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Why German Floods Will Not Change Much
Last week we’ve witnessed terrible flooding in Germany and Belgium. Angela Merkel visited devastated cities and for a while it seemed like a consensus was formed to address climate change. Finally, right?
Well, no. It won’t happen any time soon.
First of all, it takes a generational change. Boomers simply can’t jump out of their skin and change the paradigm under which they were raised and worked their entire life. It will take another 10 to 20 years for Millennials and Z-gen to get to the critical positions (in great numbers) and apply new thinking, provided they are capable of it. But by then it might already be too late.
But secondly, the math doesn’t ad up yet. Even if Germany or EU paid reparations to all those people and built every devastated city anew, it is still much, MUCH cheaper than addressing CO2 levels in any worthwhile manner. Future costs are simply too abstract for us to comprehend and work our ways around them.
Just think how many industries need to be transformed or simply closed, how many workers displaced, how much would our daily habits change (from commute to eating), just how different would the world have to be and how immense would the costs be of such transition. It’s not happening any time soon.
As long as cleaning up the damage is cheaper than making changes, nothing will happen. “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism,” remember? Prevention has to become the cheaper option, and by then, again, it will already be too late.
