3 ms·

The trouble is the people most in power to make decisions are personally insolated from the affects of hot humid conditions (quite literally) by cooling infrast

by rtkwe 5y ago

The trouble is the people most in power to make decisions are personally insolated from the affects of hot humid conditions (quite literally) by cooling infrastructure. If COVID has taught us anything there's a lot of capacity to ignore diffuse death, /maybe/ an event like the mass heat death in Ministry for the Future would get some people's attention but COVID has really knocked my expectations for coming together in the face of a collective disaster.

SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
True, but looking at the map the most populated sections of the United States are marked as danger zones. Though I realize after writing that line that the last few years have taught us that mass casualty events in Florida won't exactly cause dramatic societal change.
- rtkwe 5y ago
  The effect will be blunted because in the US we have AC and a fairly robust national power grid so the number of people affected will be limited to poor and houseless people who we're already very good at ignoring suffering from. We've already had pretty bad heat waves in the past that have caused dozens of deaths in a day but they're diffuse and not in one giant group so they're easy to ignore like COVID, heart attack, and general poverty deaths.
  - soperj 5y ago
    Didn't you just have people freezing to death in Texas because of a power outage?
    - rtkwe 5y ago
      Texas is a bit of a special case in the US power grid... They're not a part of it, Texas decided to not connect itself to the national power grid because it wanted to go way further in on deregulation and couldn't do that if it was connected to the national grid and had to follow the rules that came with that. That's why you don't really see huge blackouts very often in the rest of the country, power outages are usually due to direct storm damage and only affect things on a particular line/circuit. Texas couldn't bring power in from unaffected areas to balance the spike in demand so they lost the whole grid, it's harder to have that happen in other parts of the country.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    > a fairly robust national power grid The local grid particularly in (parts of?) California is everything but robust.
SantalBlush 5y ago
>If COVID has taught us anything there's a lot of capacity to ignore diffuse death How has COVID taught us that? Is it because the response wasn't as perfect as we would have liked? I really don't think I've seen a lot of ignorance about diffuse death from COVID; quite the opposite actually.
- rtkwe 5y ago
  Essentially yeah. Look at the proposed alternatives from the right in the US which basically amounted to "If he dies he dies" but scaled up to millions of people. One of the most consistent deflections is that "only the already sick" are dying of COVID which beyond being wildly untrue also has the strains of "it's your own fault you're dying why should I do anything to prevent it?" which doesn't bode well for our response to climate disasters.
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  In the United States, I've heard a number of people say they would rather old people die than have their freedoms violated. Their reasoning is people who die of COVID would have died anyway if COVID didn't happen. My own parents still claim COVID isn't serious, despite my grandfather dying and me being very sick for four months.

by rtkwe 5y ago

SketchySeaBeast 5y ago

True, but looking at the map the most populated sections of the United States are marked as danger zones. Though I realize after writing that line that the last few years have taught us that mass casualty events in Florida won't exactly cause dramatic societal change.

rtkwe 5y ago
The effect will be blunted because in the US we have AC and a fairly robust national power grid so the number of people affected will be limited to poor and houseless people who we're already very good at ignoring suffering from. We've already had pretty bad heat waves in the past that have caused dozens of deaths in a day but they're diffuse and not in one giant group so they're easy to ignore like COVID, heart attack, and general poverty deaths.
- soperj 5y ago
  Didn't you just have people freezing to death in Texas because of a power outage?
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    Texas is a bit of a special case in the US power grid... They're not a part of it, Texas decided to not connect itself to the national power grid because it wanted to go way further in on deregulation and couldn't do that if it was connected to the national grid and had to follow the rules that came with that. That's why you don't really see huge blackouts very often in the rest of the country, power outages are usually due to direct storm damage and only affect things on a particular line/circuit. Texas couldn't bring power in from unaffected areas to balance the spike in demand so they lost the whole grid, it's harder to have that happen in other parts of the country.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  > a fairly robust national power grid The local grid particularly in (parts of?) California is everything but robust.

SantalBlush 5y ago

>If COVID has taught us anything there's a lot of capacity to ignore diffuse death How has COVID taught us that? Is it because the response wasn't as perfect as we would have liked? I really don't think I've seen a lot of ignorance about diffuse death from COVID; quite the opposite actually.

rtkwe 5y ago
Essentially yeah. Look at the proposed alternatives from the right in the US which basically amounted to "If he dies he dies" but scaled up to millions of people. One of the most consistent deflections is that "only the already sick" are dying of COVID which beyond being wildly untrue also has the strains of "it's your own fault you're dying why should I do anything to prevent it?" which doesn't bode well for our response to climate disasters.
kayodelycaon 5y ago
In the United States, I've heard a number of people say they would rather old people die than have their freedoms violated. Their reasoning is people who die of COVID would have died anyway if COVID didn't happen. My own parents still claim COVID isn't serious, despite my grandfather dying and me being very sick for four months.