Srsly though imagine if governments treated climate change with anything like the same seriousness as they're treating covid19
Won't happen. Climate change consequences are diffused, same as with deaths from car accidents and cardiovascular diseases. People are unable to perceive such risks seriously. In case of Covid-19 politicians and businesses are concerned of short-term and mid-term losses which are quite likely. In case of climate change losses are long-term and uncertain, and they believe they have "emergency measures" at hand if things really go south.
There's also another side to that: Covid-19 containment action plan has clear and unambiguous goals.
In case of climate change we have probably a dozen of contradictory narratives, each of them fighting others.
Nobody is really concerned about *only* reversing the climate change. Some would like to sell more gas, some want to do a social revolution, some want to get rid of this or that, essentially everyone has some vested interests they want to do on the way.
At the end of the day, preventing climate change is isn't really their primary priority.
And that's precisely why climate change containment is not like COVID-19...
@kravietz @lazarski cars are designed for safety much more than they used to, however, that progress was made a bunch of decades ago.. Ralph Nader is often credited as a prominent person in this.
Also designs of the roads in the US at least, not sure. (In the Netherlands there are lots of speedbumps, bicycle lanes etc)
it took around 30 years for both safety and pollution reducing "eco" features to be deployed worldwide in an affordable car (eg: that a young person might have get for their first car).
I noticed this myself as in my teens I tried (with little success) to learn to drive, then started again in 2018, getting my licence in 2019; and my car has so many more of these features than a similar VW Polo would have had in 1989/1990...
Don't know about US but I have comparison with Eastern Europe.
In these countries people can be scared by many irrational things (5G, vaccines, nuclear power plants etc) but routinely ignore those that kill them most: smog from coal, car accidents and cardiovascular.
Coming myself from Poland I struggle to explain what is exactly the argument to ignore the latter. I guess in most cases it's just simple denial.
@lazarski @vfrmedia was mainly talking just about safety aspects of cars. Cars themselves, of course still kindah suck.
@kravietz@social.privacytools.iough, yeah 5G, saw someone boost some of that shit. 😞
Suppose it's not the entire story, but if you ignore a matter, you don't need an argument for ignoring it. (also you can use `site:` in a search engine and try find what arguments are used)
my perceiption is in recent times both safety and eco improvements for cars got introduced concurrently, it was the EU and domestic govts who pushed them forward via regulation and enforcement.
AFAIK NL is a world leader at providing safe transport for everyone (not just cars), and this was deployed quite quickly starting from the 1970s (but has not been repeated elsewhere in Europe, other than maybe DK?)
@kravietz I know, it's true, I'm just expressing my general frustration, it's beyond absurd