The silence of risk management victory
&gt; It would have been far better to risk naysayers’ ridicule and dive in earlier and stronger.<p>It wasn&#x27;t ridicule, it was propaganda intended to get people to vote against their own best interests (and therefore stop politicians from acting, by threatening them with consequences)<p>And it worked, really well. Still does.<p>If you&#x27;re treating these issues as if it was a bunch of misled but ultimately well meaning individuals then you are in trouble before you start.<p>For example, &quot;we need new tech to solve this&quot;, which is both true and dangerous. True in the sense that a million little fixes have made things better, dangerous in that climate change deniers will use it to divert time, energy and money from known fixes:<p>&gt; Green energy cannot meet Germany’s need for reliable electricity. That is why Germany still needs copious amounts of fossil fuels; German CO2-emissions have risen since the nuclear power phase-out of 2011, despite the incredible subsidies for renewables.<p>&gt; Germany is an example of how not to do green energy. Instead the solution is to research and develop better green energy technology.<p>That was Bjorn Lomborg during the previous Ukraine gas crisis in 2014. Better technology than Wind and Solar, which are the two winners of a global, 4 decade race to produce cheap, clean energy. That&#x27;s what he thinks we need. While at that time Wind energy was the cheapest source of energy available, and Solar was rapidly catching it up.<p>And here he is on twitter a few months ago doubling down on that:<p>&gt; The idea that the Ukraine war could be fixed by choosing Western dependence on Chinese solar panels and batteries over Western dependence on Russian oil and gas reveals just how unserious the environmental movement really is<p>So, it&#x27;s a real problem, and we really need to do something about it, but what the consensus solution is, isn&#x27;t a solution after all, we just need to invest in future tech that will solve the problem. We can&#x27;t rely on the the Chinese manufactured solar panels that he himself claimed did not work. Now they work, they&#x27;re just too Chinese.<p>That&#x27;s the depressing lesson of Climate Change and COVID, if right-wing politicians can buy a few votes and stall some regulations via attacking science, reason, fact etc., then they will.