Definitely agree, but I think these are different aspects of the same problem. Part of why capitalism has been as successful ("successful") as it has is precisely because humans as a species have a really hard time with long time-horizon planning and problem solving. Our hyper fixation on short term gains under capitalism strikes me as a symptom of that problem.
In addition to that, though, I think climate change is a uniquely challenging problem for us to solve, given our cognitive equipment. Philosophers of climate science like to describe the problem as a kind of "perfect moral storm," where lots of things that are problematic on their own intersect in just the right way to create a really nightmarish problem. On top of the "we suck at planning more than a year or two out" issue, climate change is also spatially distributed and causally attenuated. My emissions from (say) driving my car don't have a measurable negative impact on me (or even my neighbors) right here, but rather spread out across the globe and contribute to an ongoing escalation that is felt worldwide. Likewise, it's basically impossible to attribute any particular impact to any particular agent: something like that California wildfire season is clearly and uncontroversially a result of climate change, but the causal connections between particular actions--me driving to work, the US failing to meet its emissions targets, a particular logging company clear-cutting a range in the Amazon, &c.--are so attenuated as to be basically meaningless. That's not to say that nobody is responsible (or that some relatively small number of people aren't much more responsible than everyone else), but just that our common sense ideas of what "responsibility" or "causation" look like don't really work here, and that more sophisticated concepts are needed.
All that (plus some other things) make reasoning about--and thus combatting--climate change really difficult on a mass scale. It's a kind of problem that we've never really faced before as a species, and it's one that plays right into many of our biggest weaknesses, both individually and at the socio-political level. I used to think that once the impacts of climate change became concrete and started harming people in wealthy nations in direct, obvious ways some of these difficulties might be circumvented. Then COVID happened, though, and I...no longer think that.
Definitely agree, but I think these are different aspects of the same problem. Part of why capitalism has been as successful ("successful") as it has is precisely because humans as a species have a really hard time with long time-horizon planning and problem solving. Our hyper fixation on short term gains under capitalism strikes me as a symptom of that problem.
In addition to that, though, I think climate change is a uniquely challenging problem for us to solve, given our cognitive equipment. Philosophers of climate science like to describe the problem as a kind of "perfect moral storm," where lots of things that are problematic on their own intersect in just the right way to create a really nightmarish problem. On top of the "we suck at planning more than a year or two out" issue, climate change is also spatially distributed and causally attenuated. My emissions from (say) driving my car don't have a measurable negative impact on me (or even my neighbors) right here, but rather spread out across the globe and contribute to an ongoing escalation that is felt worldwide. Likewise, it's basically impossible to attribute any particular impact to any particular agent: something like that California wildfire season is clearly and uncontroversially a result of climate change, but the causal connections between particular actions--me driving to work, the US failing to meet its emissions targets, a particular logging company clear-cutting a range in the Amazon, &c.--are so attenuated as to be basically meaningless. That's not to say that nobody is responsible (or that some relatively small number of people aren't much more responsible than everyone else), but just that our common sense ideas of what "responsibility" or "causation" look like don't really work here, and that more sophisticated concepts are needed.
All that (plus some other things) make reasoning about--and thus combatting--climate change really difficult on a mass scale. It's a kind of problem that we've never really faced before as a species, and it's one that plays right into many of our biggest weaknesses, both individually and at the socio-political level. I used to think that once the impacts of climate change became concrete and started harming people in wealthy nations in direct, obvious ways some of these difficulties might be circumvented. Then COVID happened, though, and I...no longer think that.
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