I was interviewed by a reporter about my family breaking apart during covid due to conspiracy fairytails. When she asked me about my view for the future I told her it’s very grim: If humanity struggles with a challenge with a known solution (social distancing, vaccine, protect the elderly etc.) how are we going to fare with a challenge with an unknown solution (how to sequester enough CO2? How to produce enough sustainable energy reliably? How to store enough energy? etc.)?
Also, part of the solution is to change our lifestyles for good. And we’ve seen with covid the problem of changing our collective behaviors just for a limited time.
I agree there were so many screw-ups in the response, especially in the early days. China insisting upon secrecy until it spread across the globe, the WHO’s confusing statements on the efficacy of masks in order to preserve supplies for the front lines, the ridiculous pro-masker vs anti-masker mentality, the Trump fiasco where he suggested doctors use lemon fresh Lysol or whatever the hell he was on about to disinfect people’s lungs as if he has a goddamed clue, the alt-right losing their minds over a dangerous vaccine with Bill Gates computer chips in it, etc.
But remember CFCs and the hole in the ozone layer? Scientists were like “Hey, guys. There’s a hole here. We need to stop using this crap or we dead.” And everyone banded together and stopped using CFCs, and the hole in the ozone layer closed happily ever after. Sometimes we can actually do it right. I don’t know, maybe it’ll take a crisis like losing Florida to the ocean for Americans to collectively give a shit again and start doing things right. Or maybe we’ll all die before we get a chance to see that happen.
The difference is that with banning CFCs, the vast majority of people weren’t even mildly inconvenienced. Dealing with COVID required some temporary personal sacrifice from everyone, and it was too much for half the population. Dealing with climate change requires major, permanent sacrifices from everyone, so I don’t see any way it will happen until most people are simply unable to maintain any semblance of their current lifestyles.
Acid rain is another success story for “making a giant collective change to fix a nearly invisible problem”.
I think one major difference is that there are enormous companies and entire countries whose way of life truly depends on pumping fossil carbon out of the ground. It wasn’t that way for CFCs or NOx. Sure, Dow/DuPont/whomever surely lost some profitable investment in freon plants, but they had other business as well, and their old customers switched to buying the new refrigerants from the same suppliers.
My tinfoil hat says that DuPont/Dow was behind all of that as their patents were about to expire anyway. Now nobody else can produce their products cheaply and they get to sell their new pantended “safe” replacement.
It’s funny that when their patent for r-134a ran out they got it phased out for yf-1234.
When I saw the response to covid, a very visible threat, I knew we were going to fry.
I was interviewed by a reporter about my family breaking apart during covid due to conspiracy fairytails. When she asked me about my view for the future I told her it’s very grim: If humanity struggles with a challenge with a known solution (social distancing, vaccine, protect the elderly etc.) how are we going to fare with a challenge with an unknown solution (how to sequester enough CO2? How to produce enough sustainable energy reliably? How to store enough energy? etc.)?
Also, part of the solution is to change our lifestyles for good. And we’ve seen with covid the problem of changing our collective behaviors just for a limited time.
Yeah, apart from annoying people being annoyed, it made The Line go down.
We can’t have that.
I agree there were so many screw-ups in the response, especially in the early days. China insisting upon secrecy until it spread across the globe, the WHO’s confusing statements on the efficacy of masks in order to preserve supplies for the front lines, the ridiculous pro-masker vs anti-masker mentality, the Trump fiasco where he suggested doctors use lemon fresh Lysol or whatever the hell he was on about to disinfect people’s lungs as if he has a goddamed clue, the alt-right losing their minds over a dangerous vaccine with Bill Gates computer chips in it, etc.
But remember CFCs and the hole in the ozone layer? Scientists were like “Hey, guys. There’s a hole here. We need to stop using this crap or we dead.” And everyone banded together and stopped using CFCs, and the hole in the ozone layer closed happily ever after. Sometimes we can actually do it right. I don’t know, maybe it’ll take a crisis like losing Florida to the ocean for Americans to collectively give a shit again and start doing things right. Or maybe we’ll all die before we get a chance to see that happen.
The difference is that with banning CFCs, the vast majority of people weren’t even mildly inconvenienced. Dealing with COVID required some temporary personal sacrifice from everyone, and it was too much for half the population. Dealing with climate change requires major, permanent sacrifices from everyone, so I don’t see any way it will happen until most people are simply unable to maintain any semblance of their current lifestyles.
Acid rain is another success story for “making a giant collective change to fix a nearly invisible problem”.
I think one major difference is that there are enormous companies and entire countries whose way of life truly depends on pumping fossil carbon out of the ground. It wasn’t that way for CFCs or NOx. Sure, Dow/DuPont/whomever surely lost some profitable investment in freon plants, but they had other business as well, and their old customers switched to buying the new refrigerants from the same suppliers.
My tinfoil hat says that DuPont/Dow was behind all of that as their patents were about to expire anyway. Now nobody else can produce their products cheaply and they get to sell their new pantended “safe” replacement.
It’s funny that when their patent for r-134a ran out they got it phased out for yf-1234.
yf-1234? That’s dumb, r-134a rolls off the tongue. Also, my tinfoil hat agrees with you.
That’s not even tin foil hat territory it’s longstanding MO for chemical and pharmaceutical corps. The pattern is super obvious in pharma.