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Comment by danhak | Hacker News Reader

You don't seem to be engaging with the main point here: there were places that DID take COVID seriously--that shut down overnight, paid the price of mass unemployment, homelessness and growing tent cities, increasing substance abuse / overdose, loss of education that will never be recovered and countless other second-order effects.

And those places did not emerge with a significantly better COVID outcome.

Without an answer for addressing the second-order effects of green policy, there will be no consensus.

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Those places would have come out better if we all did this. And that's the whole problem: if you don't tackle problems of this magnitude globally then you might as well not bother because a couple of dissidents on a large enough scale will ruin it for everybody else. In this case the dissidents even use this argument to show that the better choices didn't work... which when you think about it is really despicable.

What is the evidence for the claim in your first sentence? And what does "come out better" mean? Less covid, but more unemployment, more drug addiction, more suicides than the ones that happened?

With climate change, what exactly are we optimizing for? That's never been clear to me. We want to destroy the world's economy to keep the climate from changing? How long will the climate "not change"? In other words, the goals have never been clear to me, and the whole point of this line of comments is "are we sure the juice is worth the squeeze?"

We largely don't know what the second-order effects of tampering with the climate could be, because complex systems have very weird, very broad, interconnected relationships. There's genuinely no way of knowing whether we'll just make it worse, accelerate rapid cycling, or destabilize a system that is complex.

How is a desire to invest rapidly in new, less environmentally disruptive, technology development wanting to "destroy the world's economy"?

Seems like the opposite to me, unless your personal interests are tied up in legacy monopolistic businesses. It's like being opposed to Apple and Microsoft in the late 70s because you're worried about destroying IBM or mainframes.

The whole global economy is built around cheap energy sources that also happen to be at least 100 times more efficient than solar, wind, or even nuclear. Petroleum is BY FAR the most efficient way of storing energy.

Wind and solar power are both intermittent. That's fine if you live in a coastal city in a temperate zone, but most people in the world do not. So efficient energy storage becomes a huge problem. And we have two main timecycles for which we have to store energy: capturing it during the day and releasing it at night (to charge all those EVs) and also capturing it during the summer and releasing it over the winter. That would require longer-term storage AND while we can capture the most energy during the summer, that's also the highest period of use because the world is now also air-conditioned.

If you end petroleum production, that also ends all plastic production. So all the cheap gewgaws from China disappear.

Also, did you know that solar panels are made from firing coal and quartz together at high temperatures? Do you know why they're all made in China? Because of much less strict environmental regulations there. Did you also know that solar panels have a lifespan of only 15-20 years, and that they're not recyclable?

I could go on and on, but there's no magic "alternative energy source" that even comes close to being able to provide stable power at a cost that comes anywhere close to petroleum, not to mention how portable petroleum is as an energy source. Nuclear power is the only thing that even comes close, but it's fraught with trouble as well.

You think there will be solar-powered shipping vessels? Trains are electric, but you know what runs the electric motors on them? The on-board diesel generators!

The global economy is based on cheap energy sources. Increase the cost and reduce the availability of the energy sources and yeah, you'll destroy the economy.

So then how about you get onboard with fighting for what I said, not the other position you're arguing against.

The one that's called "technology development."

Invest in alternatives, capture solutions, etc so that they get better faster. It's the same thing we've done in wartime, or for a moon mission.

The global economy was based on other things than it is today 30, 70, 150, 200, etc years ago. Shit changes. Steer the change instead of sitting back and being defeatist about the side effects of the most recent ones.

Plenty of people don't want to destroy the world to save it. Do you think your "let's just do nothing because uncertainty exists, let's just let the world destroy itself without bothering to learn more or try new things" pseudo-concern is better?

Indeed. In the words of Bobby Shaftoe (Cryptonomicon) "Show some fucking adaptability."

The (already-dead, so I can't reply directly to it) response from 'prometheus76 is telling here, so I think it's worth preserving to expose the fakeness of this whole "what if the costs are higher than the benefits" posturing:

"But I thought humans were not adaptable to climate change? Isn't that the panic?"

After all that hand-wringing about "destroying the world economy" you'd think that "adapting to climate change" would not be the bar for them. "Adapting without economic harm" would be. Even if you frame it purely economically and don't care about lives lost, the economic cost of things like rising temperatures and sea levels is easily calculable as being enormous. That precious petro-heavy global economy depends massively on infrastructure on today's coast, for starters.

This is just "I disagree with making any efforts entirely but I've given up on being able to convince people that the efforts aren't needed, so I'll just try to claim they're too expensive instead by arguing against a worst-faith interpretation of what we could possibly try to do."

> If you end petroleum production, that also ends all plastic production.

Bioplastics exist. We need better ways to deal with them at end-of-life (industrial composting is not yet widespread) but they aren’t petroleum-based.

> Trains are electric, but you know what runs the electric motors on them? The on-board diesel generators!

Not if you electrify the network. And in fact, in the US we used to have over 5x as much electrified track in the 1930s as we do now.

Also, it's not petroleum production that's the biggest problem really (even though as you say, plastics do have more and more viable alternatives available these days), but rather the burning of petroleum products as a fuel source that seems to be the major problem re; climate change.

> Increase the cost and reduce the availability of the energy sources and yeah, you'll destroy the economy.

more and more it seems like outright nihilism has led to many people being in the mindset of "And That's A Good Thing!"

these people not only think privately but announce publicly that they don't have any interest in having children specifically because they don't think it's Morally Right to produce and raise children in this Intractably Fallen World we live in today. after all, as everyone knows, western civilization is built upon colonial expansionism, slavery, white supremacy, bigotry, etc. etc., and even the good things it's produced like democracy are outweighed by the civilization-ending threat of climate catastrophe that it directly wrought! therefore, let us ignore the civilizational advances our forefathers fought and died for, because on the whole, our entire society is built upon foundations of moral abhorrence! let it all burn, and all of us with it—we deserve it.

and all of this nihilistic depression and anxiety about the entire global state of the world we live in all started relatively recently in human history, which makes one wonder what exactly caused it—was it completely organic or subversively intentional? because idk about you but if I was a competing world superpower and I wanted to set out to destroy my competition discretely, these last couple decades of getting the middle to lower rungs of society to turn on itself in every which way imaginable, all while discouraging optimism and exceptionalism in a downright institutional manner, would be exactly how I would go about it.

I used to be a fan of Doctorow when I was downloading his free ebooks & converting them to iPod notes format to read in class in high school. it's a bummer to see that he's lining up with the rest of the "we're all gonna die"-types, singing the song of the end of the world to the masses—it's pretty much impossible for me to respect anyone who takes that tack.

See map linked in other comment.

With climate change we are optimizing for survival of the species and some form of civilization as we know it. If that's all we manage to do then I would consider that a huge win.

Not to mention, the US by and large collectively avoided worst case outcomes (hospital system too overloaded to provide treatment to majority of cases) because enough people did take COVID seriously.

And that's before getting into how hindsight is 20/20 (in addition to being rosy). the neo-Black Death will be really happy, if, a month into the next pandemic the going line is, "well, the last one probably wasn't as bad as the worst case scenario, so let's assume this one will be fine and do nothing."

Yes, that is a risk. In a way we already had that because of how SARS-1 ended up being not nearly as bad as was predicted initially thanks to some absolutely amazing international coordination. Unfortunately COVID was a lot nastier.

When the people in charge believe that "x only works if everybody does it" and x is some drastic power grab, we end up with tyranny worse than plague, and worse than meters of sea-level rise, and a global war because the people of the west will not surrender to third-world lifestyles without a fight, nor will people of the third-world consent to remain where they are without a fight.

> Those places would have come out better

I assume you mean the blue states? They did come out better, on average:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...

>Those places would have come out better if we all did this.

If we all did what, exactly?

I live in Canada. We shut down our economy, spent vast amounts of money on social supports, had wide vaccine and booster adoption...and had similar results to many countries that did far less than that.

Our smallest province had, literally, zero deaths and a handful of hospitalizations for over a year into the pandemic. It was an example to the world. Then Omicron hit and that province had one of the worst infection rates in the world. Almost like nothing they did mattered and it was just a matter of time...

>In this case the dissidents even use this argument to show that the better choices didn't work

And the conformists keep moving the goalposts, claiming we didn't do enough. You need to tell people what they need to do, and for how long, and then you're kinda hemmed in. We were told vaccines would get us "back to normal" (even that they prevented the spread). It turned out they were remotely as effective as claimed. How long can normal people be offered that carrot, then have to backtrack, before they revolt?

I agree that global coordination would be fantastic, but probably impossible.

> Those places would have come out better if we all did this.

Evidence required.

Alternative claim: "Those places would have come out worse if we all did this" - neither of which can be proved.

You can think for yourself. But to spell it out for you: if all countries had simultaneously shut down travel for a couple of months then we could have all been at the level of New Zealand or Japan. Neither of which crashed their economies. Once vaccines were available we would have been able to open up travel again and we'd have been better off collectively. Even those places where they did shut down, because after they opened up they were still exposed to plenty of people who imported the virus from abroad, something that would have happened at a much smaller scale otherwise.

So you can reason it out, the fact that we can't re-run the experiment is a pity.

> if all countries had simultaneously (...) Once vaccines were available (...) that would have happened (...)

You are piling up suppositions upon suppositions to come up with a wild claim. It doesn't work that way.

In case you doubt it, here's my equally plausible counter claim: if all the countries had simultaneously shut down, vaccine research would have taken the back burner, wouldn't have had sufficient funding, and mRNA vaccines would have never become mainstream. With the fake reassurance that it was a dud crisis, opening up to travel again would have caused a much worse human toll.

It's equally impossible to prove, but it's just as plausible, as it's extremely close to what happened in Australia - a country that was heralded as an example to follow!

> So you can reason it out, the fact that we can't re-run the experiment is a pity.

Indeed, but it's not a reason to throw logic out of the window. We just can't say what would have happened if everything had been wildly different.

We can just try to learn and improve for the next time on small details: most of the big countries managed to get a vaccine with their local industry, but some didn't. In some countries, the existing regulations initially prevented the rapid diffusion of tests, etc.

It's less ambitious, but more workable.

> It doesn't work that way.

Not in actual reality, but it works just fine in virtual reality, which is what people are actually observing when they contemplate reality.

I continue to worry that improving on our (be it mainly Western people or all people, I don't know) inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality at least to some degree may be a pre-requisite to adequately solving climate change. I simply can't see how it isn't an extremely important variable.

If intelligent people can't be bothered to wonder what is true, how do we expect climate "denialists" to manage it?

Covid turned out to be much less lethal than originally thought when the only people that were identified as having Covid were the ones sick enough to go to the hospital. The places that "DID take COVID seriously" were places that were initially reacting to statistics that didn't consider how many people had already had Covid and hadn't been to the hospital.

I wonder if we'll someday look back on some of the things we do to prevent climate change and view it through a similar lens.

The thing to take away from this is: we got lucky. Very, very lucky. A somewhat longer incubation time, a higher lethality, a bit more asymptomatic spreading and the figures would be entirely different. If the first variant would have been one of the later mutations you'd be looking at a world in mourning today.

I don't think it actually changed as much as you are implying it did. Some studies of infection in the general population have indicated that infection rates were much higher than estimated, but some of those studies were rushed and haven't held up well.

I remember some earlier ranges that said it could be as high as 3-5%, but mostly it has stayed around 1% and that fell significantly after the vaccine.

I mean, if we assume that every single person in the US has been infected already with COVID, that puts the death rate at 0.2% and without a vaccine, it would have been a lot higher.

How do you rate "significantly better" though? From stats I've seen every developed nation did significantly better than the US. But it's true there are plenty of places using a "light touch" approach that have seemingly achieved much the same level of excess mortality etc. of others that took much stronger measures. Having said that, I live in one of the latter places, and one reason our net result isn't so great now seems to be that the strict measures taken in 2020-21 wore everyone out and we're just not prepared to sustain even basic precautions now. Though it may also be due to lower natural immunity levels.

> those places did not emerge with a significantly better COVID outcome.

COVID statistics are hard to interpret clearly. But, looking at the list of deaths/100K, it is clear that states that did take COVID seriously mostly had fewer deaths. Depending on how you slice the numbers I'd call 30% fewer deaths a significantly better outcome.

Deaths/100K California: 234 Texas: 307 Florida: 353 New York: 355

My guess is that mass unemployment, homelessness, and increasing substance abuse were not higher where COVID was taken seriously, but proving that would take too much of my time.

This is massively revisionist. "Shutting down overnight" was pretty much the response across the nation in March 2020. This was based on the information available at the time, and as things evolved, things changed.

Everything after was basically differences in how quickly things opened back up (and what things, in what order, with what restrictions).

And mass support for reopening rapidly with no restrictions wasn't there even in Florida or Texas early on - consider the sub-$60M box office that Tenet brought in. Theaters were open where allowed (hell, they were even open in Orange County in SoCal, not just in Florida), but nobody wanted to go because they were looking at the transmission and hospitalization data themselves and waiting for things to settle down and for vaccines to come out. Same with how conferences and events were being canceled before official government action in March 2020.

Economic damage was done at least as much, if not more, by individual behaviors as official policy. And can you blame people for that? Almost as many people died of Covid in the US before the vaccines as after the vaccines in 2021, despite there being way less of a return to normalcy by that point - imagine the number of deaths (and knock-on deaths from the overwhelmed health system) that would've happened if nobody had changed their behavior.

Claiming something like that you could've fixed homelessness in California - which was a rapidly growing problem pre-Covid - by never "officially" shutting down in March 2020 is ludicrous.

There are only a few countries that really shut down (some only regional): New Zealand, Japan, Australia and China (others?). This one graph shows how effective it was and if we'd all done that the difference would be enormous, even for the countries that did shut down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_a...

Without a really deep dive I'm not certain the island-country numbers of Australia or Japan would be achievable in the US, but if I use Canada as a "certainly achievable standin" I would state my position as "unconvinced that the marginal benefits of additional restrictions initially + for longer would be worth it" but also "entirely convinced that if the US hadn't taken the steps it did, both individually and governmentally, that number would be many multiples higher."

The "none of this was necessary" position is just ultra-revisionist and often makes arguments as if today's variant and transmission environment is the environment that was in place in March 2020. It also ignores that individuals will make their own choices to change their behavior in the face of a new threat. "Not massively damaging some sectors of the economy" was never an option.

> Without a really deep dive I'm not certain the island-country numbers of Australia or Japan would be achievable in the US

If “being an island nation” was all it took to eradicate Covid, why was Hawaii unable to do so?

It’s clear border security was a rather important factor. And can you think of a more essential responsibility of government than securing the borders?

Gentle reminder that Australia is an “island country” the size of the continental US with several densely-populated major cities.

Without global coordination it's a wash. With global coordination it might have made a difference.

It should be beyond dispute by now that societies where most people took action to increase social distance had far better outcomes.

Japan, South Korea and New Zealand all have less than 500 cumulative deaths per 100K, while the USA is north of 3,000.

And they've demonstrated that it's possible to achieve good results without "mass unemployment, homelessness and growing tent cities".

But instead of learning what works and adopting those methods, apparently we're going to continue propagating disinfo that there's nothing that can be done, and any attempt to do something is doomed to second order maladies.

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