Well, there's cause and there's cause.

If you have a smoke problem you can put the fire out without working out how it started.

The smoke problem is at the end of a long web of causes and effects.

It is not possible to put out sufficiently large fires.

We need to act earlier in the causal chain. But where? And who pays?

Do we know areas at risk of uncontrollable fires?

Yes?

Do we know how to mitigate the risks?

>Yes? Do the things.

>No? Pay the experts to figure this out. Draft them if need be.

No? Pay the experts to figure this out. Draft them if need be.

Everyone pays proportionally. Nationalize assets if need be.

We have the knowledge, resources, and capacity to solve these problems. (Change my mind). We lack leaders with the spine to take necessary action.

If everyone agrees that the fire is causing the smoke and needs to be put out, we can do that.

The problem here is that we have a bunch of smoke, and a good chunk of the population is either saying that there's no smoke or that the smoke is unrelated to the fire.

How do you fix the smoke problem if you can't get enough people to agree to put out the fire?

Effective solutions to problems do not always depend on knowing the cause.

Climate change seems to be one of the problems where acknowledging the cause is key to solving the problem. The only viable solutions we have right now involve mitigating the cause.

This is a great point, there were many gravity powered devices before we had a good understanding of how or why gravity worked.