I stopped reading it because the premise is entirely unbelievable. A mass casualty event of pretty much any size would not lead us to do anything about climate change.
For evidence, look at the deaths in the USA from gives and cars every year. Yet there is zero momentum toward doing anything about those from a policy standpoint.
Or the million+ deaths in the US from Covid, which I have seen brushed off on HN as not a big deal.
It's remarkably how quickly people incorporate tragedy as normal when it doesn't fit their worldview. If you travel to 2000 and told people "in 2020 a pandemic will kill over 1 million Americans, and a good portion will brush it off as a 'nothing burger'" people would think you were being ridiculous and would dismiss it as unbelievable fiction.
> It's remarkably how quickly people incorporate tragedy as normal
It's one of our greatest strengths and weaknesses. It let's us keep living, but also allows us to normalize that which shouldn't be accepted.
If the opening of MFTF happened, within 2 weeks people would be posting graphs showing how per capita all cause deaths are actually going down over time.
All life is a trade-off. There has been massive effort at reducing traffic fatalities, representing probably trillions of dollars of investment, including road design and barriers, speed limits, signaling, car safety features like crumple zones, seat belts, air bags, all manner of crash safety testing, enforcement actions, and much more.
We haven't entirely banned cars, and carbon emissions weren't totally banned after the wet-bulb event in Ministry for the Future.
A massive failure judging by the numbers. Which is my point. We will continue to feel bad, maybe drop in some metaphorical traffic circles, but do nothing to actually solve the issue.
Success would be the number in the USA moving in the right direction (down) which it is not as it is currently rising versus other wealthy nations such as France.
Success could have USA/Canada/[insert other poorly faring nation] looking more like the low casualty numbers of other wealthy nations (eg. Norway) as well.
Honestly no death is a pretty good goal. Cynically one could say it's not achievable but trying is nonetheless worth while. In my jurisdiction in Canada I don't see the government even lifting a finger to implement the lowest hanging fruit of policies that would move the needle in the right direction, such is the status quo and politicization of the traffic safety issue. They're not even trying.
Efforts to implement various traffic safety concepts well used elsewhere in safer jurisdictions would be politically attacked here I'm quite sure.
Another post demonstrating my point. 35K people in the US alone die in traffic every year. We have normalized this figure (see your response) as we will normalize climate deaths.
What I would do about traffic deaths is irrelevant to my point.
I should have written "fixing the problem" instead of "doing anything about those" as I did in other comments. I define "fixed" as reaching and sustaining the lower bound. So basically excluding deaths due to act of god only.
> There are people who do think about these things every day. There are people who dedicate life to working on problems and progress is being made.
Exactly. Despite that, here we are with 35K traffic deaths a year. Here's what would actually be necessary to "fix" the problem:
- 20 year project to build a tremendous amount of passenger rail
- Manhattan project for self-driving cars
- 10 year project to upgrade all city and highway signage to be self-driving car friendly
- Close roads to human-driven cars when self-driving upgrades are ready
This probably sounds crazy to you. It sounds crazy to me too. And that's why I'm blackpilled on climate change: if we can't and won't do what it takes to fix traffic or gun fatalities on a national level, we definitely won't do it for a problem several orders of magnitude more difficult on a global level.
> Saying that a major event would have no impact on the zeitgiest is questionable given history.
There will be an impact. Just most likely not a positive one. It could highly negative (see post-9/11 wars), or completely insufficient (our current response to climate change).
Without being clear about what replacement transportation mode you expect to substitute for cars, it's not clear to me that your point is being proven. If we replaced cars today with walking or the current state of public transport in the US, I think my life is made vastly better by the near-ubiquitous presence of cars, even if it means I have a lifetime risk of just under 1%.
If cars save me just 10 minutes per day, my life is improved as compared to the just under 7 minutes per day of life lost to the lifetime risk of dying in a car accident.
We normalize traffic deaths because there is a net benefit. Just like we normalize other negative outcomes from overall positive-utility activities.
In the book, the Indian government takes unilateral action to cool the planet (spraying reflectants into the upper atmosphere, iirc) after the heat wave kills 20 million Indian people in the space of a few days - a few weeks. Given the fractious state of international politics and the urgency of the problem, this seems like a fairly realistic depiction of how efforts to cool the planet might commence IRL.
There was about paragraph or so spent on that realistic response, and then huge swathes dedicated to India switching to collectivized farming (a la early Soviet Union), the world's central banks putting carbon offsets onto a blockchain, and millions of Americans willingly displacing themselves to create a giant wildlife preserve in the midwest.
It's a bit different than 9/11 though. Climate change is like a fully loaded supertanker. You can hit an emergency break all you want, but still that ship will have a 5..10km (or longer?) breaking distance.
So if a mass death event were to occur, and policy were to change course drastically, the changed climate would continue to pound our biosphere for many decades (if not centuries). Or hit tipping points and get worse & worse no matter what we do.
To put it blunt: at some point, prolonged mass suffering & death is practically guaranteed. Just with a decades-delayed fuse. That fuse is already lit, while we can't see (with any certainty, that is) how big a powder keg it goes into.
You sighted a problem and cited zero anything else.
Pandemic response was effective at avoiding healthcare system collapse and churning out a vaccine. It’s as good a plan as we can get with 30% of 300 million intentionally indifferent, centrists too absorbed in low effort consumerism, and anyone espousing concern being called a tree hugging pussy.
What else do you want? Too many seem to think the MCU should hop on saving them from themselves.
Say something useful yourself or get over it. You were never going to make it out of this life alive anyway.
> You sighted a problem and cited zero anything else.
Perhaps you missed the analogy in my original between climate deaths and gun+traffic deaths.
> It’s as good a plan as we can get with 30% of 300 million intentionally indifferent, centrists too absorbed in low effort consumerism, and anyone espousing concern being called a tree hugging pussy.
You're so close to getting it. We will be talking about "sensible solutions" that maintain our current lifestyle until the planet turns into Venus.
> What else do you want?
I reluctanty have to admit I'm black pilled at this point. I see no reason to believe that our species is capable of the kind of collective action that's needed. There are no positive examples and so many negative examples.
> You were never going to make it out of this life alive anyway.
Car accidents and even COVID deaths in a hospital ward are possibly different because they're isolated and you can rationalize that it will not affect you.
Might be different when a lot of people die in a whole region and it's very obvious. But who knows, I made detailed predictions at the onset of COVID and believed it would be handled like SARS and the likes and stopped in about 3 months. Well, I was completely wrong.
It's silly to look only at deaths. Any reasonable analysis looks at cost-benefit.
What is the benefit of vehicle transportation? Immense! They move goods around the country, provide people with rapid transportation, improve the movement of people of people around the country, etc, etc.
It's like looking at surgical deaths and saying "look at the death toll from surgery! such a tragedy!" all the while completely ignoring it's benefits.
News media like to have stories they can focus popular attention on, and no one car accident (unless it kills someone famous) will matter to enough people to warrant broader coverage than one's local paper. Despite this lack of media visibility, there actually is some movement at the city level to change the design of roads to reduce the lethality of accidents. This isn't very publicly visible yet, I don't think, and there's certainly very little in the way of public desire to drive less lethal vehicles.
I haven't read the book, but if the event the book describes kills hundreds of people or more, it seems like a plausible seed that news coverage can accrete around.
The idea in the book was this was a new event that never occurred previously that finally did and was able to demonstrate that climate change is doing some new and not survivable.
In the book, people galvanized around it kind of like 9/11 as it was clearly climate change, as opposed to other things that already existed and may or may not be due to climate change (more hurricanes, etc).
Be careful what you wish for. 9/11 galvanized Americans to start two disastrous wars. The effect of a mass fatality event like in MFTF could easily be a bunch of pointless, ineffective wars. There's precedent for that, but not for anything like a Ministry for the Future
Last year there was a local heat bubble that killed 69 people in my city. There was a bit of news coverage, but it hardly moved the needle in terms of local politics. Hell, the city can't even bother keep alive the trees it's recently planted nor stop pulling out more canopy to expand arterial roads in areas of the city that are heat islands due to lower than average tree coverage.
I think it's going to take more than hundreds of deaths to go beyond a few news stories that get lots of clicks for a week or two and talking points for politicians to bring up when it's convenient and forget when it is not.
That’s aggregate deaths one at a time, though. If all the car deaths happened all at once in a localized area and took out half of Rhode Island, it would spur action.
These are good examples of mass casualty events that didn't motivate effective responses. For both climate change and guns, there are people that want to keep the status quo as it is. I believe that popular arguments against gun control will be able to stay effective in ways that arguments against climate action will fail.
First, one of the most popular arguments against action addressing climate change has been that climate change is simply fake. A mass-casualty event would make that argument less effective.
The gun control debate in the United States is linked with people's perceptions of personal agency. Often, a mass casualty event perpetrated with a gun is ended by a gun being used on the perpetrator (sometimes, it's the perpetrator killing themselves, and sometimes it's police killing them). Many people imagine it would be possible to end those events as a bystander with a gun. But I think that it would be much harder to get people to fantasize about being a hero that stops a mass casualty event resulting from extreme heat. Such an event starts and ends when Mother Nature says it does, and it seems like it should be pretty clear to people that the only way personal agency is relevant is in the act of preparing the environment.
> A mass-casualty event would make that argument less effective
I would have bought this 10 years ago. But following the recent rise of conspricism, especially far out things like Qanon and Pizza Gate, I've come to realize that it's possible for vast numbers of people to just decide to believe something is/isn't true because it suits them.
Or Sandy Hook for that matter. Also, elsewhere in the thread people have mentioned comment sections on major news sites coverage of the Maui fires, and apparently droves of people are more interested in blaming clean energy installations, imaginary energy weapons, and Obama, Zuckerberg, and Oprah (of all people) than anything else.
Within a year of the Las Vegas shooting, the "bump stock" device used by that person was banned by the US.
The Trump administration has banned the use of bump stocks, devices that let rifles fire like machine guns, after promising to do so earlier this year.
Great example of my main point. Instead of fixing the real problems (availability of weapons and to some degree mental illness) we ban an accessory. Meanwhile elsewhere the bodies keep dropping.
Great example of moving the goalposts. You wrote "total lack of action" for which there is counter-evidence in the form of a national government action. With the same logic, one might as well claim that an entire firearm is an accessory to whatever is redefined as the "real problem."
This commenter also fails to recognize that there is a tremendous amount of political activity aimed at changing gun laws, and that represents real and earnest efforts on the parts of tens of thousands of people (or orders of magnitude more, depending on where we set the bar for having "done something").
It's true that our system of government and industry is set up to preserve itself and resist sweeping change. It is further true some incredibly wealthy and influential individuals within the system are aligned with those goals, making change all the more difficult and unlikely (this applies to climate change as it does to gun laws, car culture, throw-away consumerism, etc). It is a mistake to equate trying and failing to change massive and powerful institutions with doing nothing.
I get it, from a cynical and pessimistic perspective, doing nothing vs trying hard but failing to do something all looks the same in the end (when society is roasting canned spam on it's own embers, as we might imagine). But fatalism becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, and mostly appeals because it has the "benefit" of requiring no action of the individual. Just a lifetime of depression, apathy, and/or moral bankruptcy.
Even if the fatalist is wrong, it means people made things work out for them in the end and they didn't even have to lift a finger. What a deal! It certainly has its appeal to those parts of our brain that we share with lizards and other creatures that look to avoid personal risk and conserve energy at almost any cost.
The US is a worst case example. Most other developed countries also had major issues with gun and car deaths and have made major progress in resolving them.
For evidence, look at the deaths in the USA from gives and cars every year. Yet there is zero momentum toward doing anything about those from a policy standpoint.