In Venezuela, currently in an unprecedented electricity crisis with daily rationing up to six hours, 10 billion dollars supposed to replace turbines in the main dam that supplies power to the country were stolen with no accountability. With that money you could have installed solar roofs in a million homes serving five million people approximately
Solutions are easy, money exists, political will doesn't
Puerto Rico has this problem too and that's US territory. Not as bad for sure. But it has expensive fossil fuel power generation and unreliable infrastructure. It's screaming out for renewable energy.
The key to all this though is that fossil fuels exist to induce demand for weapons. Once you realize that it all makes (depressing) sense.
Puerto Rico should be turned into a national park and everyone offered incentives, but never forced, to migrate to the mainland. Needed investment is enormous (not just for energy transformation to low carbon generation and storage, but also their water infrastructure) and the population will only continue to decline into the future.
What you're suggesting essentially amounts to forced displacement, since it presumably will be accompanied by reduced funding, abandoned infrastructure, and whatever conversion to a national park would entail. You're talking about someone's home.
This is the equivalent of saying "No! They are entitled to remain in their burning building that no one is coming to put out. How could you even consider rescuing them?" The culture is erasing itself through a total fertility rate below 1. I offer an option to assist, because there is no other option. Leave or remain while decline continues. No one is coming to save them at the federal or policy level.
Who will pay for it? Someone will have to. When? And how long will it take? While the population continues to decline forever.
It is unfortunate, I am not unsympathetic, but unless tens of billions of dollars drops out of the sky for these folks, trajectories hold as they are. With US debt exceeding $40T, the deficit being $1T-$2T/year, and no will to increase taxes for the foreseeable future, “it is what it is.” Plane tickets and moving expense reimbursements are comparatively cheap.
Is it better if we do nothing while also not offering an option to leave for a potentially better life? If these folks prefer to remain with inadequate, intermittent infrastructure for the remainder of their lives, that is a choice. These people deserve better, but help at the levels needed isn’t coming for the foreseeable future, if ever.
> Rodríguez is one of the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans who have left the island in the last decade, a migration propelled by an economic crisis and a string of natural disasters that have devastated Puerto Rico in recent years.
> “We love Puerto Rico. It’s our country. However, objectively speaking, we need to recognize that it’s a country in deterioration and at a political crossroads. If it doesn’t come out of it, things could get much worse,” she said.
> The island’s population declined 11.8 percent between 2010 and 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, whose results are used to determine billions of dollars in public funding. Demographers say that steady migration, coupled with a declining birth rate that’s lower than the death rate, is creating a “demographic crisis” that will fundamentally alter Puerto Rico’s society, economy and culture, as family structures change and there are fewer workers to pay for government services.
> “It will literally be another world, another society. It’s not only that there will be fewer people, it’s that the structure completely changes. It’s a complete transformation,” said Hernando Mattei, a demography professor at the Medical Sciences Campus of the University of Puerto Rico.
Solutions are easy, money exists, political will doesn't