But, when the head of an international organization takes a week and a half to get to a meeting on the other side of the planet, and thinks that it's nicer to take a sequence of trains and sailing ships than it used to be to fly ... that seemed totally alien. When subsistence farmers were surprised by the large amount of money they were paid for getting more carbon into their soil, that seemed really implausible. When KSM glosses by how easy and quick it was to make giant wildlife corridors across North America, and talks about whole communities packing up and voluntarily abandoning towns to ceded those areas to nature ... that seemed wildly implausible.
There were a lot of these moments for me, and while I get the people that use these as a criticism against the realism of the book, I also think that gap is a criticism against all of us.
I'm not advocating for violence, to be clear, and in the novel KSM seems to take the stance that at some point violence is really counter-productive. But certainly there have been places and periods in which e.g. targeted kidnappings of rich people, assassination attempts on politicians, and terrorist attacks against high-profile targets have all been around -- why do you think is it impossible for those to be directed at people in power in the future? Especially if there are progressively more climate victims, it seems like we're setting the stage for a generation of people to be ripe for radicalization.
Submarine accidents not withstanding, I'm not convinced the UN in our current timeline could be transformed into one that engages in this behavior.
I'm going to go back to my comparatively easy computer engineering tasks after writing this comment, and have the greatest respect for those willing to confront coordination problems in the political sphere. That's playing the game on hard mode.
The whole thing reminds me of this thread [1] from a few weeks ago referencing Orwell's critique of Dickens:
>> The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. ... His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.
> I can't help but feel like TS Eliot's "public-spirited pigs" are the same thing as Dickens' "good rich men".
The good news is that we've developed systems of governance and economics that are not exclusively worse than uneducated tribalistic hunter-gatherer anarchy - a very large number of people live in significant comfort in relatively ordered, mostly polite societies, generally free to do what they want, and for the most part those societies build things like roads, landfills, electric grids, and fire departments together that make the community better. It's not perfect, for sure, and we're really missing the ball on this particular externality of global warming, but I have some hope that we'll figure out a way to address the problem that doesn't rely exclusively on weak moral appeals.
> The ways in which we fail to address societal issues are not in fact our responsibility, they're a systemic issue that is a function of human nature ... - that will not be solved by morose feelings of condemnation.
Are we not society? Do we not make up the system? But more importantly, you're refuting a statement of responsibility by saying the underlying problem won't be solved by feelings. Whether a statement of moral responsibility is _true_ and whether concurrent emotions on their own solve anything are fundamentally different propositions, and denying one implies nothing about the other. If I murder someone by stabbing them, perhaps that reflects part of human nature -- but a jury telling me I'm guilty is _correct_, even though their condemnation will not bring back my victim. It would be absurd for me to say "oh your moralizing emotional condemnation won't solve the issue of murder which has always existed in human societies, and certainly won't bring back the person I killed -- therefore I'm not responsible."
But somehow, if a few generations knowingly trash a whole planet, aware that this would cause chaos which results in a large number of deaths, illness, property damage, etc you want to believe that the fact that morose feeling will not suck carbon out of the atmosphere somehow implies that responsibility cannot be assigned.
One can argue about whether moral statements can meaningfully be "true" (I think they can), but one can't jump from "moral condemnation doesn't on its own solve problems" to "therefore moral responsibility can be denied in any instance".
If anything, I think the reluctance to fully face the problem and acknowledge our role in it, and to recognize the ways in which our own lives will need to be different to stop exacerbating the problem, is part of the foot-dragging.
> The whole thing reminds me of this thread [1] from a few weeks ago referencing Orwell's critique of Dickens:
>>> The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work.
But The Ministry for the Future is basically nothing _but_ constructive suggestions put in a nice palatable narrative container. We're not talking about a moral judgement in the absence of specific ideas about how to address climate change, environmental justice, and even wealth inequality. We're talking about acknowledging responsibility when, though opportunities stare us in the face, we do little or nothing to fix the situation we've created.
A population or corporation should be expected to be moral. Collective behaviors are a function of incentives and penalties, of pure economics.
If your plan to fix the problems in society relies on every member selflessly cooperating and fails if one member defects, if you create a system that is trivially exploited by rich amoral sociopaths not behaving like rich amoral sociopaths, then the defector is morally to blame when it fails, but that's still the expected outcome.