> My biggest pet peeve is this idea that the human race or even some large swath (“investors”) are doing one thing instead of another. How does one “pour billions in to policies” anyways? How do investors investing in bigpharma in any way impact public health policy?
You're asking these questions as if they're rhetorical, relying on the simplicity of the "One doesn't! They don't!" answer to get that answer which you want. But that's not the true answer, the true answer is just more complicated.
People are investing billions into getting policies passed (lobbyists) and implementing them (compliance, government contracting, etc.). These are multi-billion-dollar economies.
Big pharma affects drug policy through lobbying, drug pricing, choosing what drugs to research and make publicly available, etc.
> If the worst miscalculation you can point at the human race making is accidentally planting too many trees - well - I think the author is perhaps the myopic one!
The miscalculation being pointed out by the author is that we're paying fraudsters for environmental interventions like removing carbon from the atmosphere, and they aren't doing it.
Even if planting trees is a good, it's not the good we're paying them for and it's not getting the results we intended. And if you read the article with the intention of understanding it rather than with the intention of picking it apart, you might have noticed that it points out that the trees aren't even getting planted in many cases.
> Of course they immediately confuse other complex topics (wildfires bad is an extremely naive understanding of California!) so pulling apart any of this is hopeless.
"Wildfires bad" is an extremely naive understanding of this article. Perhaps pulling apart the article is only hopeless for you because you're trying to pull it apart without bothering to understand it.