Something I read in another comment on HN: "Climate denialists have gone in one smooth move from 'we'll fix it' to 'it's too late to do anything about it anyway'". Which unfortunately rings very true.
The really, really big problem is that people seem to think that they personally are going to be exempt from this, that it will happen to others, but not to them. Waking up from that will be pretty harsh. But if COVID denialism is any indication of how well humanity deals with complex problems on a planetary scale I'm not too optimistic about climate change countermeasures, the problem is much more complex and would require cooperation on a far more massive scale than anything COVID related.
Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society would prevent more harm than they cause.
And now looking at outcomes across different states (e.g. Florida vs. California)--and considering ALL outcomes (public health, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, mental health, truancy, graduation rates, violent crime)--it's indeed unclear that draconian policies in the name of public health were a net positive.
I am extremely concerned about climate change. But there seems to be little introspection from those who propose sweeping policy change about the need to consider second-order effects on those whose lives and livelihoods will be upturned. The general disdain for people in places like West Virginia gives me little hope that will change.
All that whining is something that my grandmothers' generation would have scoffed at: you have it relatively easy, stop complaining. 5 years of war, occupation, hunger and brutal death is the kind of thing that generation lived through - or not, in many cases - and they came through to rebuild their world without bitching about it. COVID was - compared to that, sorry - a walk in the park and we should have shouldered it collectively and dealt with it. Instead we ended up with a large fraction simply denying objective reality in the hope that it would go away. That's not how you deal with problems as an adult. In toddlers I find that acceptable, but not in grown ups.
And the ease with which demagogues used it to bend people to their will shows clearly that we have not learned anything from the very recent past, which in a way is even more worrying: apparently we are structurally incapable of retaining very hard won knowledge over a stretch longer than a human life-span leading to endless repeats.
But this time, with climate change, the stakes are a lot higher than 'the usual' price of a few million people dead, we're talking about changes on a scale that humanity has never had to deal with before.
So if we aren't going to get our act together the next 100 years or so will not at all be pleasant, to put it very mildly, and going on the assumption that it isn't way too late already.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your comment comes off as demagogic, and certainly uncharitable and disrespectful. "[reality] doesn't care about your feelings." and "denying reality" are typical expressions that both sides of the divide use to shut-down dialog and to paint their opinion as morally superior and based on truth, as if there is such a thing.
If you want to fight against demagogues, you should engage with people, recognize that issues are nuanced and that most people are not the caricatures that you'd paint them as.
Finally, telling people they're being whiny after a 2 year long pandemic that saw many people lose their loved ones, be unable to even see their bodies, the near collapse of our national health systems (that was not caused solely by the strain of Covid but specifically by the preventative measures put into place) and the great suffering that resulted from it is very insensitive and uncaring. I doubt my great-grandmother would have said anything of the sort were she still alive, and I know for a fact if you asked many elderly people how they've lived these past few years (those who survived) they would not be so dismissive of the complaints of others.
> Instead we ended up with a large fraction simply denying objective reality in the hope that it would go away. That's not how you deal with problems as an adult. In toddlers I find that acceptable, but not in grown ups.
If you had fallen victim to this phenomenon yourself, would you necessarily know? Might there be some materially important imperfections in your model of reality that you're describing here?
So that's why you make sure your assumptions and claims match what happened.
For instance, anyone who claims that the economic impact was solely the result of government action, and that no private individuals or organizations changed their behavior independently, is ignoring the timeline of events.
Anyone who claims that the vaccines didn't change things so that post-vaccine policies could have been equally successful pre-vaccines, is ignoring the stats.
All this stuff is pretty easily googleable in the current and past-two-years news records, and yet you still get lots of people here making arguments based on completely different claimed facts.
> So that's why you make sure your assumptions and claims match what happened.
Ah yes, of course. Like everyone in this thread, and every other culture war based thread on HN eh? Everyone is super seriously making sure that their statements are free of error, and signs of uncertainty are far more plentiful than high confidence.
> For instance, anyone who claims that the economic impact was solely the result of government action, and that no private individuals or organizations changed their behavior independently, is ignoring the timeline of events.
> Anyone who claims that the vaccines didn't change things so that post-vaccine policies could have been equally successful pre-vaccines, is ignoring the stats.
The mind tends to be drawn to easy, clear cut scenarios, but tends to be highly averse to wading into scenarios where certainty is not so obvious.
> All this stuff is pretty easily googleable in the current and past-two-years news records, and yet you still get lots of people here making arguments based on completely different claimed facts.
Agreed....and this is an intelligent forum, on a relative basis anyways - which is another thing one can notice: people have a tendency to think only in relative terms. "I am clearly much more intelligent than those Trump supporters, therefore I must be intelligent [on an absolute scale]". How many flaws like this are hardwired into human consciousness, running completely sub-perceptually, turning our perception of what is all around us into a gross misrepresentation completely without our knowledge?
What if this actually is a big deal, but we can't be bothered to even consider the possibility?
I'm not saying I think everyone on HN is doing their homework.
I'm saying that if you want to make sure you're not running yourself in circles and letting your own previous assumptions dominate your ongoing judgment, you should be doing your homework.
If you don't keep doing your homework you will almost certainly fall into that trap.
It wouldn't surprise me if the level of correlation between intelligence and "doing your homework" was near-0, to be honest, but that's just a guess in part based on people's behaviors on HN. ;)
> I'm saying that if you want to make sure you're not running yourself in circles and letting your own previous assumptions dominate your ongoing judgment, you should be doing your homework.
This seems a bit like "just" focus on your breath in meditation.
“Sweeping” seems to be a favorite adjective of those who have moved into the “it’s too late to do anything anyway” stage.
As Doctorow writes, the policy changes didn’t have to be sweeping if we’d started in 1977. But we didn’t. Now all the remaining options will upturn someone’s lives. It’s just a question of balancing the effects to achieve something better than the current path which means sweeping catastrophe for our children.
Nuanced is an interesting way to describe what happened - especially with a description like draconian!
The disdain is for ignoring the science, the health of other people, and negative externalities… it is not likely to change, nor are the minds of those who are dug in and feel as though their entitlement to the status quo will outdo entropy.
This, to me, summarizes the problem. Comparing an entire group of people to a heavy metal object at the bottom of the sea. It’s a tempting dismissal, sure, but will never help someone stuck in their ideology see beyond it.
> nor are the minds of those who are dug in
And is it any wonder that those minds will not change when we hold nothing but disdain and shout at each other?
I am convinced that we will not solve these issues without focusing on the tribalism and identity politics that sit at the core of it all.
I don’t see an anchor being dragged. I see people who see their way of life threatened, and are willing to fight against that.
This doesn’t excuse the behavior, or make it valid. But it’s also not terribly surprising when you look at how conversations about this across ideologies usually go.
“I don’t see an anchor being dragged. I see people who see their way of life threatened, and are willing to fight against that.”
Fighting against what? Change? The science that says its not sustainable? Young people who want a future?
Way of life? As the anchor analogy was a joke, arresting progress and getting dragged, (made fun of)… this feels like a joke, but anything can be your way of life if you are stubborn enough and willing to make it your identity I guess?
“Yeah you’ve got ghosts in your blood, better do cocaine about it!” - Old timey doctor whose way of life is threatened
Yes, exactly. It's no more complicated than that. Change is hard, and we need to acknowledge that. When its change you deeply believe in, it's not so hard. But when that change is framed as a set of "for" and "against" political ideologies, with little interest from either side in having an honest conversation, now that change looks like one political party imposing their will on the other. People are hardwired to be loyal to their tribe, and when these issues manifest as Tribe A vs. Tribe B, it's little wonder that they fight against it at what seems to be an almost unconscious level.
I don't think this can change until we start having different kinds of conversations with each other. The current shouting, name calling, derision, etc. only deepen that divide, and ultimately it doesn't matter if the subject is climate change or inequality or abortion rights, we're in an era where almost no one is willing to have an open conversation, with genuine interest in hearing the other side. Because of this, all each side sees is a caricature of the other, unable to see what's really there.
I'm about as liberal as one can be, and I find myself incredibly frustrated at how "my party" engages.
> anything can be your way of life if you are stubborn enough and willing to make it your identity I guess?
Look at the state of modern discourse. Almost everyone is tying their identity to a myriad of things. This is relatively new. Political party is just one. By definition, political changes that impact attributes of one's identity are now perceived as existential threats, because identity is about as existential as it gets.
> “Yeah you’ve got ghosts in your blood, better do cocaine about it!” - Old timey doctor whose way of life is threatened
This is a pretty disingenuous example when there are real/current issues that we could examine instead. I think one need only look at the pandemic and how it unfolded. Was I incredibly frustrated at conservatives for their selfish behavior and denialism? 100 times yes. But it seems clear to me that much of that behavior was precipitated/exacerbated by the attitudes of liberals, who shamed, shunned, yelled and screamed at those who disagree (behaviors which seem antithetical to liberalism...).
And what was everyone screaming/yelling about? Telling people that they could no longer live their lives. No longer see their friend groups, etc. You can argue that this isn't what it was about, but if you come from a position that suspects the premise of the argument is incorrect, the only thing you can look at is the outcome of the argument, which in this case directly impacted everyone's ability to live their lives freely.
"But it was for the greater good and they're just selfish and don't give a shit about other people" is what many of my liberal friends would counter with. And I agree it was for the greater good (which is why I was extremely conscientious about my own behaviors throughout that time), but the trouble is that the dialog got stuck at the screaming/shouting phase.
That this resulted in a similar response and backlash hardly seems surprising.
If the pandemic was a dress rehearsal for how we tackle world-wide existential problems, we need to be going back to the drawing board, and fast.
The problem is not specific to people that want to stop climate change. The general disdain for people in places like Western Virginia can be attributed to the dominance of neoliberal philosophy (insofar as it can be described as a philosophy).
My experience is that the most vocal proponents of proper strategies to address climate change are also the most vocal supporters of social justice.
The thing is is the rest of us have free agency to optimize and adapt to our conditions.
I don’t actually owe giving up my agency to do so in deference to people thousands of miles away, whose lack of movement away from toxic industry is instigating the agency I have to take in the first place.
Stow your bucolic imagery of simple WVians. Those simpletons are having a dramatic impact on my life. Yet it’s unconscionable if I push back?
That’s a lopsided, abusive scenario. The people of WV do not rule the world.
> Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society would prevent more harm than they cause.
Sorry, but that's historical revisionism, and I'm not going to let you get away with it.
"Covid is a liberal hoax" was the starting point in the US. That was neither nuanced nor deep. That was pure denialism.
> it's indeed unclear that draconian policies in the name of public health were a net positive.
I believe that the data we have from Sweden vs other Nordic countries (which did real lockdowns) contradicts that narrative. Both Norway and Denmark have around half the deaths normalized per capita of Sweden (Denmark a little above--Norway a little below half).
>>>> But there seems to be little introspection from those who propose sweeping policy change about the need to consider second-order effects on those whose lives and livelihoods will be upturned.
That seems like basic conservatism, which has been systematically forced to the sidelines over the past 50 years.
I love the people of West Virginia, but it keeps getting harder and harder to pretend that they don't vote their beliefs.
This. I cannot upvote this enough. Many people advocating for drastic measures (which may be necessary) are in a war. Casualties to be expected, those who are not on our side are enemies to be dealt with as the war times require (this is also the theme of the original article: let's grab the wheel and swerve, and if the bus rolls, well, too bad).
That is a possible approach, but once you start on that path there is no more negotiation. Only the force, us vs them. Then most folks on the sidelines who are somewhat supportive but not thrilled about swerving of the bus they ride in become active adversaries. I would not underestimate that factor. My 2c.
> Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society would prevent more harm than they cause.
> And now looking at outcomes across different states (e.g. Florida vs. California)--and considering ALL outcomes (public health, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, mental health, truancy, graduation rates, violent crime)--it's indeed unclear that draconian policies in the name of public health were a net positive.
Why are we drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of Covid safety protocols based on the failed half-measures taken by America? We have a plethora of working examples to study from the Asia-Pacific region: Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and China all eradicated Covid pre-Omicron.
> But there seems to be little introspection from those who propose sweeping policy change about the need to consider second-order effects on those whose lives and livelihoods will be upturned.
Equally, there seems to be little introspection amongst American libertarians about the role their own society’s dysfunction might be playing in shaping their personal beliefs.
> there seems to be little introspection from those who propose sweeping policy change about the need to consider second-order effects on those whose lives and livelihoods will be upturned
I really encourage you to read more deeply on this, as I think you're painting climate advocates with the same broad brush you decry others for using. It is extremely common for climate people to insist that a just transition is the only transition worth making - which includes both gigantic structural changes around how we interact with the climate & also structural changes to society to change the material conditions of marginalized & adversely impacted groups. These recommendations are included in basically every climate change document produced by international efforts.
The inclusion of these considerations is also routinely mocked by US conservatives. Lots of people think that "climate is about climate" and the inclusion of social safety net reforms or serious retraining is a bad-faith inclusion from the left who are just using climate change as a cudgel.
If you're interested in a pretty up to date holistic (though to the left of many of the IPCC recs) take on climate recommendations, I would point you at the latest season of scene on radio[1]. It links together the chain of reasoning about why it is essential to address climate with other sources of marginalization and victimization.
The understanding of "what climate change activists want" that you're taking about in your post is frequently brought up by people who would like to obstruct action.
The differences in policies were heavily hyped, but if you look at overall policy and people's actual individual behaviour both Florida and California went through pretty stringent lockdowns. In practice a lot of work places enforced social distancing, masks, pushed vaccines. The two states certainly had much more similar public behaviour and policies with each other than either had with some other countries like Ecuador or Brazil. Another difference that gets hyped up a lot is Sweden versus many other European countries. Sweden was famous for "not locking down", but in fact it did pretty heavily in the grand scheme of things. It just did it a bit later than many other countries.
Take a look at the stringency index in this article.
Florida locked down just as fast and just as hard as California for the first 6 months of the pandemic. After that stringency measures diverged, but Florida still maintained a range of significant pandemic control measures. Their measures in early 2021 were about as strict as California's in late 2021. Overall they were more similar than different.
It also seems that the high number of elderly people in Florida, as a group, took the pandemic very seriously. They were in fact more likely to get themselves vaccinated than elderly people in California, despite the lack of mandates.
In the end it's actual behaviour of the population that makes the difference, whether that behaviour was mandated or not. One interesting stat is that in the most pro-Trump counties (60%+ support) death rates were 2.7x higher than in the most Pro-Biden counties. In the top 10% of counties for each camp the death rate differential was 6x. At the peak of the wave in 2021 about a thousand more Republicans were dying per day than Democrats.
> both Florida and California went through pretty stringent lockdowns
In Australia, police would patrol the streets to ensure people were staying within a 5 km radius of their residence, and to ensure they were only out for a reason deemed essential by the government.
This was accompanied by international, interstate and intrastate border closures, i.e. you couldn’t enter Australia, and couldn’t enter another state within Australia if already in Australia, nor could you in some cases even drive from one part of the state to another, without a special exemption.
I hesitate to ask what Florida did to enforce the lockdowns, because I’m fairly certain what passed for a “lockdown” outside of Asia-Pacific was a joke by comparison. I strongly doubt any of the above measures were done by any state in the US at any point in the pandemic.
That's true, sure, there are places in the world like China and even Australia that dwarf the efforts elsewhere, but Florida and California were both much more stringent than some other places.
Two examples of what I (in the US) decry as "COVID denialism" both are people known personally to me (extended family actually). These are from mid 2020. Both people eventually pivoted to "being opposed to draconian policies"
1: The numbers coming out of NYC are grossly exaggerated; probably only about 1/10th of those reported as "dying of COVID" actually died of COVID. Other people died from different causes but just happened to test positive for COVID.
2: A dialog between person A and person B:
A: If only 1% of people who get COVID die from it why are we still worried?
B: At a 1% fatality rate if half the population of the US gets COVID, that's over a million dead
The mistake in your reasoning is to believe that the fatality rate is the only thing that matters.
But fortunately with climate change it is that easy: you or your descendants will either die or you won't, and hopefully there will be a recognizable society left for the survivors. Enjoy the ride and make sure to snap pictures.
Of course fatality rate isn't the only thing that matters; however I was giving an example of one person claiming that fatalities (not fatality rate) were overstated by an order of magnitude, and another person claiming -- I'm not sure what -- that multiplication is wrong.
These are both denialism, even with the common ground that 1M dead Americans is a bad outcome.
I actually think the people who think they'll be exempt are basically right. It's not like a tornado is going to pick your house up (unless, unfortunately that is exactly what happens).
Sure, there are going to be hotter hot spells, and more extreme cold spells, but that's not seriously something that a New Yorker can't deal with.
What is going to happen is poor people, foreign people, are going to starve to death and drown trying to get to safety, and the problem won't be climate challenge, it'll be illegal immigrants.
It's not going to happen first to middle-america. It's going to happen to Mexico, North Africa, the Middle East. And we're not going to say "hey, this is a universal issue created by emissions that our countries benefitted from". It's going to be talk about economic migrants, or how we can't afford to help them because we have problems at home. Bold prediction: Shipping them to Rwanda isn't going to be sustainable.
Poorer people are always worse off, that's true, but we're talking about global climate change and its effects can devastate anyone on the planet.
The climate is a complex system into which more and more energy is being input. That's more likely to produce sudden, drastic and unpredictable changes. It's not just simply going to get hotter.
So it's entirely possible that huge swathes of the US become largely uninhabitable, due to, say, drastic increases in rain or violent weather. It's entirely possible that most current agriculture could become impractical in the US.
The politics of climate change has very likely made scientists too conservative in their predictions as to not seem hysterical, but looking at how quickly the climate is changing right now, extreme outcomes seem very likely.
What I'm really saying is that the obvious direct effects of climate change are likely going to be blamed on people.
It's going to get to the point where a poor person can't live in Mumbai - literally, you can't survive exposure to the temperatures that are going to happen. But when those people move north to escape the heat, their migration is going to be blamed on all the things we blame current migration on, rather than the reality that they'd likely die if they stayed where they were. Oh and guess how many poor people there are in Mumbai.
I think in those circumstances it won't be so much migration but war. It's more likely the affected country will just invade a cooler, less well armed country and take what they need.
This very issue has been raised by the US military as a security threat going forward.
Not necessarily. Those poor people, today, are malnourished and lack access to the many benefits that higher energy use brings. And some of the same things that the top billion of the population has been enjoying for decades.
Telling them that they cannot get this (energy to bring water to the fields instead of hand-carrying it, tractors to work the fields) and, by the way, it is for their own benefit may not be very convincing. I think those poor people just got on the bus and think they are OK with where this bus is heading. And would club someone who tries to grab the wheel and put the bus in a ditch. My 2c.
There's been all kinds of comments here about how Malthus' thesis was wrong. I'd agree that was the case if we could get the vast majority of humanity on the same page and actually deal with the many crises that currently face us (climate, food, extinction,etc). But given how we've dealt with the climate crisis up til now and how we handled (or didn't handle) covid, I think Malthus was probably right. I don't think he was even factoring in human nature just carrying capacity (and his calculations there were probably flawed), but it's human nature that's driving the bus.
> The really, really big problem is that people seem to think that they personally are going to be exempt from this
Is that a bigger problem than people who seem to think that they personally are saving the planet by their own actions?
I honestly can't tell the difference between treating gun crimes with thoughts and prayers and stopping global warming by taking personal responsibility. Nether is effective. Both seem delusional. Oh, and those two activities belong to different parts of the political divide. The problem is not "those people" so much as it's humanity, all of us.
I'd say that it's more akin to trying to solve gun crime by refusing to own a gun: the only reason it won't work is that it needs everyone to do that, and if merely 0.1% of the population defect (in the game theory sense), that leads to the bad outcome.
It's a counter-productive rhetoric that I've long decried and sadly started from environmentally conscious folks. It's hard to understand how "It's too late to do anything" is going to push people in the right direction, if anything it achieves the opposite effect.
The really, really big problem is that people seem to think that they personally are going to be exempt from this, that it will happen to others, but not to them. Waking up from that will be pretty harsh. But if COVID denialism is any indication of how well humanity deals with complex problems on a planetary scale I'm not too optimistic about climate change countermeasures, the problem is much more complex and would require cooperation on a far more massive scale than anything COVID related.