Best-Case and Worst-Case Scenarios

edge.org

23 pointspella3 comments

The response to COVID-19 does not make me optimistic about the world addressing climate change at all. China reacted by covering up the problem, the US leadership called it a hoax and encouraged a vocal group of conspiracy theorists, and numerous countries are guilty of seizing each other's equipment and supplies. The author does not make a convincing argument that the response to COVID-19 by the global community was not an embarrassment. I think it demonstrated we don't have the tools to handle a global crisis.

The argument could be made that this is the first pandemic that the world failed in decades. MERS, SARS, Ebola, etc, are all examples of pandemics we did not see because the groundwork, learnings and operational cooperation was already in place.

It is obvious that this was not the case - this time.

I've been cottoning on to the political aspects of Big Problem resolution (or mitigation or response or ...) and it's not prety.

The work of William Ophuls (Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity and Plato's Revenge especially), and others, possibly Thomas Homer-Dixon most principally.

Basically, polities seem to fall apart badly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com