But Does it Though?

The chief objection I always hear about disaster prevention, especially large stuff that's generally the government's responsibility, is that it "does nothing". People drag out the panic about Y2K to support this argument, and then usually protest that climate change action isn't going to do anything. Of course, it's all a load of horse puckies. A smokescreen to make us all think that everything is pointless when it comes to making SuperMegaGloboCorp actually do anything.

As I said. All of it is dung. Big old steaming mountains of dung. You know why?

Because that's how disaster prevention firkin WORKS.

You prevented the disaster! Yay! That means that the disaster did not happen. Which means that it all looks like all that time, energy, and herculean effort was for nothing. It especially looks like that to conservatives who'd much rather spend the tax money on "important" stuff like handouts to all those poor starving rich buddies of theirs.

Cynical? Moi? Of course I am.

The thing with disaster prevention is, when it works, it looks like it wasn't worth the bother. If it doesn't work, then all that money was wasted. You can't always tell with retroactive, 20/20 hindsight that that was because the prevention efforts were underfunded.

Some prevention efforts are set up to fail. Let's be honest, the administration makes more money out of disaster creation and is too short-sighted to see the long-term impacts of this nonsense.

Which is why the Australian Government still loves the coal dollar and climate change denial despite the fact that the whole country is on fire. On fire, despite cyclones that have also made it flooded.

So they make us focus on re-using plastic bags, not using plastic straws, and carpooling like that's going to do anything very big. The biggest sources of carbon and greenhouse gasses are mass producers who still want us to buy all of their shit and keep them solvent. Just as long as we use recyclable bags.

The 'grass roots' avenues for climate change action are little more than slacktivism that's set up to fail. The people in the everyday get to feel like they're doing something, but those efforts are negligible against the superior polluters like the factories that make everything.

For an analogy, it's like if the paper companies in the 1970's told everyone that the real way to prevent dioxins in the water was to take shorter showers. Sure, you can nebulously connect the two, but individual action in this case is not the solution.

Paper companies were forced to clean up their act by massive public outcry. The same is bound to work about climate change. IF we can all keep up the noise. And the votes.

If we can vote in people who could give less than a shit for commerce and more of a shit for the environment, then we might have a chance. Especially if they stick to their guns and refuse corporate moneys after they get in.

It's a slim chance, but we can't buy our way out of this problem.

We have to do some serious, large-scale disaster prevention. Or it will be one of those preventable disasters that nevertheless failed to be preventable because everyone took the wrong action.

We really, really, want it to look like our action "did nothing" in the end. That means it firkin worked.