> Now it sounds like you've pivoted to, "it's complicated and we would have to think really hard about it", contrasting this with an overt strawman, as though a

> Now it sounds like you've pivoted to, "it's complicated and we would have to think really hard about it", contrasting this with an overt strawman, as though any reasonable solution would consist of "sit back and say 'we did the best we could'". None of this is a pivot; systems science is my primary topic of interest but if I started talking about attractors or distributed-parameter systems then I'm just spewing jargon and that doesn't help anybody. We need market interventions, funding interventions, sociological, maybe even cultural interventions (if anybody's figured out how to shape culture yet). My point is that systems science provides an approach to dealing with these exact kinds of problems. My point (which, I don't know if I'm not being clear enough or you're just missing it) is that as a society we tend to over-rely on just legislating away issues. The problem is that these techniques aren't going to cut it in this instance. They might help a bit, but it's not going to remove the need for fossil fuels, which are one of the biggest problems. It might make the occasional chemical plant executive think twice about dumping waste into the water. Those aren't the kind of incremental results that will avoid disaster. And you can't rely on the compounding of incremental results either, as would typically be the next step in the reductionist pipeline of ineffective approaches. Even if we stave off anthropogenic co2, we still have every other climate problem we've created to deal with. If you think that making murder illegal has done the job of reducing the murder rate then there's really no getting through to you. Murder's been illegal for hundreds or thousands of years depending on the country, and it turns out that other things have done the work that making murder illegal could not. If perhaps we could have investigated and put funds towards those things earlier, the murder rate would have dropped sooner. It's a similar argument to the "defund the police" people - maybe stop trying to stamp out crime exclusively through punishing it, and instead divert some of those funds elsewhere to prevention through different services like mental health and community intervention.