You're either misunderstanding his point or misunderstanding reality.
Our public policy today endorses (and heavily subsidizes) the burning of carbon on a scale never before tested.
Why should the default position be to subsidize this as opposed to alternative means?
Or are you arguing that we should be agnostic about the science and thus stop burning all carbon immediately (i.e., returning to a scientifically validated state in the past where we didn't burn carbon)?
>You have this backwards. Claimed knowledge doesn't get to be assumed to be right until it's shown to be wrong.
I'm guessing you have it backwards but I'll let you explain. Which knowledge do you think we are claiming that we shouldn't assume to be right? Give a concrete example and we can discuss. If you think we can "assume its safe to burn obscene amounts of carbon" without any evidence of that safety, then you are the one who has it backwards.
You can't make a public policy that is agnostic to the science of burning of fossil fuels at current levels. It's clearly unsustainable, but let's set that aside. If you want to argue it's sustainable and should continue, you would still need to rely on (nonexistent) science to make your case. It's not an argument to say "this is how we done things for a long time so this way doesn't need to be supported by science." That's illogical.
I don't think the government should be subsidizing any energy sources or playing favorites with certain sources over others. That applies just as much to playing favorites in favor of "alternative" energy sources as to playing favorites in favor of oil, coal, and natural gas. (Actually the government subsidizes all of these.)
However, that has nothing to do with any beliefs about the relative risks of different energy sources. It has to do with a belief that government subsidizing anything or playing favorites in general is likely to do more harm than good. In other words, the government does not have reliable enough knowledge to justify favoring any energy source over any other, so it shouldn't.
> It's clearly unsustainable, but let's set that aside.
No, let's not. Let's ask, instead, why you apparently believe that the only way to fix anything that is "unsustainable" is government policy. Why not just let the market work? If governments would stop subsiziding fossil fuels, their prices would be higher, and there would be more market pressure to find alternatives. Just as we found alternatives to horses that saved us from the "unsustainable" practice in the late 19th century of using horses for transportation, which, if that had gone on the same way, would have us all by now, as the saying goes, knee deep in horsesxxt. (And people were predicting exactly that at the time.)
> It's not an argument to say "this is how we done things for a long time so this way doesn't need to be supported by science." That's illogical.
No, it's not, it's a fact of life. Most of the things we currently do are not "supported by science". We do not have well-supported scientific rationales for most of our current activities. That's because we don't have a good scientific understanding of the relevant domains for most of our current activities. But just stopping all of our current activities that aren't "supported by science" is not a viable alternative, never has been, and never will be. So it's you that is being illogical, not me.
This is not possible. You might be misunderstanding how subsidies work. Everything the government does is a subsidy of something or other. Building out roads nice new roads in every podunk town in America is an enormous subsidy to oil. Allowing people to pollute my air with carbon is an enormous subsidy to oil. Again, it is literally impossible to be agnostic.
>No, let's not. Let's ask, instead, why you apparently believe that the only way to fix anything that is "unsustainable" is government policy.
Where on earth do you get the idea that I think this?
>Why not just let the market work?
Externalities. Unless you start making all carbon users bear all costs associated with their carbon use, I have to bear that cost for them. The market can't sort that out unless I can forcibly stop other people's carbon use myself. In that case, we would have a violent solution, not a market solution. Governments is justifiable largely on the grounds that it replaces the need for these violent solutions.
>If governments would stop subsiziding fossil fuels, their prices would be higher, and there would be more market pressure to find alternatives.
Agree.
>Just as we found alternatives to horses that saved us from the "unsustainable" practice in the late 19th century of using horses for transportation, which, if that had gone on the same way, would have us all by now, as the saying goes, knee deep in horsesxxt.
This move had nothing to do with global sustainability. It had to do with scalability, user friendliness, etc.
>No, it's not, it's a fact of life. Most of the things we currently do are not "supported by science".
Agreed. So the question is why do you think some policies (like burning carbon) are justifiable without science. While others (like not burning carbon) need more science? You haven't justified this asymmetry.
>We do not have well-supported scientific rationales for most of our current activities.
Exactly. So why do you think we need well-supported scientific rationales for new activities?
>That's because we don't have a good scientific understanding of the relevant domains for most of our current activities.
Absolutely agree. You're talking common sense here.
>But just stopping all of our current activities that aren't "supported by science" is not a viable alternative,
And no one is arguing we should. But pretending that we can continue burning carbon at current rates (without any scientific support for this) is not in any way more justifiable than saying "we need to start burning less carbon".
>So it's you that is being illogical, not me.
Nope. It's you. We can't keep burning carbon the way we are and there's no reason to think we can. There are better reasons to think we can't.
No, a "subsidy" is not the same as a purchase. Purchasing something at whatever the current market price is is just a purchase. Fixing prices at lower than the current market price, and making up the difference in various hidden ways, which is what the government does with fossil fuels, is a subsidy.
> Building out roads nice new roads in every podunk town in America is an enormous subsidy to oil.
No, it's an enormous investment in transportation infrastructure for the benefit of everyone. Which benefits all transportation technologies. Unless you think that hybrid or electric or fuel cell or solar powered vehicles are somehow unable to use the same roads?
> Where on earth do you get the idea that I think this?
What else do you expect me to think when the only thing you propose to fix whatever you claim is wrong is government policy?
> Externalities
Which is a non-answer unless you know, with sufficient confidence based on scientific knowledge (not somebody's beliefs or speculations or hypotheses), the amount of the externality and who can address it at the lowest cost. Which nobody knows for the case of CO2 emissions.
> Governments is justifiable largely on the grounds that it replaces the need for these violent solutions.
First, government solutions are violent: the government can dictate what everybody does only because it can back up what it says with violence if necessary.
Second, you ignore the obvious third alternative: give people a better option in the market. If the government did not subsidize fossil fuels, gasoline would be more expensive and more people would be buying cars that used less, or no, gasoline. No need to use force on anyone. And if there were more entrepreneurs figuring out how to build cars that used less, or no, gasoline, they would get cheaper. That is true even for the SUVs that you apparently abhor: a hybrid SUV can easily get double the gas mileage of a conventional one. But with gas as cheap as it is now due to government subsidies, the added cost of the hybrid simply doesn't pay for itself over the life of the vehicle.
(It's worth noting, btw, that this is even more true because the average "life of the vehicle" in the US is so short due to the availability of cheap financing and leases, which is due to government manipulation of the financial system. If people had to pay higher interest rates on car loans, they would have more incentive to keep cars longer and not buy a new one every year or two just because some shiny new thing came out. Which in turn would mean an initial investment in something like a hybrid would be more likely to pay for itself over the life of the vehicle. Another example of government meddling skewing incentives in a way that does more harm than good. And before you ask, my wife kept her last car for 19 years, and I kept my last car for 14; mine had more than 260,000 miles on it when it finally gave up the ghost. We both plan to keep our current cars as long as possible.)
> So why do you think we need well-supported scientific rationales for new activities?
I have made no such claim. I have never said individuals need well-supported scientific rationales for every new thing they decide to do.
What I have said is that dictating a public policy to everyone requires a well-supported scientific rationale, or at least a much higher standard for one than has been used.
> We can't keep burning carbon the way we are and there's no reason to think we can. There are better reasons to think we can't.
Then we simply disagree. You think this claim has a well-supported scientific rationale. I don't. I think it's a combination of ideological beliefs, speculations, and hypotheses, with no predictive track record to back it up. So I don't think dictating public policy on this basis is justified. If you want to base your own choices on it, go ahead.
Now, if you had said "we can't keep importing fossil fuels from countries like Saudi Arabia the way we are", then I would agree. But the basis for that has nothing to do with CO2 emissions, and everything to do with national security and geopolitical realities.
Or, if you had said "we can't keep burning coal the way we are", I would agree, because burning coal has a huge impact on air quality and respiratory diseases, and mining coal has a huge impact on the environment in the area where it is mined. But again, that has nothing to do with CO2 emissions.
Or we could talk about how it's stupid to burn oil when it has so many important other applications in the chemical industry, or the risk of oil spills.
> pretending that we can continue burning carbon at current rates (without any scientific support for this) is not in any way more justifiable than saying "we need to start burning less carbon".
You're misstating the alternatives. The alternatives for public policy are not "keep burning carbon at current rates" vs. "burn less carbon". The alternatives for public policy are "allow people to make their own decisions about burning carbon" vs. "dictate everyone's carbon burning activities by force". The former does not need a well-supported scientific rationale. The latter does.
So the best course of action is to treat any uncertain number as zero?
Did I a say "subsidy" was the same as a purchase? Not sure what you're getting at.
>Purchasing something at whatever the current market price is is just a purchase.
Um. It's a purchase. It can also be a subsidy and generally is when the government does it. If the government purchases a bunch of oranges to give away (or throw in the gutter) it is subsidizing the orange market. Are you not familiar with how government subsidies work in general?
>Fixing prices at lower than the current market price, and making up the difference in various hidden ways, which is what the government does with fossil fuels, is a subsidy.
There are lots of ways to subsidize things. Almost everything (or maybe absolutely everything) the government does creates a subsidy of some kind.
>No, it's an enormous investment in transportation infrastructure for the benefit of everyone.
It's not for the benefit of everyone though. Car-centric life obviously is not very healthy, so it's not healthy for the general public to subsidize this. More importantly, it creates dangerous externalities for people that walk, bike, etc.
It heavily subsidizes unsustainable suburban modes of living, etc. Can you imagine the shitfit people in Kentucky would have if they had to fund their own roads?
>Which benefits all transportation technologies.
Wat? How does building a 20 lane highway in Houston benefit bikers? It doesn't. It actively harms them.
How does building a road to Dingleberry Alabama benefit people that ride the subway in DC (or want to ride a subway in Alabama)? It doesn't.
>Unless you think that hybrid or electric or fuel cell or solar powered vehicles are somehow unable to use the same roads?
Again, this is taking kind of an autistic view. In theory, yes my fart-powered car can use the roads. In practice, since 99% of cars are powered by carbon, we know that a road subsidy benefits carbon users 99% of the time.
>Which is a non-answer unless you know, with sufficient confidence based on scientific knowledge (not somebody's beliefs or speculations or hypotheses), the amount of the externality and who can address it at the lowest cost.
Huh? Why would we need to know this? If my neighbor is pumping carbon dioxide into my living room, I don't need to do any calculus or science to know that (a) he's wrong and (b) he needs to stop. That is a problem that markets can't solve.
Why would we need to know the person that can do it at the lowest cost? The person doing the bad behavior should bear the cost regardless of who the lowest cost avoider is.
>Which nobody knows for the case of CO2 emissions.
We know a lot about the costs of C02 emissions. It's ridiculous to say we need to have perfect solutions before we can push back on our current failed "solution".
>First, government solutions are violent: the government can dictate what everybody does only because it can back up what it says with violence if necessary.
Absolutely. That's a huge role of the government. If some asshole is pumping carbon dioxide into my living room, the government needs to correct his behavior. If a strongly worded letter doesn't do it, violent action must (ethically) be taken to correct the situation.
>Second, you ignore the obvious third alternative: give people a better option in the market.
I'm not sure why you think I ignored this. I have literally written books on market solutions. But they can't solve everything.
>If the government did not subsidize fossil fuels, gasoline would be more expensive and more people would be buying cars that used less, or no, gasoline.
But you would still have too many people buying. You need to read up on externalities.
>No need to use force on anyone.
Yes need to use force. This is econ 101. When you have an activity that forces negative externalities onto third parties without compensation, you get sub-optimal levels of that activity. When you don't bear the full cost for polluting the air I breath (this is very well documented stuff here) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3155438/, then you'll tend to create sub-optimal levels of pollution that wouldn't exist if you had to bear those costs.
>And if there were more entrepreneurs figuring out how to build cars that used less, or no, gasoline, they would get cheaper.
This helps but doesn't fix the problem.
>That is true even for the SUVs that you apparently abhor: a hybrid SUV can easily get double the gas mileage of a conventional one. But with gas as cheap as it is now due to government subsidies, the added cost of the hybrid simply doesn't pay for itself over the life of the vehicle.
Even without government subsidies, gas is extremely cheap.
>What I have said is that dictating a public policy to everyone requires a well-supported scientific rationale, or at least a much higher standard for one than has been used.
This is the part you still aren't addressing: We are already dictating a public policy to everyone without any scientific support whatsoever.
>Then we simply disagree. You think this claim has a well-supported scientific rationale. I don't. I think it's a combination of ideological beliefs, speculations, and hypotheses, with no predictive track record to back it up. So I don't think dictating public policy on this basis is justified. If you want to base your own choices on it, go ahead.
You're misunderstanding. You are saying that the public policy you like (lets keep it simple and say "Ford Excursions") doesn't need any scientific backing whatsoever. But the public policy I like (lets say "bikes") somehow requires a "well-supported scientific rational". You need to explain this difference. Under your system, our current policies are also not justifiable (nor are the policies you are advocating for).
>You're misstating the alternatives. The alternatives for public policy are not "keep burning carbon at current rates" vs. "burn less carbon". The alternatives for public policy are "allow people to make their own decisions about burning carbon" vs. "dictate everyone's carbon burning activities by force".
You are ignoring externalities. This line of thinking is fine for activities that don't harm others. It doesn't work if there are externalities. Unless you think I should be able to forcibly go stop my neighbor from polluting, you still haven't solved the problem.
>The former does not need a well-supported scientific rationale. The latter does.
You can't just say this without justification. Or you can, and I can too:
The former needs a well-supported scientific rationale. The latter does not.
How about that?
At what point in the progression of scientific consensus does evidence for the consideration of a new externality require a response by passing laws that define the externality and how it can be bourne?
One argument is that there is not enough scientific basis to ground policy regarding CO2, specifically. And, separately, there is enough evidence that some forms carbon energy should be restricted, but due to other factors like pollution from coal. This argument is coming from a strong negative-rights model of government (like the US), where axiomatically people are allowed to do anything not currently restricted by law. The advantage of this system is that it allows people to act in the face of ever-changing circumstances of the world without needing to get approval from the government every time a new thing is discovered. The disadvantage is that now you have to hold externalities to higher bar of proof.
I think that we, individually and as a society, still have to act in the world, imperfect information and all. We cannot demand perfect data to base our decisions on, because always waiting for perfect data means that every decision will be too late. But, just like in science, we need to be able to change our beliefs/laws as evidence mounts that the basis for our previous belief is wrong. The problem is that politicial discourse is so deadlocked on pure narratives (all negative or all positive, no room for nuance or complexity) that we'll never be able to agree.
It's not inconsistent with any definition of rights that I'm aware of to say that you can't pollute our air without consequences. By contrast, the current state of affairs does not mesh with any philosophical system that I've found. Under what theory can some stranger pollute my air? That's no more justifiable than me pouring perchlorate in my neighbor's well. The stronger someone believes in individual rights, the stronger they support my argument.
I think it's a misreading of philosophy (not saying you're doing this) to say that we need to justify restrictions on obvious negative externalities like air pollution. The polluter needs to justify his actions, not the neighbor whose air is being poisoned.
(The science on the deleterious effects of air pollution is of course settled regardless of what anyone thinks about global warming.)
> It's not inconsistent with any definition of rights that I'm aware of to say that you can't pollute our air without consequences
What exactly does pollute mean here?
I could say that my neighbor generating sawdust while sawing wood to build their deck is "polluting" the air. Or me sneezing while standing on my porch outside is "polluting" the air. Or if I'm watering my plants and some water flows downhill to my neighbor is "polluting" their lawn. Or me practicing piano in my house is polluting the soundscape of the neighborhood. Or, ..., or, ..., or, ..., or, ... See, there are limitless ways that one could construe basically any action someone takes as producing a negative externality. Almost certainly all of the examples I mentioned have been argued as negative externalities, and the answer is not to either accept every argument or reject every argument, because the details and circumstances matter.
My point is: Don't presume that negative externalities are automatically identified, and don't presume that every identified negative externality automatically justifies action to correct it, and don't presume that your chosen favorite corrective action produces no externalities of its own.
To be clear, I agree that there is enough evidence against CO2 that it is worth considering taking action to force CO2 generators to bear the cost of the externalities they produce. I don't agree that it's "obvious" that: 1. the negative externality exists, 2. the chosen remedy will actually solve the problem, 3. that the chosen remedy is known to be sufficiently free of its own negative externalities to consider forcibly changing our behavior. I think these things are true, but I don't think it's obvious that they're true, and trying to assert their truth by trying to make them axioms is dangerous and counterproductive.
No, we don't. We have a lot of ideological beliefs, hypotheses, and speculations about the costs of CO2 emissions, with no predictive track record to back them up. So we don't have the kind of knowledge that we would need to have to justify dictating public policy to everyone in this area.
There is no reason whatsoever to think there is zero cost. Why would we implement public policy assuming this?
Edit to add: the public policy imposed on us today is based on what we thought we knew back when it was put in place.
To the extent that this is true, it is, IMO, mostly a bug, not a feature.
> the public policy imposed on us today is based on what we thought we knew back when it was put in place.
If you seriously believe the public policies we have today were all based on the best current knowledge at the time they were put in place, all I can say is that you have a most charming naivete.
It's an ideal to aspire to, but only if the ideal includes a very strict standard on what level of knowledge justifies dictating a public policy at all.
England has a public policy that people drive on the left. America has a public policy that people drive on the right. In a society that had no codified rule about which side of the road to drive on, where people just weave back and forth, the choice to not enforce a particular convention would also be a defacto public policy.
It seems to me that in general you should only need the preponderance of evidence to suggest that a public policy change will do more good than harm in order to adopt it; otherwise you're unnecessarily biasing yourself in favour of the status quo. This of course should be done with an appropriate risk-weighting decision theory (how you weigh a small chance of large negative utility against a large chance of small positive utility, etc).
Neither of these policies were imposed by government. They were conventions that naturally evolved without any top-level policy being dictated, because they are obvious ways of solving an obvious coordination problem about using roads, and only got codified in law after that natural process of evolution had taken place.
> in general you should only need the preponderance of evidence to suggest that a public policy change will do more good than harm in order to adopt it
Even this standard, while it is weaker than the one I have suggested for what is needed to dictate public policy to everyone, is still strong enough to exclude many public policies that are currently in force, or suggested.
If it didn't hurt humans but just insects that you're fond of, or just the ozone layer that protects you from radiation, or just the climate that you've come to enjoy, what standard of proof is needed?
Otherwise, it is too slow to act to prevent future problems.
In that regard, I feel it's best paralleled with business. Business decisions are often made with incomplete information, to get a competitive advantage. But you always need to weigh the risk/reward potential.
Feel it's the same for public policy. Depending on the potential risk of a particular policy, pitched against the level of confidence in the information that supports it, and you can arrive at a decision. I don't think it make sense to say, always wait for the confidence level to be approaching 100%. You've got to take calculated risks sometimes.
>I'd say having 70% of the information, something like that.
This is still missing the point. This means that you need only 31% of science to continue burning carbon, but you need 70% to stop burning carbon. You have created an asymmetry that's not justified by anything (let alone science). Public policy cannot be agnostic about the science. It's not possible.
If you say "let's wait" you're saying "it's safe to keep doing what we're doing" even though you don't have any justification for that.
To put it really simply, you've created a default bias. There is no reason to assume the default is better than a given alternative. It needs to be justified. If you can justify it, fine and good, let's do it. But no one has.
As I responded elsewhere in this thread, by this criterion, we should stop pretty much everything we are doing. Which is not a viable option, never has been, and never will be.
No, I'm not saying this. I'm saying we need to stop pretending its sustainable to keep burning carbon at the rates we are. It's not sustainable and we need to take painful steps immediately to stop this.
It does not mean we need to "stop doing pretty much everything we're doing". Not sure where you get that idea. It means we need to stop allowing every Cletus in Kentucky to buy an F-350 and pay $1.89 for a gallon of gas to cruise 56 miles to the local Walmart to buy factory farmed beef and a bunch of plastic sh!t shipped across the globe from 12 different parts of China.
The idea is we should live in reality, not that we shouldn't live.
Because your own stated criterion is that we need to be able to justify what we're currently doing based on scientific knowledge. We cannot justify most of the things we're currently doing on that basis.
> The idea is we should live in reality
We apparently don't agree on what "reality" actually is, at least with respect to how much of an emergency CO2 emissions are. You think they're a dire emergency. I think they're not an emergency at all. You will, I take it, claim to justify your belief that they are a dire emergency based on some kind of scientific knowledge. But it isn't. Nobody has a good enough predictive track record about the climate to make such a claim. So this claimed "knowledge" isn't actually knowledge at all; it's just people's beliefs and hypotheses and speculations. And that isn't a good enough basis to dictate public policy to everyone. Which is one of the key points the article we are discussing in this thread is making.
Exactly my point. Why do you think we need to have a higher justification for good ideas (engaging in sustainable behavior) than for bad ideas (engaging in unsustainable behavior)?
>We apparently don't agree on what "reality" actually is, at least with respect to how much of an emergency CO2 emissions are. You think they're a dire emergency.
>Which is one of the key points the article we are discussing in this thread is making.
And the point you're still missing is that not doing anything to stop risky behavior is making an assumption that it is safe to continue the risky behavior. That assumption is not grounded in anything.
You're misstating the alternatives. We're talking about public policy. The alternatives for public policy are "don't dictate what everyone must do in area X" or "dictate what everyone must do in area X". The former does not need a "higher justification". The latter does.
No.
>We're talking about public policy.
Yes.
>The alternatives for public policy are "don't dictate what everyone must do in area X" or "dictate what everyone must do in area X".
The world is not this simple. Regardless, we must dictate that people cannot inflict externalities on third parties without compensation.
>The former does not need a "higher justification". The latter does.
Where are you getting this idea? You're just stating a conclusion without any support. I can do that too:
You are wrong, I am right. You need to scientifically justify acts that have harmful externalities. You do not need to justify harmful acts that restrict harmful externalities.
Wow, this is easy! I should have been arguing like this all along!
I disagree. Individual people and businesses often need to make decisions with incomplete information, but individual people's or businesses' decisions are only about their own actions, not about everybody else's. But public policy decisions affect everybody, so the criterion needs to be a lot stricter for how complete the information needs to be and how confident we need to be in our knowledge before we impose a public policy on everybody.
> You've got to take calculated risks sometimes.
The idea that public "leaders" should be able to take calculated risks with everybody else's money (and lives) is, IMO, pernicious. This is exactly the mentality that has created so much mess in the world throughout history. No, "leaders" should not take calculated risks that affect everybody.
There's a certain symmetry to, say, FDR in the USA suggesting "maybe we should consider a new public policy restricting certain private business activities" with his New Deal and, say, Lenin in the USSR suggesting "maybe we should consider a new public policy allowing certain private business activities" with his New Economic Plan.
It seems like most of the users here have acknowledged that both of these constitute public policy changes. In fact, we could even imagine a scenario where passing one act is equivalent to repealing the other.
To say that both changes would require extremely high confidence, just "because they affect everybody", doesn't seem rational on this regard. Either the evidence supports one thing over the other, or it doesn't.
But I think you're taking a different view -- that there's a default anarchy / state of nature policy, that should be favoured with a very high prior, and any policy to deviate from it would require a much higher certainty than doing the opposite. Is that your position?
Again, your own logic destroys your argument.
We have made public policy decisions that heavily subsidize oil, cars, lowered air quality, etc.
These decisions affect everyone not just car drivers. These decisions were not based on complete information (in fact, we had very limited knowledge of global warming, air pollution, etc. when we made public policy decisions to favor air pollution).
>The idea that public "leaders" should be able to take calculated risks with everybody else's money (and lives) is, IMO, pernicious. This is exactly the mentality that has created so much mess in the world throughout history. No, "leaders" should not take calculated risks that affect everybody.
So why should Cletus who like to roll coal on Tesla drivers be able to take uncalculated risks that affect everybody?
I seriously think you don't understand what externalities are.
Yes, and I have already said that I oppose those decisions. The government should not be playing favorites.
> why should Cletus who like to roll coal on Tesla drivers be able to take uncalculated risks that affect everybody?
Cletus' behavior doesn't affect everybody; it only affects the few people who are within range of his coal rolling.
So you agree that government should stop subsidizing roads and suburbs?
>Cletus' behavior doesn't affect everybody; it only affects the few people who are within range of his coal rolling.
Actually air doesn't work this way. Pollution can and does carry for hundreds of miles.
But we can proceed with your fictional conception of aerodynamics.
How are the people that Cletus rolled coal on supposed to get compensated for their loss?
No, it's an affirmative choice to not impose a public policy on everyone based on what we think we know right now. And often that is the right choice.
> To make such an argument requires attacking that knowledge directly, showing specifically how it's wrong. Not just vaguely complaining that it's not good enough yet.
You have this backwards. Claimed knowledge doesn't get to be assumed to be right until it's shown to be wrong. It needs to demonstrate that it's right with a sufficient level of confidence before it even gets considered at all. "Not good enough yet" just means "you haven't shown your claims to be right with enough confidence to make them worth considering in this public policy debate".
> leaders act to address needs in real time, making the best decisions they can with the information available to them.
"Leaders" aren't the only ones who act to address needs in real time and make decisions. Everybody does that. Often the best thing for "leaders" to do is to not make any decisions at all as "leaders", but to simply let individual people, who have far more accurate information about their individual situations than any "leader" can possibly have, make their own decisions.
For a "leader" to make a decision and dictate a public policy, the policy needs to be based on knowledge that is strong enough to justify overriding the billions of individual decisions that people are making all the time about their individual lives, with a top-down dictated decision that everybody must follow. That's a much, much stricter requirement than most people appear to think.