> But I'm struggling to understand what we know now that scares us so much. Could PFAS concerns be partly some kind of enviro-moral panic?
I will tell you what scares me:
- I think covid has maybe a 10-20% chance of leaving a large portion of the population partially disabled (with small but significant effects like lead)
- We have new diseases coming out all the time. This is pretty new, and specific to humans living with the density and travel we have today. Most serious human diseases are <10,000 years old. I think this is >20% risk.
- I think PFAS are also in a 10-20% chance range.
- I think there are a half-dozen similar things currently in the environment.
- Toss in some reasonable probability for biological superweapons (which can now be made at many university labs by a clever undergrade).
- Add in thermonuclear war, which was very possible during the cold war, and seems increasingly possible now.
- Global warming. I think it's overblown, and I'd also toss it in the same 10-20% range of being a civilization-ending crisis.
- AI apocalypse
... and so on.
Modern humans have been around for (big-O) 100,000 years. Prior to 200 years, we had zero ways to cripple or end or all human life (or all life) on the planet. Today, we have literally dozens. I don't think any individual one is that likely, but I am increasingly concerned that we might have reached:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
I'd like for us to invest the resources to take each of these seriously and address them. That's really where I'd like a big chunk of my tax dollars spent. Right now, we're spending big-O zero resources on serious crisis mitigation.
FEMA is maybe 0.01% of our GDP.
That's not really a fair way of looking at it, since military, CDC, etc. aren't part of FEMA, and play similar roles, but the point is that I'd like us to have a holistic infrastructure for:
- understanding risks
- mitigating them
- having big projects to eliminate them (like we had with getting rid of many diseases like smallbox a half-century ago)
- leading and coordinating globally
- having food stores, medical supplies, shelters, and access local manufacturing capacity
- having emergency capacity (e.g. producing all the artillery shells Ukraine needs, or all the respirators we thought we needed during the acute phase of covid).
... and so on.
If that takes up 10-30% of our GDP, I think that's money well-spent. I actually don't think that would take that big of an increase in spending, since a lot of our existing capacity could be generalized. For example, the military could train for a lot of domestic disaster relief and coordination as well. We could give small subsidies to e.g. manufacturing plants if they maintain more general capacity and excess capacity. Etc.