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The Swerve

locusmag.com

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Re: The Swerve

#51

Post by majormajor »

jacquesm wrote: post #41
majormajor wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is massively revisionist. "Shutting down overnight" was pretty much the response across the nation in March 2020. This was based on the information available at the time, and as things evolved, things changed. Everything after was basically differences in how quickly things opened back up (and what things, in what order, with what restrictions). And mass support for reopening rapidly with no restrictions wasn't…

There are only a few countries that really shut down (some only regional): New Zealand, Japan, Australia and China (others?). This one graph shows how effective it was and if we'd all done that the difference would be enormous, even for the countries that did shut down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_a...

Without a really deep dive I'm not certain the island-country numbers of Australia or Japan would be achievable in the US, but if I use Canada as a "certainly achievable standin" I would state my position as "unconvinced that the marginal benefits of additional restrictions initially + for longer would be worth it" but also "entirely convinced that if the US hadn't taken the steps it did, both individually and governmentally, that number would be many multiples higher."

The "none of this was necessary" position is just ultra-revisionist and often makes arguments as if today's variant and transmission environment is the environment that was in place in March 2020. It also ignores that individuals will make their own choices to change their behavior in the face of a new threat. "Not massively damaging some sectors of the economy" was never an option.

Re: The Swerve

#52

Post by EvanAnderson »

odessacubbage wrote: post #42
voakbasda wrote: post #4

It is just me, or is this an open call for a proletariat revolution against the bourgeois? Any successful "plunge past the first-class passengers" will not be a peaceful event.

in essence, any proposed swerve will do far less to hurt the first class passengers than it will to hurt those in coach and it will outright kill those who are hanging onto the bumper. whether those harms are moral, unavoidable or 'necessary' is largely open to interpretation.

Depressingly, harming the "lower class passengers" is a feature, not a bug. It helps deter them from taking action.

Re: The Swerve

#53

Post by bsedlm »

LarryDarrell wrote: post #3

It's not a bus, it's a train. Best case you can slow it down for a few people to jump off. Carter told people to wear a sweater and the American people flipped out and elected a ghoulish union-busting zombie. Twice. There will be no change until it is forced upon us when the treats stop flowing. And even then you just have to hope that the populace has an accurate story in their heads as to why.

it's a train, and it crashed already, but it's a rather humongous train, most of the train hasn't yet felt the shock from the crash

also, it's not a literal train, some people will be able to say there's no crash even as they fly out

Re: The Swerve

#54

Post by jacquesm »

prionassembly wrote: post #21

The thing about this kind of take is that there isn't really one bus hurtling towards one cliff. Climate, biodiversity, water pollutants, sustainable agriculture and extractivism... these are not orthogonal, but often run in different directions nonetheless. And then there's civilizational issues...

Yes, that's very true, the trouble is on many, many axis at once. This is what makes it so hard to engineer a solution: come up with something that might work along one axis and chances are that you are making things worse along another. Which then need to be weighed to decide if the change is a net positive and this isn't always easy to see at all.

For instance: a massive re-tooling towards solar and wind has its own climate impact as well as effects on available resources, pollution and lots of other side effects.

Re: The Swerve

#56

Post by dougmwne »

The swerve is not happening. The bus driver and first class passengers are locked up front. The road is on a steep decline. The bus is going fast and still accelerating. This sucker is going over the edge.

Re: The Swerve

#57

Post by dash2 »

Respectfully suggest this is nonsense. No serious climate scientist thinks we are going to fall off a cliff. There will be huge costs, yes. Civilization won't end, no.

What people fail to grasp is that costs can be absolutely enormous but look like a blip compared to the effect of GDP growth in the long run. World War II is an example. The millions of deaths barely show up on a graph of world population. The huge losses barely interrupt the smooth rise of GDP. Similarly, climate change could knock 5% off GDP permanently, this would be "the world's biggest collective action problem" as I think Nick Stern put it, but it wouldn't stop human society getting much richer.

Edit: a bit of backup: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/11/25...

Re: The Swerve

#58

Post by jacquesm »

odessacubbage wrote: post #42
voakbasda wrote: post #4

It is just me, or is this an open call for a proletariat revolution against the bourgeois? Any successful "plunge past the first-class passengers" will not be a peaceful event.

in essence, any proposed swerve will do far less to hurt the first class passengers than it will to hurt those in coach and it will outright kill those who are hanging onto the bumper. whether those harms are moral, unavoidable or 'necessary' is largely open to interpretation.

This is spot on. In fact, the number of people displaced by natural disasters (in large part driven by climate change) is already rising rapidly, but it doesn't really make the news because of where they live and what color their skin is.

20+ million people in 2020:

https://www.internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2021...

Re: The Swerve

#59

Post by jacquesm »

wrnr wrote: post #50
hgomersall wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know what to do about climate change - stop emitting greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide and methane. Any strategy that doesn't address that on the scale that is required can be immediately dismissed as noise. That leaves relatively few options, and those are well enumerated. Probably we need to do all of them.

Yea but HOW? Do you think there is some cheap pareto improvement to be had here. For god sake, the article is advocating for hurting and killing people and then complaining about a lack of political consensus.

The article isn't advocating for that, the article is merely observing that this is unavoidable.

Re: The Swerve

#60

Post by panarky »

danhak wrote: post #26
jacquesm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature really doesn't care about our feelings. All that whining is something that my grandmothers' generation would have scoffed at: you have it relatively easy, stop complaining. 5 years of war, occupation, hunger and brutal death is the kind of thing that generation lived through - or not, in many cases - and they came through to rebuild their world without bitching about it. COVID was - compared to that, sorry - a…

You don't seem to be engaging with the main point here: there were places that DID take COVID seriously--that shut down overnight, paid the price of mass unemployment, homelessness and growing tent cities, increasing substance abuse / overdose, loss of education that will never be recovered and countless other second-order effects. And those places did not emerge with a significantly better COVID outcome. Without an…

It should be beyond dispute by now that societies where most people took action to increase social distance had far better outcomes.

Japan, South Korea and New Zealand all have less than 500 cumulative deaths per 100K, while the USA is north of 3,000.

And they've demonstrated that it's possible to achieve good results without "mass unemployment, homelessness and growing tent cities".

But instead of learning what works and adopting those methods, apparently we're going to continue propagating disinfo that there's nothing that can be done, and any attempt to do something is doomed to second order maladies.

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