If the roughly 60-75% of Americans who believe human activity is causing climate change were to stop voting for individuals who don't believe this, we'd have meaningful change coming from the federal government within 2 years.
This is not just semantics, some who believe in global warming fly every month or week, some who don't believe in global warming have not flown their entire life (to pick just one example). The latter do more to mitigate it than the former.
Climate change has some really terrible consequences, but until it gets real for people they'll only suffer so much inconvenience. My own pet peeve is when recycling bins get thrown in with the garbage... Shitty solutions will regress us, but shitty solutions are necessary for iteration, so /shrug.
Electing leaders who ignore the problem does way more harm than the lifestyles of average people.
Not everyone's priorities are yours and even if they were its difficult to coordinate action.
The only remedy to the above problems is abolishing first-past-the-post elections in favor of instant runoff.
One estimate of a 3.7C warming scenario is a total cost of $550 trillion: https://www.axios.com/climate-change-costs-wealth-carbon-tax.... That's about in the 2100 timeframe.
That sounds like a lot, except OECD projects that by 2060 world GDP will be $267 trillion annually: https://data.oecd.org/gdp/gdp-long-term-forecast.htm. Estimates of world GDP in 2100 are in the $250-$500 trillion range annually.
That means that adopting policies that cause us to hit the lower end of that range instead of the upper end of that range could cost us more than the total cost of a 3.7C increase in just a few years. And if those government policies don't work then you will have paid that cost, and you'll have to deal with the cost of climate change on top of it.
Now, of course lots of things could happen. Climate change could be an extinction-level problem. (According to the IPCC, there is "virtually no chance" of anthropogenic causes resulting in a Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect.) Or we could figure out workable CCS in 2050 and average climate change entirely. (That's also not super likely.)
Ultimately, the rational course depends on what you think of government action in this area. If you think it'll cost a lot but end up ineffective (like say the "War on Poverty") then it's completely rational to vote against it. If you think it'll work without hurting economic growth significantly, then it's rational to vote for it.
That is true, and I easily agree with everything you said, but FWIW there have been studies on whether cost-benefit analysis actually works by examining the outcomes after the fact. For example this set of case studies demonstrating that cost-benefit decision making would have historically made the wrong choice, and that sometimes our estimates for costs in the future are wrong by orders of magnitude.
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
Point being that the completely rational vote isn’t always the right vote. Focusing on costs rather than goals sometimes leads us to miss the big picture.
> focusing on goals rather than costs lead to programs that cost stratospheric amounts without producing the desired results.
Just curious, I don’t doubt there are some, I just don’t know what they are. What would count as some examples of that having happened in the past, akin to the examples I linked of leaded gasoline, damming the Grand Canyon, or removing vinyl chloride from workplaces?
First, the article paints a strawman of cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analysis can consider different scenarios, probabilistic measures, and even qualitative components.
Second, what's the alternative? If you don't at least quantify the things that are quantifiable, all you're doing is going by gut feelings and emotion. And that's the province of savages.
> Just curious, I don’t doubt there are some, I just don’t know what they are. What would count as some examples of that having happened in the past, akin to the examples I linked of leaded gasoline, damming the Grand Canyon, or removing vinyl chloride from workplaces?
There are many areas where over-emphasis on desired outcomes and goals, while ignoring costs, led to poor results.
The war on poverty: https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/the-w...
The war on drugs: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/31/opinion/failed-war-on-dru...
Doubling education spending per student since 1970 (in constant dollars): http://www.foundry.org/wp-content/uploads/ed-spend-fam-facts...
The Iraq War, most of our Middle East policy, and the TSA.
Socialism: https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/socialism-markin.... (Huge disaster from an environmental standpoint.)
Many environmental disasters are the result of focusing on goals or outcomes without thinking about costs. Irrigating the southwest, damming the Colorado, hydroelectric power, opposition to nuclear power in the 1960s and 1970s, etc.