To speak with authority on the COVID-19 pandemic or on climate change, you generally need some academic credentials or professional experience. These are complex scientific topics. Yet it seems that both covid and climate change have a lot in common, and the list of experts who are well-qualified to speak on both must be very small. Our scientific age of hyper-specialization has created a conundrum for the common man to untangle.
Both covid and climate change involve risk analysis. How dangerous is it? How does the danger of a new coronavirus variant compare to other dangers like social isolation, putting people out of work, or shutting down schools? It took time for data to come in and these varying risk levels to become more actionable. Likewise, how does the danger of warming two degrees Centigrade compare to the danger of third world poverty? What kind of timeframe is needed to make this judgment? When anyone argues that there's no more time to debate, my skepticism grows.
Even with some agreement on the danger, both covid and climate change involve a cost/benefit analysis for mitigation. What can actually be done about it, at what cost, and who gets to decide? After three years of mask mandates (finally ending February 2023), it became clear that there was no point in discussing the effectiveness of the mask. It had reduced to a sign of compliance. Some may think the mask is an effective and effortless way to reduce risk. Others see the mask as useless and authoritarian. Whatever your opinion, the sign is primary and the effectiveness is secondary. This reminds me of the recycling bin and a curious incident at my company years ago. At an all-hands townhall meeting, the CEO would often answer questions from the employees. One employee was concerned that our cleaning staff regularly tossed the contents of the recycle bins and the trash bins into the same dumpster. The CEO responded that we shouldn't worry because the recycling gets separated out at the waste facility. I've never looked at the sign and significance of the recycling bin quite the same again.
Both covid and climate change involve a tension between public policy and personal responsibility, which maps neatly to our left/right party lines. Governors of New York and California issued strong mandates to control public behavior. Governors of Florida and South Dakota issued strong statements that individual citizens should remain free to confront the problem as they thought best. The virus knows nothing of state lines, so we have no clear-cut way of measuring who was right. Carbon emissions also know nothing of state lines, so the effectiveness of climate legislation in California can't really be measured.
Both covid and climate change pit the developed West against developing Asia. The virus originated from China, possibly from Western-funded lab research gone wrong, and it spread rapidly out of Asia with Western-driven globalization. The Asian-style response of lock downs and masks also spread with it to the West. If the burning of fossil fuels has been the decisive factor in rising temperatures, that innovation arose in the West as well. And yet it's Asia that is now burning the greatest amount of fossil fuels to lift multiple billions of people out of poverty for the first time. Asia is going to burn what it needs to burn in order to get there, and who in the West can say no?
Finally, both covid and climate change show the dangers and benefits of modern science. We may have created that virus, and we may have created this global warming. But we also quickly created a vaccine and new medications, and we have smart people who can figure out how to produce and consume energy in new ways without the old risks. I don't have much faith in government mandates, but I do in human ingenuity.
