No, it&#x27;s a closed loop of externalized costs. Workers have to try to eat, businesses have to try to compete, voters have to promote their economic interests, politicians have to stay elected. Climate change and antibiotic resistance et al don&#x27;t cost any of these people anything -- individually. If nobody has to pay for them, and everybody has to compete to take advantage of whatever they can to live and prosper, the rational thing is to fuck everything up. It&#x27;s a massive scale prisoner&#x27;s dilemma with high stakes.<p>Government is ostensibly the system that prevents external costs, and imposes rules that skew what&#x27;s rational for individuals today to be closer to what&#x27;s rational for society tomorrow, but in practice it fails to do so much of the time.