still, I see no serious action being taken to tackle the climate crisis. Current governments are just putting some dates by which we’ll stop doing x or y, but in really almost nothing concrete is done to stop the worst scenarios.
If there was an asteroid coming, there would be some deadline imposed by the astronomical observations.
If it's a pandemic, there's a time when all the politicians have to stop thinking about Brexit and start thinking about lockdowns.
In economic crises there's that Lehman moment when the government needs to decide right then and there what to do about the economy.
In pure political crises, there's a vote of no confidence in the government and the politicians have to think about how to form a new one immediately.
With the climate, there's just never a time when you absolutely have to do something. People have even tried saying "we have to do something by x date" but you can't manufacture a crisis point, in fact those kinds of deadlines seem to have the opposite effect to what was intended. That slowly boiling frog analogy is somehow quite appropriate.
I think part of it is the nature of noise. Once you see an asteroid, you don't doubt that it's there. Government falls, you need a new one. People get sick in large numbers, better not let it grow.
But if it rains a lot or gets hot, that will pass. Once it passes we're relieved and we go back to normal. Even if storms get bigger and more frequent, the day after is sunny.
My last point goes back to the first: a proper crisis forces everything else out of your attention. 9/11, Lehman, Pandemic, those were all things that blocked out the news. That has never happened with the climate. When did you ever have a news day where all they talked about was climate? Where all the talking heads on TV were climate scientists/commentators/lobbyists? Where you could see politicians going from meeting to meeting with only one topic being asked of them?
I have zero hope of it happening. People won't stop driving, flying or eating meat. They won't even drive smaller cars. As I understand it, that would just be the start.
Looking at how we handled the pandemic, I don't think we'll manage.
Vat meat is starting to get on the market, and while we’ll have to wait and see if this is a iPhone moment or a Sinclair C5 moment, the prices have come down rapidly since the first attempts.
Flying is going to be a hard thing to totally green, but it’s not impossible either, merely low priority.
Yes, there will be those that reject everything — I’ve encountered those who think a self-driving car will take away their freedom, instead of regarding it as a chauffeur — but when the economics are against them, when they have to pay extra to be eco-unfriendly instead of paying less? History shows most people follow the money, not just for ill but also for good.
But don’t be so hasty to dismiss culture as an opportunity: Musk turned electric cars from a joke into something the rich wanted to show off with.
Amidst the chaos, humanity has been able develop a wide range of therapeutics and public healthcare prevention protocols, research and deploy vaccines at global scale in under a year, all while avoiding total economic collapse.
What outcome would've given you hope in humans' ability to solve complex and chaotic crises?
Yes, the scientific community has done the impossible, but us laymen have failed to do even the possible, even when it was easy.
We can solve problems, no doubts, but perhaps we aren't so good at collective, sustained efforts. Climate change will not come to pass like the pandemic. It will last generations if we're lucky.
By slightest inconvenience you mean complete social isolation for an entire year, right?
Both ultra-simple and only slightly inconvenient actions, but both would have made a huge difference in the outcome and timescale of this whole mess. Of course humans can't be bothered to give a rat's ass about other humans (or even about themselves) if even the slightest inconvenience is involved. Nope. Humanity deserves what's coming. Humanity is a planetary cancer, and we've brought this all upon ourselves by our own actions.
But the pandemic also showed us a large % of the American population are reluctant to make even minor, temporary sacrifices to protect their country. And that a decent fraction of American political leadership are happy to close their eyes to factual reality.
Long term economic effects for example, and the ability to remain globally competitive economically and in other ways.
But there are people declining a free a pinprick jab that's been given to billions of other people already, when there's clear evidence it's good for both the nation's interest and their own? The country's not asking us to charge Nazi machine gun nests on the beaches of Normandy here.
The first world response against the vaccine is selfish and short sighted in the same ways that make solving global warming incredibly difficult socially.
The vaccine recipes should be free, the raw materials should be coordinated so that vaccine production is maximized. Just like global warming, no one is safe until everyone is, we are from it yet have the capability to do so. Yet we do not, we finagle to ensure profit over life.
Our collective COVID response is exactly why the climate crisis is so hard.
Our problems are not technological.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/21/business/covid-vaccine-billio...
Those Americans aren’t any different from you and me: they just got their news from different sources — sources that shouldn’t be saying what they said.
What made me pessimistic about climate change w.r.t. COVID-19 was that most countries only did something once the population was sufficiently affected, even when the consequences of doing nothing were perfectly clear and immediate. W.r.t. climate change most countries won't be affected much or it will be hard to attribute to climate change and the consequences will be hard to predict and delayed.
COVID-19 was the easiest case of a global tragedy of the commons problem and we failed w.r.t. to a globally coordinated solution. Climate change is much harder. Doesn't give me much cause for optimism.
However I also see the role of the government as educating the population about the negative effects the population is not seeing yet so I don't use that to excuse the government.
Most politicians are more concerned about their carrier and personal gains than their country, let alone the world.
Also, most politicians are indeed concerned about their heritage in the history books, so they have motivations to do something beyond their office time.
But what should they do? There is not really a broad concensus on how to transform the whole worlds industry into CO2 free. Because that is not really easy. I believe it is doable and I actually see much more change into that direction, than I thought possible a few years ago. But when a vast amount of the population of the earth still struggles to survive - how can they save on CO2. They need to eat now.
We're apes trying to live like ants, but we lack the organisation and selflessness. We'll do what we do best, wait until we have our backs against the wall and find some half assed solution, it's going to be a free for all until some kind of reset event happens.
It feels like we're at the beginning of one of these Hollywood "end of the world" movies in which you can see TVs in the background of early scenes showing crazy reports about climatic/social/war events while the heroes are focused on their meaningless daily struggles.
That's very deliberate. We've all been saturated with doom propaganda for decades. Many people believe it, despite virtually all metrics of human well-being improving.
Another common thread among those movies is a large number of people in decision-making positions who could have taken action much sooner denying the very existence of the actual problem until after it's far too late.
So governments will need to start with actions mitigating the effects climate change with at least equal effort than emission reduction. Don't see that realization happening at the moment as most policy and international discussions are about emissions. In the end, might even be that adaptation wins out over reduction in terms of effort.
Humans in general are very short term creatures and we fail at having a long term perspective on most things.
That's also the reason why I believe that any concrete things set in motion will probably focus on fixing the symptoms of climate change, the short term quick fix, rather than fixing the underlying issues that have lead to climate change. Sadly...
Even now, the current government is resisting any policy that could be considered threatening to fossil fuels.
The voting majority of Australians don't give a fuck about climate change action.
Until their house burns spontaneously due to the heat, of course
This will get worse quickly, because the averages change, but the variance changes as well.