't just look at this domestically because even if we (America) were to disappear and have 0 impact or cut our impact in half, the rate at which China is growing modern consumers, still has much higher impact - the upcoming growth alone is projected to be more than all of US today. India is next and then maybe Africa. Not sure how to sugar coat it so that it sounds like US efforts alone can offset that.

Will be necessary to continue to pursue things like renewable energy because at some point we'll run out of the resources that we can't easily renew. All projections I've seen indicate that even with the most optimistic future development of renewable energy, globally we'll still end up using all traditional natural resources we can get access to (most at a higher rate than today). I'm not promoting that we should, just acknowledging that is the pattern and projection. Germany is the most progressive with renewable energy yet projections are CO2 emissions are going back to being higher every year as they are going back to coal usage as other trad sources are too expensive. Countries with faster growing rate of modern consumers are expected to continue to use every resource available.

Edit: Here's a recent conference where someone points out...

Carl Henric Svanberg (of BP and Volvo) noted that, while renewables are the fastest-growing portion of the energy market, if you extrapolate out current trends, non-hydro renewables will only cover six percent of the world's energy needs by 2030.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/12/ ... or-cloudy/

Another interesting article on how Germany progress is backfiring and as a result are increasing use of coal as is only source that is profitable...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-2 ... jumps.html