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Tuvalu looking at legal ways to be a state if it is submerged

reuters.com

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Re: Tuvalu looking at legal ways to be a state if it is submerged

#81

Post by b112 »

ocschwar wrote: post #69
pkphilip wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can become a nation where citizens live on boats (if they are ok with that) or on dwellings that exist over water.. or they can increase the height of their island by bringing soil from elsewhere.. or they can make their own islands.

The engineering challenge involved in making that a safe way to live go beyond anything the Tuvaluans can hope to finance.

I wonder, because even it they are submerged, it could be 1 foot submerged....

So, trade could bring wood, materials, solar, desalinaton. If done slowly, over years, as parts submerge, it wouldn't be a massive outlay at once.

I agree.. not cheap, but individual citizens have to buy building materials currently, their new houses would just be on stilts.

Re: Tuvalu looking at legal ways to be a state if it is submerged

#82

Post by gumby »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #8
bin_bash wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

call me cynical, but would any country be willing to give up its land like that? Tribal lands only exist to give back a small fraction of stolen lands back. Would any country give land to another country just for goodwill?

Tuvalu’s total land mass is ~10 square miles, which doesn’t seem onerous to provide. That’s about 22% the size of San Francisco (~46 sq miles).

Their problem is not where people will sit (likely NZ will oblige) but that they want to retain control over other territorial claims/benefits such as fishing zone, domain, orbital rights et al.

Re: Tuvalu looking at legal ways to be a state if it is submerged

#83

Post by bogwog »

FredPret wrote: post #39

Build an underwater server farm and become an offshore (undershore?) banking centre

Or an underwater city and become the number one tourist destination in the world for the next few years (until everyone else is forced to do the same)

Re: Tuvalu looking at legal ways to be a state if it is submerged

#85

Post by oblio »

ocschwar wrote: post #69
pkphilip wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can become a nation where citizens live on boats (if they are ok with that) or on dwellings that exist over water.. or they can increase the height of their island by bringing soil from elsewhere.. or they can make their own islands.

The engineering challenge involved in making that a safe way to live go beyond anything the Tuvaluans can hope to finance.

They just need to persuade the latest crazy, pardon me, eccentric billionaire.

Re: Tuvalu looking at legal ways to be a state if it is submerged

#86

Post by [deleted] »

ashtonkem wrote: post #66
ocschwar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tuvalu exists as a state because the international community decided to let them. They export coconuts and fishing licenses for hard currency, and there is no way they could muster the money and hardware to defend their patch of the ocean. So if the same institutions that decided to enable the foundation of the republic of Tuvalu decide to protect Tuvualuan territorial waters as a way to give the Tuvaluan diaspora so…

> there is no way they could muster the money and hardware to defend their patch of the ocean. You also cannot defend a patch of ocean without some land, at least with current technology. War ships require quite a bit of time in dry dock for fueling, refit, and rearmament. And that's before we consider the subpar fighting capability that crews without shore leave would provide. No, they'd still need to buy or borrow…

[deleted]

Re: Tuvalu looking at legal ways to be a state if it is submerged

#87

Post by b112 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #8
bin_bash wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

call me cynical, but would any country be willing to give up its land like that? Tribal lands only exist to give back a small fraction of stolen lands back. Would any country give land to another country just for goodwill?

Tuvalu’s total land mass is ~10 square miles, which doesn’t seem onerous to provide. That’s about 22% the size of San Francisco (~46 sq miles).

Or a small Canadian prairies farm...

Re: Tuvalu looking at legal ways to be a state if it is submerged

#88

Post by ocschwar »

bin_bash wrote: post #6
toomuchtodo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These nations will need to make arrangements to migrate to welcoming host nations, that will allow for local governance similar to how tribal lands work in the US. Wealth could be preserved by seeking restitution from nations according to lifetime emissions (which has led to sea level rise), and creating a trust to manage and distribute the returns from those funds invested to citizens where ever they are. Once subme…

call me cynical, but would any country be willing to give up its land like that? Tribal lands only exist to give back a small fraction of stolen lands back. Would any country give land to another country just for goodwill?

The most likely resolution would be a land purchase in (for example) Fiji along with a grant of autonomous power on that land, in exchange for a fishing lease in Tuvaluan waters.

Fiji gets a share of Tuvaluan fishing grounds, and the Tuvaluans get a place to live AND some protection for their territorial waters by a nation that is still landed.

Re: Tuvalu looking at legal ways to be a state if it is submerged

#89

Post by beachy »

advice_thrwawy9 wrote: post #30
nharada wrote: post #12

So have we moved from "climate change isn't real" to "it's real but we aren't gonna do anything"? Nobody making long term plans is questioning the science of it, they're just trying to figure out how to be the last ones to starve.

If we were really going to prevent catastrophic climate change the realistic time to act would have be probably 50-70 years ago. I've become fairly patient with climate deniers over the years since it is both a difficult to imagine idea and contains serious amounts of existential dread, making it very hard to reason about. Because of the latter I don't know anyone, climate scientists and myself included, that aren't…

> Destroying the economy today to mitigate the worse case scenarios is risk that even right now no sane person earnestly wants to take.

I consider myself sane, and I would take that option.

Then again, I also resent that the banks were bailed out during the gfc, for fear of "destroying the economy".

What does destroying the economy mean? The factories would still stand. The knowledge, science still exist.

Re: Tuvalu looking at legal ways to be a state if it is submerged

#90

Post by hasmanean »

number6 wrote: post #73
vehbisarikaya wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also export .tv domains (e.g., twitch.tv)

So they can exist forth on the metaverse.

That is a very grim assessment. But yeah they might become the worlds first virtualized state for stateless people.
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