[mistermann]

> We need to act. With significant effect. Now.

Perhaps. But what action(s) are optimal? Are the top 5 most optimal actions contained within Doctorow's essay?

Consider his ending:

> We’ll swerve. The bus will roll. It will hurt. It will be terrible.

> But we won’t be dead on canyon floor.

> We’ll fix the bus. We’ll make it better. We’ll get it back on its wheels. We’ll get a better driver, and a better destination.

> That’s our happy ending. That’s our hopeful future.

> We gotta get ahold of that wheel first. You ready?

> Let’s roll.

I wonder: what does "Let's roll" resolve to?

[dredmorbius]

"Let's roll" is an allusion to a self-sacrifice made on the moring of 11 September 2001, in which a group of unorganised civilians aboard United Airlines flight 93 stormed the cockpit within which armed hijackers were piloting the aircraft toward Washington, DC, having already killed the flight crew and several passengers. The group stormed the cockpit and overwhelmed the hijackers, crashing the aircraft into the ground in rural Pennsylvania. All 44 on board were killed, either in the crash or earlier by the hijackers. "Let's roll" were the last words uttered by passenger Todd Beamer via phone before the passengers swerved the bus, in this case, an aircraft.[1]

The plane's likely target, the US Capitol or the White House, were saved.

What "let's roll" resolves to is principled sacrifice for the greater goood.

There is no Pareto-optimal solution. That is, there is no action which causes no harm, or benefits all.

There are less pessimal solutions. There are courses of action which minimise net harm, or perhaps more significantly and apporpriately, maximise long-term survival, resilience, and net quality of life for many future generations.

We're having this discussion in the immediate context of a global pandemic whose reported deaths exceed six million souls with estimates of actual deaths from 15--26 million[2], in which both individuals and political leaders at city, state, and national levels refused to take or implement basic measures such as social distancing, masking mandates, and vaccine requirements, on the basis of claimed rights to attend spring break parties, "personal freedoms", pecuniary concerns (most of which appear to have been far more severely impacted by measures taken in their name), and similar short-sighted, selfish, and straight-up counterfactual bases.

Cory, I, and numerous others aren't saying there's a fairytale ending to this. There are simply less horrific variants of hell.

I've been reading Kim Staley Robinson's fiction book Ministry for the Future. Among the criticisms I've seen of it is Francis Fukuyama's, who finds the book unrealistic in that KSR seems to assume that everything goes right. Mind that "going right" includes mass terrorist response that destroys tens of thousands of commercial jetliners in flight and heatwaves killing tens of millions across South Asia.

Fukuyama is right in one regard, though. KSR is showing us what a best case (or close to it) scenario might look like. It is an optimistic book.

And it's still got some pretty awful parts.

The line we'll likely track will be far south of Robinson's plot. But the line we follow doing nothing is far further south still.

Or to quote another climate realist: Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

________________________________

Notes:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

[mistermann]

Sure, I realize all this, but my point is that recommendations of what we should do tend to be excessively abstract, at least in my opinion.

"What "let's roll" resolves to is principled sacrifice for the greater good" is all well and good, but what does it look like physically?

And, as you note: what if we do come up with a viable strategy, but substantial portions of the population are not interested in going along? It happened once, I'd feel extremely comfortable wagering top dollar that it will happen again - does anyone have a plan for this? "Sacrifice!" seems rather underpowered.

[dredmorbius]

Stop. Burning. Fossil. Fuels.

[mistermann]

And if mother nature says "no", what do you counter with? More rhetoric? More democracy?

As the saying goes: "if wishes were horses, beggars would ride".

Sometimes success takes hard work and skillful thinking, this is well demonstrated by history. And time's a wasting.