Simply flabbergasted that the FSO Safer is STILL a deteriorating ecological time bomb while we wait for the US and Saudi Arabia to pull of the couch cushions and scrounge up the necessary $80 million. This is a small-scale exemplar of why we're so fucked in terms of climate change - the cost to fix it 50/30/10 years ago would be significant but we have simply refused to do so because it's not in our immediate political/national/foreign policy interests AND because we're shitty at assessing future risks vs. present costs. Should we pay $80 million NOW to fix a problem that could cause irreparable ecological damage and $20 billion to properly clean up? Ask any rational person on the street and the answer is "yes" - but filter that through our fucked political and foreign policy institutions and it comes out as "maybe, check later." Climate change is the same kind of problem and, unlike the FSO Safer, I think we may have already lost our opportunity to avoid the irreparable ecological damage and whatever the equivalent of the $20 billion dollar clean up/adaptation bill will be.
Simply flabbergasted that the FSO Safer is STILL a deteriorating ecological time bomb while we wait for the US and Saudi Arabia to pull of the couch cushions and scrounge up the necessary $80 million. This is a small-scale exemplar of why we're so fucked in terms of climate change - the cost to fix it 50/30/10 years ago would be significant but we have simply refused to do so because it's not in our immediate political/national/foreign policy interests AND because we're shitty at assessing future risks vs. present costs. Should we pay $80 million NOW to fix a problem that could cause irreparable ecological damage and $20 billion to properly clean up? Ask any rational person on the street and the answer is "yes" - but filter that through our fucked political and foreign policy institutions and it comes out as "maybe, check later." Climate change is the same kind of problem and, unlike the FSO Safer, I think we may have already lost our opportunity to avoid the irreparable ecological damage and whatever the equivalent of the $20 billion dollar clean up/adaptation bill will be.