My recommendations for understanding and processing this side of humans:
- Merchants of Doubt (book)
- Losing Earth (book)
- Drilled - Podcast series.
The mixture of strict ideology (conservatism extremism) in the early years and still present today, was the driving force for arguing that government/supranational action was essentially communism/soviet policy. On top of this, you had the short-termism voices that argued that you could not model future economic catastrophe so it was better to get stinking rich now and let "hypothetical humans" deal with "hypothetical problems" in the future. The reason we are where we are now is that extreme conservatism and short-term people won the war inside corporations and government over the last 50 years. Government officials that screamed governmental policy was "communism" won the policy debate. The short-termists argued and won the argument that the stock price was the only thing they had to care about. When you get to right now, these voices are still dominate because their ideology and short-termism achieved their intended goal, it made them filthy rich. This enabled them to dominate the popular and governmental discourse, and conservatism extremism has created an unmovable power-base which disproportionately controls policy compared to their actual political adherents/base which is disproportionately funded by status-quo short-termists.
In particular, I would have a listen to the last ~10 episodes of Drilled which goes into great detail about how the oil companies had seriously fantastic scientific research on global warming and certain parts of the businesses actually led the charge on framing global warming science as the potential source of vast riches for these companies (as in, "ok we have the science, lets become the leaders of renewable energy first and dominate a new market"). This is when the mixture of those two things noted above overwhelmed this progressive view of solving the problem. And I would say its only been within the last 10-15 years that potentially the first weaknesses in the dominate structures have become visible. By no means is the prevailing dominate ideology or economic narrative in threat of being replaced, but their arguments are losing weight. If you think about it like that, maybe within the last 10-15 years have seen seen a weakness in the prevailing narrative, I think could be one possible explanation for where we are now.
