Vaccines another blow to the doom-mongers
Max Rashbrooke is a senior associate at the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies. He wrote 2018)
All around me I see people succumbing to despair. The world looks dark, and it seems – in some quarters – to have become the savvy thing to heed only the most downbeat predictions, to trust the doommongers. But in the last couple of years those commentators have been consistently wrong.
Take the coronavirus vaccines. When the outbreak began, even experts assured us it would be years before a vaccine was developed. It took nine months.
The rush has had some downsides: the Oxford vaccine, currently being investigated for links to potentially fatal blood clots in a very small proportion of recipients, may not be completely safe. But the other vaccines appear problem-free, and are being rolled out globally at an exceptional pace. Over half of Israelis and Brits have received two jabs and one jab respectively. (Our rollout has been far slower, though we started from a stronger, almost coronavirus-free position.)
While the vaccines won’t solve all our problems, they will make the coronavirus immeasurably easier to live with. They also represent a triumph of human ingenuity. Humanity may have brought the outbreak on itself, the insatiable drive for economic growth pushing us further and further into the pristine native habitats where such viruses would otherwise circulate at no risk to ourselves. At some point we will have to reckon with that fact. But at least we have, using all our vaunted powers of innovation, found a quick fix. And that’s not what the doom-mongers foresaw.
Speaking of vaccines: how well are the Americans doing? Over 100 million of them have now had at least one jab. Turns out you can work wonders if you actually have competent people leading your country. And that’s another area where the doom-mongers got it wrong.
President Joe Biden was always going to be popular in New Zealand, given that surveys showed just 11 per cent of us would have voted for Trump if we had the chance. But the doommongers didn’t give Biden much of a chance.
Trump’s grip on middle America was too strong, we were told. The politics there were too poisonous, the voters too ready to believe his propaganda. Well, that proved false, albeit only just. The fallback doom-scenario was that even if Biden won, Trump would steal the election. But while he gave it a good go – what we saw at the Capitol on January 6 was nothing less than an attempted coup – he ultimately failed.
But even if Biden resisted Trump’s attempted fraud, the darkest scenario ran, he wouldn’t be able to govern a hopelessly divided country. Well, he’s already passed a US$1.9 trillion stimulus package that is predicted to halve child poverty, and is gunning for a massive infrastructure spend-up that would reorient America towards a low-carbon future.
Speaking of climate change: that might be another issue where the doom-mongers are wide of the mark. Of all the dark things in the world, it is, admittedly, the darkest. We are already seeing its effects. We have watched wildfires burn around the globe, each incident a harbinger of what we can expect in a warmer world. Some sea-level rises are also inevitable, no matter what we do now. The poorest regions are being, and will continue to be, worst-hit.
But the gloomiest views – like the claim, echoed by the prominent US Democrat Alexandria OcasioCortez, that ‘‘the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change’’ – are obvious hyperbole. The darkest predictions are based on scenarios in which countries stay on their current carbon trajectories, something that simply will not happen.
The momentum for a greener world is growing.
In fact, there are signs of progress. In December last year, the Climate Action Tracker, a global not-for-profit initiative, argued that the Paris climate goals – to keep warming to below 2° Celsius, and ideally 1.5° – were coming ‘‘within reach’’.
The Tracker folk are no softies: they like to label countries’ climate plans ‘‘highly insufficient’’ or ‘‘critically insufficient’’. So what’s changed their minds? Big new net-zero emissions commitments from China and the US, among others.
The obvious problem remains, of course: countries so far have been much better at the relatively easy stuff, the long-term commitments, than the hard stuff, the short-term moves to actually reduce emissions. Those emissions continue to rise, year after year. But the momentum for a greener world is growing. Australia is building huge renewable-energy batteries, each bigger than the last. More than half the cars sold in Norway last year were electric.
Naive optimism serves no-one; but a guarded, grounded optimism is a vast improvement over despair. Hope in the dark, as the author Rebecca Solnit calls it. We are too prone to believe the darkest predictions, forget them when they are invalidated, and fall for them all over again the next time. So we need to keep reminding ourselves that the gloomiest scenarios are not always the right ones.
Government for the Public Good: The Surprising Science of Large-Scale Collective Action