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What to make of the recent rush of near-term climate apocalypse stories? My inner contrarian wants to shift to skepticism at this point. Anyway, if that stuff is real then having a 401K is basically "prepping" for a corner case where civilization actually carries on.
Maybe there should be a NatGeo TV show about crazy suburbanites who prep for extremely unlikely scenarios, like there being a world where their kids can go to college, or where there are hospitals that might send them a sudden large medical bill.
But nobody actually behaves this way, for all the stories one reads that are like this: nbcnews.com/health/mental-…
People just read depressing news stories, feel really bad, make their kids cry by telling them doomer stuff, and then go right back to Instagram or Amazon Prime or whatever they were doing. This suggests to me that few people actually believe these climate doom stories...
...and that they play some other, weirder role in our culture. It's like some collective performance of guilt at having stuff that others don't have, or whatever other kind of deep psychological thing.
I'm not saying that the climatepocalypse is not real -- I vacillate between alarmed and agnostic. I'm just saying that people who profess to believe it's real don't seem to actually alter their plans for it or otherwise behave as if it's real.
I'm tempted to think this, but I grew up in the Cold War & we treated the idea of WW3 as legit real, & had drills & some people had bunkers & plans, & it was talked about & cities had fallout shelters etc. It was "real" in the way climate isn't.
This piece is really excellent and pretty much sums up exactly where I'm at personally on the climate change issue:
I remember back in 2010 when the worse of the GFC was over & we didn't know if things were going back ⬇️ or going back ⬆️, the "barbell" portfolio was the hot thing (half in stocks, half in bonds), so you were hedged either way. What is the "barbell portfolio" for climate change?
Cf. this for the barbell strategy. I just googled this up but it conforms to my recollection: thedeepdish.org/advanced-inves…
Counterpoint: having lived through two bubbles then crashes as an adult, my experience is that there is no panic until there's panic, then everyone rushes the exits at once:
There may be a panic cliff out there ahead of us, brought on by some trigger event, where everyone at once says "oh crap" and actually rushes into whatever climatepocalypse trade looks safest -- migration or radical activism or whatever.
Re: this subthread, I have seen this dynamic in the power industry via the deep dive I did on solar storms. This is a catastrophic risk but it's so poorly modeled & mitigations aren't truly developed...
...that it's legit hard to ask private power industry to spend billions on untested mitigations for a threat that we can all agree is 😱 but can't accurately forecast the timing or severity. Collective action problems are hard under capitalism absent at well-defined risk model.
If you can't price it, it doesn't exist. And we can't price some of these existential risks, like a Carrington Event 2.0 or a global climate apocalypse. So capitalism is like 🤷♂️.
