We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

I agree. I've been thinking about this problem for a very long time. Since the mid-1990s. I'm not a fast thinker, or particularly good, so it took me 20 years or so to figure it out. It's really only in the last couple of years that I think I really understand where and how we went wrong.

I gave my first presentation on the greenhouse effect, as it was still called, while I was in high school (graduated 1974). It was reasonably well received and a small group of students started cooperating in letter writing campaigns and trying to speak at council meetings and other venues. We were part of a movement that was starting to make progress.

Meanwhile, those threatened by change, everyone from people fearful for their jobs and their ways of life to captains of industry and politicians were doing their thing. And they were far better organized and far better funded. The end result was that we got Thatcher and Reagan and others like them.

We joined a variety of so-called environmental groups:

1. Ducks Unlimited was not interested in the environment, only in making sure that their members still had stuff to shoot at. Many of the members were farmers who were actively draining wetlands on their own property while petitioning for some semblance of wetland protection on public lands.

2. The Fish & Game societies were not interested in the environment, only in making sure that their favourite hunting and fishing spots were protected from newcomers. Many of their members were farmers who thought nothing of taking out a fence line to make a field larger or plowing up a new plot of land or lobbying for the transfer of Crown lands to private hands.

3. Groups like the Sierra Club were not interested in the environment, only in protecting their precious hiking trails from the unwashed masses.

By the mid-1990s, modern neoliberal economic and social theories had become so firmly entrenched that even those people claiming to be socially conscious, left wing thinkers were working from the premise that neoliberalism was not mere ideology, but represented a set of ground truth facts about the world equivalent to the law of gravity and the laws of motion. As a result, we had things like Saskatchewan's NDP, arguably the founders of the Canadian public health care system, closing hospitals and clinics, gutting the workforce, and reducing funding. Everyone, it seemed, had fully internalized the "reality" that the stock market and the economy are one and the same.

And here we are, completely incapable of imagining any large scale project that doesn't have it's roots and execution in "market" thinking. Cost/"benefit" analyses that are, in fact, strictly financial profit analyses that exclude any consideration of actual impact on quality of life or externalization of costs.

I think a lot of the problem is general apathy. As a software engineer I came into this world with a desire to improve the world through technology, and landed in a world where nobody gives a damn about anything besides getting paid. Though, to be fair, when you're a small cog in a huge company where half of the time you don't even know what's the bigger picture, and the product you're working on isn't yours in any way, it's hard to care, and this carries over easily into everyday life.

Climate: A lot of people don't even think it's man-made, or that it's serious, or that we can do anything about it. (Also I think that it's quite a shame that it's often mentioned as "Save the planet", as if Earth is going to get destroyed, and not "Save humanity")

Work automation: Even software engineers say how automation will "kill jobs", which betrays the worldview in which it's only important to have a job and make money, doesn't matter what your work is.

Inequality: Again, most don't care and believe that poverty is a result of moral failing, or just think that it's not their problem so they have nothing to do with it.

Fascism: Youtube is absolutely brimming with terrible content that leads people down that path because it's so simple and seemingly intuitive, and the prevailing opinion (at least around me) is that everything else is just "feminazi sjw feelings" propaganda. Even "anti-fascism" is often seen in a bad light.

I agree with you completely, the solutions are there, we're just not using them, and I think that the bulk of the problem is that most people have been conditioned to a certain worldview where everything is as it should be, and has been since forever (very often nationalists like to project their modern worldviews into ancient and medieval history), and your only concern is your day-to-day life, to have a job, make money and numb yourself to reality ("have fun") until you die.

We have to get people to believe in societies again, to make small mutual-aid agreements in daily life with our friends and family and make them seem normal and how societies should function. And that's something deeply entrenched in human culture, the "general wisdom" we tell kids and rarely do ourselves: "Be kind, help others". Just today I saw a woman accidentally get her front wheel stuck in a ditch, and she couldn't get out. Almost instantly a couple of complete strangers that were passing by came to help, and they managed to get the car unstuck. As Mencius said, if someone were see a child about to fall into a well, they would immediately and without second thought run to save the child, our default mode is to help those who need it.

I'm somewhat more optimistic, but some things are easier than others.

The transition to environmentally friendly energy production will happen, because it's cheaper. It ought to have happened sooner, because when accounting for the true costs of fossil fuels and other kinds of pollution it always was cheaper to use renewables. It just didn't appear so.

Similarly, I believe the costs of not doing the right things for work automation, fixing inequality and even misinformation, will eventually prove to be higher than just doing things right. It just doesn't show up as a direct cost at the moment.

The key to understanding the effects and true costs lie in education. Thankfully more people are better educated today than 30-40-50 years ago, so eventually and hopefully we will soon have politicians and other leadership who are also able to see past the direct costs. I don't think it's a gradual change. It'll happen quite fast with the change of a generation. The last dinosaurs and their voters will disappear and younger and better educated leaders with more realistic ideas will prevail.

But no, it's not a job for engineers. Education is the most important part of all this.

If you really want to get pissed. The worlds share of low carbon electricity was 35.88% in 1985 and it was 38.73% in 2022. So bascially nothing really was done to actually go green in nearly 40 years. It is not like we do not know how to built nuclear power plants, we have been able to scale up hydro, which is still the most important clean energy source and we even have cheap solar and wind, which today beats nuclear in cost.

We'll all support you when you decide (to run for office).

Thanks for sharing!

This kind of stuff is why I come here. Great post.

Good read although I think the critics of this idea have gone a little too far recently. It’s certainly true that the tragedy of the commons is not some universal truth of commonly managed resources. There are numerous examples of well-managed communal resources from across the world and history—in fact I would argue that part of what all governments do is the management of commons. But there are also plenty of examples where management was non-existent or ineffective, which led to the squandering of resources. So the tragedy of the commons still exists, but in a smaller subset of situations than claimed by the original author. There are even examples of this “tragedy” from commons that have been privatized.

So I think it’s still an interesting concept, just one that needs a reworking with a more evidence-based and less ideological framework.

First of all to understand that the problem is not technology, but the systems we have. So the goal should be to either change the systems we already have or to create new ones. The common tools are:

• ban bad technoligies. That would be something like a ban on internatl combustion engines or fossil fuel boilers
• set up none capitalist structures to gurantee access to some technolgies. For example public health care for cancer medicin.
• change planing priorities. That would be public funding for railways instead of car based infrastructure.
• add hidden costs as real costs. Something like emissions pricing for example.

A lot of this can be done on a smaller scale as well. Local councils are responsible for roads and therefore can turn parts of them into cycling infrastructure. Then you have stuff like cooperatives for utlities for example. They are run for the benfits of the members and not for Wallstreet. The key is to change the underlying system to make it better. There are plenty of threads here, which talk about individual solutions. Just go for a problem that you are intrested in and find a solution. Usually they can be fund and just have to be copied and adapted to local factors.

Also important to say is that you are not going to fix the every problem in the world alone. Fixing one part of the problem is difficult enough and you have to trust that others will do the right thing as well.

Why would rich people change the society which made them rich in the first place?