This denialism was already very strong well before the collapse of institutional trust that you're referring to. It goes back many decades, both at an institutional level and a population level.
Two things can be true at the same time.
1) We can recognize the measurable physical reality of climate change, the likely devastating impact on life, wealth, and well-being, and the absurdity of believing that all the data around it is an elaborate century long scam, especially when even huge moneyed interests that are condemned by it (e.g. Shell) acknowledge that it's really happening.
2) We can be suspicious of our government's ability to respond to it reasonably and not take advantage of and leverage the tragedy to force unpopular and restrictive changes on their populations.
That's a lazy cop-out, because the alternative to trusting those authorities is trusting business authorities, whom you have zero democratic control over, who have done nothing to earn trust, and who are driven by incredibly powerful, self-serving profit motives to fuck you over.
Saying that the public can't fix climate change because you don't trust public institutions, while careening down the road of private institutions causing climate change is illogical nonsense.
As Churchill once famously said, public solutions are the worst kinds of solutions, except all the others that have ever been tried.
A system of oligarchic patronage would also have the properties you describe, and I cannot seriously call that one a democracy, either.
They really didn't, what was thought to be sensible policy ended up exacerbating a problem much worse: primarily because COVID thrives in spreading in confined areas and was not viable for transmission outdoors when exposed to either water or UV light; furthermore, denying people to get outside, do excercise at gyms and get natural vitamin D, converse with people in person and overall just live their lives was cause to a much larger, but rarely spoken of epidemic unless you or your loved ones are in the medical field: suicide and over-dose out paced COVID deaths by mid-summer 2020 where I was and no one wants to talk about that.
People's mental health definitely has gotten worse from the lockdowns, and in the US states where they didn't do lock-downs thrived economically but had a huge economic disparity issue and homeless populations are at alarmingly scary levels.
Some people, like myself, dealt with out PTSD with intense gym sessions that were available 24hours/day (the adrenaline and endorphins were a lifeline) and depression was creeping in and I often had bouts of it despite my best efforts to make due.
The one good thing that came from lockdowns, in my view as an environmentalist, was that it showed how the Earth was actually healing itself: you could see the Himalayas from India when they stopped burning so much outdoors, the same could be seen in DTLA where most didn't even know there were mountains in the area because of pollution/smog.
I was an essential worker during this time, I chose to be rather than stay locked down a home as I knew after my teens in public high school that my cognition and over all mental health and well being suffer when confined in one place, and it was alarming to see it from the other side. People embraced it at first, made bread recipe videos and memes online and were actually rather nice to each other as we all had a common threat, but then after the Spring time it got really dark.
I want to write a chronicle of the events one day from the POV of small chef-owners/restaurateurs who got blind-sided from the politics of COVID, but the more the I think about it the more its a reflection on how poorly Society fared during that time and its actually never gotten better.
In the UK people out of work were given 80% of their pay. Denmark paid people 75% of their income. The Netherlands gave their people 90% of their wages. All of this on top of their already strong social services and safety nets which helped make sure that people were taken care of.
In the US we got nothing until after a lot of government fighting we were reluctantly given a couple $1,000 "stimulus" checks leaving Americans with record amounts of household debt. We're still seeing the impacts in increasing rates of utility disconnections and rising numbers of evictions and homelessness which will likely continue to get worse long before they improve.
This is completely subjective to someone's values. To some, living is more important than survival. Not everyone believes in courage in the sense of loving life (life as in the virtue of living, not specifically one's own life) enough to being ready to die for it. Lockdowns were smart to some, but a tyranny to others, and we are still paying dearly for them. Even those of you in bed with the green agenda should be distraught over this, the world's coal consumption set a new record in 2022, and the lockdowns are largely to blame.
I‘d love to learn more about that interaction.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand why people deny climate change, but it usually comes down to a few basic things: 1. Group membership. 2. Seeing is believing, and not having been impacted yet. 3. Having been impacted, but unwilling to admit it due to embarrassment/sunk cost fallacy. Honestly I expect that after this summer most people in cohort 2 will move to cohort 3.
Possibly, although that would imply that you'd see more acceptance at the state, local, and individual level, and I certainly haven't seen that.
What I have seen is people eager to latch on to any narrative that doesn't involve big changes, especially not big preemptive changes.
They would be 'legions' comprised of men like the the Qanon Shamaon I take it? If so, this would be a short fought battle and these often over-weight, out of shape diabetics wouldn't do very much. Moreover, it was Trump who advocated for lockdowns and was the first to highlight not allowing super-spreader events to take place as the Pandemic started to get serious in Asia: unlike that walking corpse Pelosi had in San Francisco for the Lunar New Year to goad her voter base into thinking she was more progressive and woke and told everyone to go out and celebrate.
Again, facts be damned, people are hardliners that justify their own cognitive dissonance.
You strike on something notable, but fail to see the facts that these people are ill-informed and much of social media has made them that way, which if we are honest is really what a place like HN should be able to do considering it's root within tech.
But hey... who says they aren't in denial and deluding themselves, either?
No, more like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, the QAnon shaman did serve as a pretty effective media distraction, though.
I'm going to be incredibly cynical and go back to my channer days for a second because you think this holds water for some reason:
I can't believe anyone thinks these cosplaying militiaman would hold their own in any real conflict, it's pathetic: look at how the bodies of even mercenaries from Wagner are piling up when former Ukrainian farmers, bakers, bank tellers, and artists are trained by and with modern Western weaponry. The fact that anyone thinks these things is why I think Social Media has irreparably damaged most people's minds.
Bubba and his buddies stack of ARs isn't going to mean a thing if they were taken seriously, it takes one drone strike at the local watering hole for this to end; what I think is a media distraction is how Jan 6th was a psyop that let these imbeciles into one of the most fortressed places on Earth in order to increase survielence and policing budgets; they let the National Guard sleep on the floor and opined how under-budgeted they were and was unpreventable when their is actual video footage of the security letting the mob into the Capital rather than doing their job and stopping them from making a mess.
Hell one guy even had a heart attack on the way to storm the Capital by tazing himself in the balls [0].
I think I've had enough of HN for today...
0: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/01/13/fac...
Americans have believed it since the country was founded, it's part of their national myth, that they began as a ragtag bunch of drunken rebels who took down the greatest empire in the world with nothing but grit and tenacity (and definitely no help from the French, Spanish and Dutch.)
Jan 6th was such a mess not because it was a psyop to increase surveillance and police budgets (Americans by and large love both of those things during Republican administrations, and the government doesn't need a pretext) but because despite American bluster about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, all most American gun owners know about actual combat or insurgent operations they learned from playing boomer shooters.
But yes, they absolutely believe the government's fear of the pistols they keep hidden under their pillows is the only thing keeping the US from tilting into hard Stalinist tyranny at any moment.
Probably true—I wonder what he did to earn that level of trust?
We need to make predictions for more than 30 years that are accurate before we trust scientists?
Or has it been destroyed? By what?
You talk about another completely arbitrary problem with government decision making without context as if it dismisses this entire argument without need for explanation.
You then go on to say that Trumpists trying to start a civil war do so not for comfort but due to trust.
That couldn't be further from the truth. The entire point of the far right propaganda machine is to aim for comfort. Anything wrong is the out groups fault and eliminating them will bring back your comfort is the tagline of that mindset.
Efficiency is an answer but the question is never asked in public. Why? Secondly, a handful of industrial actors and their dot-mil customers are apparently never to be questioned, instead we get the 632nd episode of you and your carbon footprint, citizen.
I'm growing tired of the idea that riding a bike instead of driving a car is a discomfort equivalent to being a Neanderthal.
Biking works out just dandy for Netherlands.
It's not about comfort. It's about aversion to change.
But I also flew about 100,000 km per year in the time before COVID and am still on track to fly about 30,000-50,000 km this year. This puts me right back among the people with the highest carbon footprints in the whole world.
There are lots of different things that people might be asked to sacrifice, not just one. And the general trend of development and rising wealth is a trend of greater energy intensity. You can find exceptions and substitutes where you can reduce energy intensity in some area without major sacrifice, but if you have to do it across the board over and over again, that's really a loss of material standard of living.
You were going to fly 30k-50k km regardless of if you biked or drove.
The fact that you biked cut your emissions quite a bit.
A cut in emissions is still a success.
And before anyone says, but what about my electric car!?
1) it produces a ton of carbon to build your car (a year's worth of emissions for a Westerner)...
2) for at least the next 10-years, in most of the US and the EU, your car is charged by ~50% fossil fuels.
The average person's emissions are almost ~1/10th just from building their car...
Can I ask why? I struggle to think of a legitimate reason anyone would need to travel that much.
Please don't say it's for meetings.
This year is family visits and vacations.
My travel patterns were still rather low for self-conscious "frequent flyers", who would, for example, feel an absolute requirement to fly at least 50,000 or 100,000 miles on a single airline each year in order to "maintain status" so that that airline would reward them with various perks. I have "only" ever done this once. Of course, I expect even approaching the low end of a frequent flyer status is probably the top 1% carbon footprint in the world.
No, I haven't. And I fail to see how being out-of-shape is a comfort and not a discomfort.
I do agree that we can't force morbidly obese people onto bikes.
But the narrative amongst healthy people has got to change that their life would be DRAMATICALLY worse if they biked instead of drove a stupid $80k SUV.
Only ~28% of urbanites are obese in the US, btw. Compare that to ~60% in most rural areas and suburbs. In most walkable urban areas - this number is ~20% or less.
It's almost as if the car and the design of our cities makes us fat, and maybe we should change that, instead of saying that the car & roads & parking makes us comfortable.
Let's also not forget that the US pretty much has no bike infrastructure. You can say "well, that's your fault," but it's not the fault of the SUV drivers; it's the fault of city planners who plan for anticipated demand by cyclists, rather than leading with infrastructure to encourage cycling. This predictably leads to a lack of people wanting to cycle, for fairly rational reasons: roads built for and dominated by cars are not very safe for people riding bikes. So, the demand doesn't materialize because the infrastructure isn't here, which inhibits demand.
Oh, and yeah, the auto manufacturers had a bit to do with it as well. [0]
In any case, your ire is aimed in the wrong direction, and the "fat, out of shape American" stereotype has very little to do with it.
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[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/cycling-boom-us-streets-infr...
Netherlands doesn't have a huge biking culture in the middle of nowhere, Netherlands.
Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)
Companies need to see where people are commuting from and set up a small office to capture those people.
Who thinks it's a good idea for hundreds of thousands of people to burn fuel to sit in an open office with half the company WFH that particular day?
Commuting culture is insanity.
It's almost like we should invent a train or a bus or something - working from home, moving closer to work, getting a different job, plus more options than I care to enumerate.
Who says you need to move?
~50% of the US population is urban, and that number is rising quickly.
Miami & Los Angeles could be biking paradises with minimal effort from the city.
But voters view bikers as subhuman.
No one did. That’s why “or being taxed to upgrade infrastructure” is the very next part of my statement.
It's also okay to be a little uncomfortable. A lot of us are quite obsessed with avoiding discomfort, but it's often exactly what we need. I like riding my cargo bike with my son to his school, getting soaked and blown around in the wind. Sometimes he hates it, sometimes I dream of dry sunny days, but when I get home or to the office I'm in love with my awesome bike and all the cool stuff we do with it. Camping, shopping, errands—it's awesome, and totally worth the discomfort.
Like in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: on a bike, you're in your environment, not just watching it go by. You're a participator, not a spectator. You're in the weather, you can reach out and touch some tall grass or a low hanging branch. That aspect makes little parts of the day so much more immersive and interesting. I love that, and I'll take getting hot and sweaty or cold and soaked over driving my car 95% of the time.
I know it's only my perspective, and many will never consider it, but I hope a lot more people do. Bikes made my life so much better.
For what it's worth, I'm out of shape and a bit overweight, so I'm not some fit and out-of-touch athlete telling people they should just go ahead and do a difficult thing.
I'll admit though, there are definitely financial barriers. If you take the bus for economical reasons, an electric cargo bike probably isn't an option. If you own a car and need it, and you can barely afford it as it is, an electric cargo bike also isn't a realistic option. It's definitely a privilege in a sense, and I won't shame someone for relying on a car in those circumstances. Well, I won't shame anyone regardless.
The car's role in family life is hard to overstate, though, when you have more than one kid, and you need to get somewhere all together while also bringing some cargo like a stroller.
We get by with renting a car occasionally, but installing two car seats and bringing them back up to the flat again is getting really boring.
Actually I'm dreaming of buying a used RV...
This seems to ignore that we've been thinking of the cars for a century and it really hasn't worked out all that well for cities, where most people live.
We need to do it differently, and more cars/space for cars isn't the solution. It doesn't need to be bikes either; plenty of people can't even ride bikes. All access lanes seem be the best solution I've seen (wide enough for mobility scooters, room for passing, on and off ramps, etc).
Most people are pathetically weak with such an extreme aversion to minor discomfort or the denial of indulgence and acute pleasure. This counter intuitively makes their holistic life experience more miserable than if they had the foresight to sacrifice a little today for a much better future.
Aversion to exercise and eating healthy resulting the obesity epidemic is the classic example of this.
Enlightened hedonism is the way.
The same Netherlands that still can’t say goodbye to its beloved car. Traffic is back and surpassed pre-covid records. We still have to keep speed restrictions during daytime to reduce emissions because we just can’t help it to live in one part of the country and work in the other.
Well said.
You wouldn’t need so many cargo ships plying the world’s oceans, for instance, if you simply produced more locally and regionally.
Yet, we’ve somehow decided that complicated supply chains that simply add to consumption bloat are more important.
Would we really be in that much pain if our local store stocked 10 types of tees instead of 200?
I think there's so much skepticism of climate change precisely because so many of those pushing for action are so invested in using climate change to push for other political goals. Chiefly anti-capitalism and de-growth. People aren't necessarily adverse to climate action, they're adverse to anti-capitalism or de-growth. As much of a buffoon he's been in recent years, one of the best things Elon Musk has done via Tesla is demonstrate that climate action does not have to be coupled with the deeply unpopular positions that so many climate activists espouse. Likewise, France demonstrates how electricity can be thoroughly decarbonized without making people's lives substantially more uncomfortable.
We all worship the beast that feeds us, right until the moment it turns around and devours us.