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.
And the time for that was before we hot record ocean temps killing off all of florida’s coral. Things are accelerating past the point we could have done anything. Any time now the antarctic ice sheet is going to calve into the southern ocean which, on its own will lead to nearly a meter of ocean level rise - this is now a sure thing. The time to act like we did on the ozone layer was probably some time in the 90s.
Hell, we have the power to fix this planet as we did with the ozone, yet we failed to do against fossil fuel… And the main factor there was money. We’re such a disappointment to future generations.
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.
And the time for that was before we hot record ocean temps killing off all of florida’s coral. Things are accelerating past the point we could have done anything. Any time now the antarctic ice sheet is going to calve into the southern ocean which, on its own will lead to nearly a meter of ocean level rise - this is now a sure thing. The time to act like we did on the ozone layer was probably some time in the 90s.
Hell, we have the power to fix this planet as we did with the ozone, yet we failed to do against fossil fuel… And the main factor there was money. We’re such a disappointment to future generations.