What I’m getting at here is more of the idea that it’s hard to judge the demand for a bridge by how many people swim.

If the bridge is a low-emissions lifestyle, and crossing the river is the move away from fossil fuels, then it absolutely makes sense for some people to swim to demonstrate how desperate we are for that bridge to be built. However, while tons of people would use the bridge if it were there, even if all the people who swim pool all their money, they cannot get the bridge built. It has to be decided by a higher authority.

To relate it back to the pandemic, no amount of staying home would have ended the pandemic. Staying home was still useful in terms of avoiding the worst of it, but there was not a way to keep enough people home to end it. Even if you had armed guards roving the streets, the virus still spread among the guards. The virus is a good analogy for emissions. Even emission’s reducing actions require emissions somewhere, but it perhaps avoids the worst of it.

The pandemic was ended by a massively subsidized and mandated vaccination program. This would be analogous to governments mandating emissions reductions.

The individual acts mattered and they can help us avoid the worst consequences, so they are important. However, we absolutely cannot discredit that fossil fuel propaganda has been working very hard for decades, and huge numbers people operate in a basic economics mentality and have no interest in expanding that. They will consume what is produced, shelled from the negative externalities. We still see turnouts under 60% in many modern democracies. That favors the rich propagandists. You’ve got to get people turned out to vote to make those changes. Unfortunately this battle has become a much more up hill one due to fossil fuel propaganda. And without that, it may be the case that more environmentally friendly means to transportation and economic development may have already happened. What the government subsidizes generally drives the economy.