If nuclear war happened, and there was no way for us to know whether it would happen, there was nothing we could do to survive the event.

While climate change is happening, there is still a lot we can do to slow it down and mitigate its effects, both individually and collectively.

> While climate change is happening, there is still a lot we can do to slow it down and mitigate its effects

Not to disagree with your general point but one of the most frustrating things about climate change is knowing how much we could do, while seeing how little hope we actually have of making those changes.

Yes, at the time it seemed like something that might happen tomorrow. You had TV movies like "The Day After" and constant discussion of it in school and in the media. It was a real fear.

Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1963) has somebody in Sweden becoming depressed and withdrawn due to anxiety over China developing an atomic bomb. Then in 1982 Prince sang "everybody's got the bomb, we could all die any day". That's two decades of continual anxiety about sudden obliteration (or worse, near obliteration).

When did Reagan take Carter's solar panels off the White House roof, again?

I don't get it. The answer seems to be 1986. What do you mean?

That climate anxiety has existed at least as long.

The solar panels (and the famous sweater Carter wore when turning down the White House thermostat in winter) wasn't done out of climate anxiety though. This was done because of the oil crisis (at the time the US was more dependent than now on Mideast oil and their organization OPEC raised the price dramatically leading to shortages in the US).

Again, that doesn't tell the whole story. As we've discussed, solar research predates the episode by quite a long time, and Carter's efforts were not just about the energy crisis, but also about setting the foundation for future pro-environmental efforts (which were not necessarily about climate change at the time, but that certainly bled into those concerns later on). Your characterization seems to try to make Reagan's later actions seem more rational, when they very well may not have been based on anything but his disdain for his predecessor and his policies. We don't really know.

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2008/11/jimmy-carters-sol...

The solar panels that Carter installed were nearly useless, given poor 1970s technology. It was performative, showing that he was interested in doing something to handle the oil crisis, even if it was futile. And Regan's removal of them was likewise performative, signaling that there no longer was an oil crisis.

Carter's installation was actually then the latest in a long line of interested advocates who pushed for American adoption of not a particular device or system, but solar technology as a whole; his panels were better than what came before and worse than what came after, and might have prompted enhanced development, if not for the course history took.

Reagan, on the other hand, was one in a long line of what I like to call "Powerful White Men Whose Irrational Beliefs and/or Reckless Actions Ruined Millions of Lives", alongside the likes of Hoyt Hottel, an MIT chemical engineering professor who co-founded the Combustion Institute and who was somehow allowed to head (and thwart) MIT's solar engineering research efforts. (CEO Jack Welch, welfare reformer Larry Townsend, chemist Thomas Midgley, Jr, and urban planner Robert Moses are also on that list.)

I just think your scope is unnecessarily limited, I suppose.

Not a fan of Reaganomics, and people like Midgley are hard to defend, but I think you have the wrong idea of Hottel. Hottel basically invented solar energy as we know it in the 1930s -- he wasn't some guy trying to subvert it. There's a reason that the highest honor the American Solar Energy Society gives out is called the Hoyt Clarke Hottel Award.

And The Combustion Institute (which was founded in 1954, well after Hottel's solar breakthroughs) isn't the sinister thing you think it is. It's not about cars and their internal combustion, but about combustion science -- the science of fire.

Hottel expressed both explicit bias against solar research and implicit bias against one of his charges, who was actually a much more natural advocate for the technology ( https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/journeys-innova...). He headed MIT's solar research efforts, for sure, but again, I find this strange, since so many of his decisions reflected an undue skepticism for someone in that position. What a coup for his apparent ambitions that his name is on so many of the institutions whose purposes he stunted from the most advantageous perch imaginable: "leading" them.

Ultimately, he was a true advocate for combustion-based heating (solar also being focused on that rather than electricity generation through mid-century), which lead to the national status quo of high levels of airborne pollutants both indoors and in the environment, as well as the ever-present threat of one's domicile or business detonating with little notice. But, you know, worth it since hydrocarbons are cheaper. /s I apologize for the snark, but the way people like this get the benefit of the doubt in retrospect is quite frustrating. They made the world we were born into worse, and they did it on purpose (or negligently), for specious reasons. Fixing their mistakes means acknowledging that they sucked.

Rich Americans can buy a Tesla, solar panels, heat pump and give up meat, and feel like they’re making a difference.

But there’s several billion people without those options. Who’d all love to consume like rich Americans if they had the chance.

That nuclear war deal sounds way too good. Can't do anything about it? Well you don't have to worry then, since the inverse is also true. I.e. you don't have to do anything.

The thing is, it is not about what you can do, it is about what you must do. Emphasis on must. You must, but you don't, hence the guilt.