Not to be the contrarian — OK, TO BE THE CONTRARIAN! — but COVID-19 has made me more marginally more optimistic about how the world might respond to climate change. Amid COVID-19, people have been willing to accept some pretty radical changes to their lifestyles for what’s now going on six months. And many governments (although not really the U.S. federal government) have given the benefit of the doubt to expert guidance. But my priors were quite pessimistic on how people would respond to COVID-19, so the somewhat-patchwork response might look less bad to me by comparison.
