Branching points

1994: Tony Blair becomes leader of the Labour Party

Back in the 1970s and 80s, mainstream political discourse treated the far Left as eccentrics whose ideas were wrong but interesting, and the far Right as dangerous subversives who should be dealt with by the police. The two have changed places now, in an ideological pivot which I think has been the single most baleful development of the last quarter-century (not least because it gave us both Brexit and Boris Johnson). I date it to 1995-2005, and I blame Tony Blair for it more than any other individual. Plus no Blair means no Coalition of the Willing and quite possibly no War on Terror, which would also be a big plus.

Haha, as my kids would say. You can’t even tell what the effect of Comey’s cowardly last minute non-revelations in the ’16 election, or Raffensperger’s bravery in standing up for truth in the 2020 election, much less the effect of the 2001 attacks, or the Eurozone crisis.

Would Obama have been elected in 2008 without the financial elite’s disgracing themselves in their behavior during the 2008 financial crisis?

It seems to me that by the time the attacks on the twin Towers and global financial crisis happened the responses were already limited to different flavours of neoliberalism. The 1990s were my formative years so I’m probably biased to seeing them as having a bigger opportunity for doing things differently.

Rwanda and the break up of Yugoslavia gave more legitimacy to military intervention and set up the response to 9/11, and also the continued policy of international relations with Saudi Arabia. The failure to fully learn lessons from the South Asian financial crisis and dot.com bubble led to the global financial crisis and not knowing how to respond to it. Blair and Clinton turning to a soft version of neoliberalsim might have been pragmatic and even necessary in the short-term but has limited what left wing responses are seen as legitimate. For Clinton it could be the ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ slogan and for Blair getting rid of clause 4.

Another one that is a more “butterfly flapping its wings” point than an (at the time) obvious branching point: 1977: Newt Gingrich is denied tenure in the history department (rightly, it seems) at West Georgia College, and puts all of his energy into a narrowly won race for congress in 1978. (This is obviously pre-Berlin wall, but the impact of Gingrich in congress are not really felt until the 1990s.)

Three major turning points for the US that I’d add:

The bi-partisan amnesty for illegal immigrants in 1986-1987: the deal of legal status for those here, and sharply lower rates of further illegal immigration, wasn’t kept and soured the working class on any further immigration deals.

Allowing China to have MFN status in 2001

Not sure what moment, but the homos-exuality/gay marriage fight–from the conservative side, it highlighted that the left did not believe in either stability of law or democracy, and really shifted the right away from caring about those topics.

Two things that came back to bite Blairite left-neoliberalism:
-marketisation of HE and the 50% target
-no moderation of FoM after 2004 EU enlargement
Arguably the first gave us the “millennial left” and the second Brexit.

Nice selection of branching points, each of which would’ve ameliorated conditions had another decision been made, but perhaps not as much as might be without wealthy reactionaries vigorously stirring the pot.

Most catastrophic single event since the end of the Cold War that could easily not have happened – 1995, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Without it, possibly a real end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and no 9/11.

I presume SamChevre has mentioned that extremely eyebrow-raising and unusual view of the LGBT rights movement in previous threads; can anyone point me to past threads where I can get an understanding of it without derailing this particular thread?

Also: 1991, the assassination of the prime minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi. I haven’t looked into this closely, but I imagine that in a world where this did not happen, India’s national politics might not be as right-wing as they are now.

And: was there anything that could have happened to change, delay, or prevent the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China?

CB @ 18: I’m not a expert, but at least from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_demographics_of_the_United_States#Historical_data_for_all_races_and_for_Hispanic_origin_(1610%E2%80%932010)
“Racial/Ethnic Demographics
of [flag icon, seal of US] (1912-1959) Greater coat of arms of the United States United States (1910–2010)”
it appears that the white percentage of the population held steady until 1970, and went into steady decline thereafter. The Black population increased by about a percentage point. The Hispanic population started increasing dramatically too, after 1970.

Something changed around 1970: it seems like there was an “inflection change” so that from a White nation in 1970, we became a most decidedly multicultural nation, in 2020. That multicultural nation has sufficient numbers of nonwhite allies, and also white allies who are comfortable with, and happy with, nonwhite people. And those people are now allies of Black Americans, and it seems to me that that is new.

There is a majority in this country who now want to end White supremacy, and this is new, and it would seem to me, something we can chalk up to that Act. Again: I’m no expert, and would welcome any thoughts you had on this.

There are up to 4 items in your list with arguably a common preceding event, which is Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in July 1990. I know it’s not useful to talk about what Saddam could have done differently, but it’s a highly salient event.

Inside Trumpistan (formerly the United States of America):

The opening of Fox News, which normalized the existence of media networks that exist not to inform viewers about reality but instead to distribute centrally-created right wing propaganda that has a deeply tenuous connection to reality.

The decisions by Clinton and Obama administrations not to prosecute any of the numerous legal and democratic violations, including the Brooks Brothers Riot, perpetrated by their respective predecessors. These failures to prosecute established to the Republican party that it is free to act with utter impunity.

Globally:

The opening of Facebook (and the rest of the social media industry), which provided a tool of unparalleled effectiveness to deliver right wing propaganda directly into the unthinking brainstems of the ignorant. Neither Brexit nor Trump would have happened without Facebook’s radicalization pipeline or political dark advertising platform.

At the end of July, 1990, John Kelly, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, testified before the House International Relations Committee. The chair, Lee Hamilton, asked him whether we had a mutual defense agreement with Kuwait that would obligate us to come to their defense if they were invaded by Iraq. Kelly truthfully answered no. Hamilton should have known the answer and shouldn’t have asked the question publicly. That was the final green light for Saddam Hussein.

April Glaspie got scapegoated for it later.

I don’t have any firm opinion on whether China should have been given MFN status in 2001 or not, but I think it’s necessary to point out that SamChevre’s characterization of events in relation to immigration reform and same sex marriage/rights for gay people is somewhere between 100% wrong and deeply contestable.

<

blockquote>Thinking back over the past two decades, which of the following events that took place since the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) are the important moments when something different could have been done that might have saved us from being in the situation we are in?

<

blockquote>I remember reading some commentary on the genre of fiction where it is imagined how history might have turned out differently in which the writer asserted that in English-language fiction of the same kind it is most commonly imagined how history might have turned out worse (for example: the Axis wins the Second World War; the Confederacy wins the Second World War) whereas in French-language fiction of the same kind it is more commonly imagined how history might have turned out better (for example: a Napoleonic triumph): the commentator suggested that Anglophone writers might imagine that we live in an ideal world (so alternatives would be worse) while French writers know that we don’t (because English and not French is the globally dominant language).

If there are all kinds of situations where different choices were available to people, surely it’s reasonable to suppose that includes both choices which would have produced better outcomes and choices which would have produced worse outcomes? The stated question is framed to envisage the former possibility and exclude the latter.

Right now we are observing that different countries are experiencing widely differing COVID-19 outcomes, and it seems reasonable to suppose that this is at least partly because of different choices about preparation and response; doesn’t it follow that in most countries, if not all, considered individually, there were other choices available, both some which would have produced better outcomes and some which would have produced worse ones?

Anyway, the outbreak of SARS-COV-2 certainly merits a place on the list of key events.

SamChevre @10

“homos-exuality/gay marriage fight–from the conservative side, it highlighted that the left did not believe in either stability of law or democracy”

uhhh, what?

It is a bit vague what is meant with “we” in this case. I assume what is meant is the political situation in the USA and UK, specifically? (As opposed to Germany, France, Australia, China, India, and as opposed to economic situation?)

Funnily enough, my personal view is that the two are very different.

USA:

There has been a radicalisation of the right wing of the political spectrum since at least the Clinton administration. At that moment even the Republican leadership decided that they would not consider governments led by Democrats to be legitimate, and to sabotage and block them with every possible means. I therefore do not believe that any event along the line was pivotal, be it 9/11 or Trump’s election. If those had not happened, something else would have happened and made it onto the list without changing the overall malaise because, well, crises and elections happen from time to time.

In that alternative universe we might look back upon the US-Iran war, the economic downturn of 2011, and outgoing President Walker trying to cling to office with claims of election fraud despite handily losing the popular vote in 2016, but there is no reason to assume alternative Fox news and Facebook would be havens of reasoned and evidence-based discourse, nor that alternative Republican party would be seeking compromise and bipartisan solutions and value competence over allegiance. Those problems have long become too deep and systemic.

UK:

Despite decades of anti-EU propaganda in the UK media, hardly anybody seems to have cared very about leaving a few years before the referendum. Yes, the propaganda had laid the groundwork that the Leave campaign was able to build upon, but I believe that Cameron could have got away with not calling the referendum. Even when the referendum was called, it came out very close, and may well have gone the other way if held a few months earlier or later, if Remain messaging had been a bit more competent, or if the European refugee crisis had not happened right around that time.

The Brexit referendum therefore feels like a pivotal event, a make or break decision point that set the UK on a new course and was not simply the great wheels of history inexorably moving towards a near-unavoidable destination.

Conversely, it was pivotal precisely because the new destination then quickly became near-unavoidable. Once the decision to leave was made, only two local optima were left, revoking the decision or something very much like the present outcome. That is because any intermediate solution of staying in Single Market and/or Customs Union would have meant obligations without influence, to proud nationalists the worst of both worlds and therefore utterly unacceptable. But it would also have been politically extremely difficult to revoke, because that would have produced enormous frustration among Leavers who would have felt disenfranchised. That leaves only something very much like the present outcome, which was therefore effectively decided on 23 June 2016.

(Or accidental No Deal followed by hasty resumption of the negotiations to arrive at something close to the present outcome anyway, but IMO that is splitting hairs because both outcomes are near-equidistant from EU membership.)

While I’m obviously not a believer in predestination, I’m also not enthused by the idea of key breakpoints that send the train of history onto different rails. What look on the surface like key points that shifted the course of events turn out on closer inspection to have been the all-too foreseeable consequences of previously visible trends; the 2016 election in the U.S. is a case in point; so is the 2008 financial crisis. Over at ProjectSyndicate, Robert Skidelsky has a similar summary on Brexit.

Better candidates are the “known but unpredictable unknowns” events whose exact timing could not be foreseen ahead of time even if we had some idea that they were becoming more likely. These include not just pandemics like COVID19 but also individual, specific terrorist attacks like 9/11.

Over the longer canvas of history, and ignoring politics in favor of technology, I think the following “known possible but timing-unpredictable” events will prove to be key turning points:

1970’s: previous key breakthroughs in electronics, including transistors, integrated circuits, etc. lead to computers becoming household items as well as required for every commercial business. While the most immediate effects are on business and economics, biotech would also not be possible without computers.
1980-2011. Accidents at 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, in combination with spiraling fixed costs in order to enact safety measures, end the prospect that nuclear fission reactors can substitute for fossil fuels.
Early 21st century: improvements in wind and solar power efficiency, plus the beginning of battery improvement, result in fossil fuels being no longer the only practical alternative for energy.
2010’s. Epidemic of opioid addiction either (a) leads the U.S. and other governments to exert much tighter control over the pharmaceutical industry or (b) becomes the first, likely unintentional, step that allows the U.S. and other national oligarchies to exert Brave New World-like control over their populations.

COVID19 pandemic either (a) leads national governments to overhaul emergency pandemic reaction procedures, so that COVID19 becomes the last large-scale pandemic for several centuries or (b) becomes the first of a series of 21st-22nd century pandemics that governments are incapable of dealing with and that exacerbate a period of political and economic crisis similar to the pandemics that helped bring down the western Roman empire between the 2nd and 6th centuries.

Without question, a Gore presidency would have been much different than the Bush presidency. Whether the events of September 11 could have been prevented is hard to say; that Gore would not have invaded Iraq can be asserted with confidence.

It’s hard to draw a line connecting the Bush tax cuts and the administration’s lax regulatory stature to the 2008 financial collapse. Had the set up been different, the result may have been different; however, the market is always bubblicious.

Regarding the responses to that financial crisis, I was proud that the American response was automatically Keynesian and appalled that the UK and EU response was not. We seem to be doing a little better this time around, but not as well as we should. A lot of misery could have been avoided then, and could be now, and there’s scant hope that anyone’s response will be adequate, but some signs that the powers that be are no longer quite so bone-headed.

What’s to say about the Arab Spring? Galbraith said “All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.” Clearly the rottenness is not a sufficient condition; see the first and second French republics.

The 2016 election turned on a whisker. Considerable misery could conceivably have been avoided if somewhere a certain butterfly had landed on a different flower. The turmoil we’ve endured has a familiar flavor, though. It has not so much revealed as reminded us of who we are.

now really deeply thinking about it –

What if Trump never would have come out as ”a Birther”?
Would Obama have made fun of Trump?
Would Trump then have decided to run for President?
Would I -(ME) have won?
And so –
wouldn’t we have had the first female US President already?

I’m so far behind, I’m confused as to what the situation we are in, is, as well as who “we” are.

Alternate history can be delightful (my favorite example is Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain.) But the notion that somehow the same sperm are going to fertilize the same eggs so that the cast of characters in the alternate history remain the same is preposterous. There’s only a roughly 50/50 chance the supposed alternate version of any given person is even the same sex. (And given the work of the Great Abortionist, God, there is a significant probability any given conception can fail, ranging from 20% to 50%—-this is an issue scientists seems to be reluctant to make estimates on.) So, no, alternate history stories are as artificial as a locked room mystery: Something everybody gets even though it has never happened.

Paul Kagame’s invasion (with Ugandan support) of Rwanda and the subsequent Congo war would count as an underestimated event?

Deng’s Southern Tour?

The interventions into Haiti?

The peculiar events surrounding the fall of Bo Xilai?

The Telecommunications Act of 1996?

Tim Worstall:

“Just to make my position.background clear, yes, I used to work for Ukip, doing the PR over an election campaign. This might mean that to some my views are to be anathematised – but it might also be a small guide to my knowing this subject, even if from the wrong side.”

Well, considering the vast amount of flat-out lies which the Brexit movement told, even unto this time as ‘Project Fear’ becomes ‘Project Reality’, just why would be consider your account as being worth hearing?

It is a little peculiar that all of those points are about the West. It is like missing the rise of the U.S. in the 19th century or something. Surely it is China’s economic policy, with its amazing success, that is the major point to consider. Especially as the plague has been sort of a real-time experiment in hugely incompetent, even criminally imcompetent western governance. With slightly passing grades for Germany. Norway and Finland. I guess there isn’t one moment of South Korea’s history, I guess, that made it the most prepared, the most tech ready, or of Vietnam, which showed how community could be militated. All the emphasis in the neolib decade in the West seems to have enriched a vanishingly small sector and fucked over the rest. And there’s no change in sight.

I know this view isn’t popular, but I regard Occupy as an important (and positive) branching point.

@J. Elsome at 11

I’d put it a bit less … ahem … aggressively, but the decision taken by center left parties (Labour, the Democrats) to become center right/neo-liberal parties seems to me to be a crucial feature of how we got here. My take on that in the US is that Reagan’s appeal to disaffected white supremacists–not just working class ones, either–scared the hell out of the Democratic Party in the US. YMMV.

Meanwhile to follow up #50, surely China’s decision in 1992 to return to 改革開放 and accelerate counts as huge.

The end of South African apartheid in 1994 has a case also.

Barry,

I don’t really see that 9/11 was that important. It was not a cause of things, merely an opportunity for trends that were already underway anyway to become more visible.

The evil on the right was already there, and it could, and would, have found another opportune event to express itself, which we could then consider pivotal, demonstrating that neither is pivotal.

The right wing in the USA was already powerful.

Middle Eastern refugee problems and the Arab Spring were not created only by the Iraq war. Although I do not for a moment doubt that it played part in destabilising the region, from what I have read water shortages and failed harvests in combination with population growth were a big factor e.g. in Syria. Or in other words, most likely global heating and unsustainable use of resources, and we will see more of that.

The 2008 crash was, to the best of my understanding, mostly due to deregulation enacted by Bill Clinton’s government.

I agree, obviously, with your point on the suffering and loss of human lives in the Iraq war, but that is not directly relevant to where the political situation in places like the USA and the UK goes, because (as morally devastating as that is) the relevant electorates collectively just don’t care that much.

roger gathmann,

I guess the question is whether the OP was about the West or not. If it was, then the main point regarding China (and India) might be to what degree behaviours in particular of the US leadership are about trying to maintain US hegemony in the face of those nations becoming more prosperous and powerful.

I find it fascinating, by the way, how many people can with a straight face write pieces to the effect of “we should be worried, because soon half of the world’s economic activity and wealth will be in Asia”. Do they realise that more than half the world’s population is in Asia?

Now I would understand if it were something like, “I am worried because a dictatorship is getting more and more influential”; at least that argument makes some kind of sense, even if one might want to point out that the democratic hegemon of the past few decades did not necessarily foster democracies and peace when making its influence felt and protecting what it saw as its interests (Latin America, Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia…). But complaining merely because Asian nations become more prosperous? That implies that the authors of such pieces see everybody but Europe and North America being powerless and impoverished as a natural order that should be defended at all costs.

Echoing the first couple of sentences of Roger Gathmann (#50), possibly the most significant event is the rise to power of Xi Jinping and his turn to a harsher dictatorship. It’s too early to gauge its long-term significance, but certainly it is one of the events that has affected the most people: more than a billion Chinese now have less freedom of expression (or a much worse fate, as with the Uighurs), and China has ceased traveling the road that other East Asian countries have trod from dictatorship to democracy. China has become less free even as it has become more influential in world affairs.

Your asking what was cause and what was symptom reminds me of something that puzzled me about the 9/11 incidents, why was the reaction so spectacular? I woke up and saw it on the morning news and thought, that’s bad, all those poor people dead, like a train-wreck in India or a ferry-boat turning over in Brazil. Not as bad as the Union Carbide plant poisoning, maybe, but bad, and those buildings shouldn’t have collapsed like that, what the hell? I packed a sandwich and went to work at the federal building but within an hour they told us to go home and there were television cameras outside and pretty soon the town was full of pick-up trucks with jumbo American flags fraying in the back and seemingly intelligent people were signing into the Army to battle with who knows who? And a few weeks later when we were back at work behind locked doors I saw a vaguely Arab-looking guy lost in the halls and I helped him toward the right door and then realized that I was supposed to be afraid of him or maybe muscle him toward the rent-a-cops, but come on, man, you don’t turn your back on a lost hallway man just because Peggy Noonan is scared and the President ran like a rabbit and the stand-up guy was crazy Rudy Giuliani.

I could never understand why the whole country freaked out so hard and became so weak and flailing and unable to write it off as a lucky hit by random punks. I’m thinking that the reaction, and our living conditions that developed, are symptoms of something that was ripe for happening. Being on old person, I suspect that the root cause was fifty years of watching television. But I can’t be sure, because I watched a certain amount of television myself, and got a little confused.

Some rather consequential errors were made during the definition and implementation of internet protocols. Let me make clear my bias at the outset: my professional career mostly involved embedded systems, 8 bit microcontrollers with little memory, for which the prospect of a buffer overflow was practicably inconceivable.

And yet the following scenario presented itself time and again: one party would say to the other, I’m going to send you 64 bytes, and, after acknowledgement, say here are 64k bytes, overwriting the buffer and the stack and enabling execution of the malefactor’s code.

One might think that mighty Microsoft, which touted itself as a software factory, could rapidly armor itself against such a trivial error. Surely the process of negotiating the receipt of a message and matching the sizes of the offered and transmitted traffic would be handled by a standardized software component.

Hah! Fat chance. It took years for them to fix nearly innumerable vulnerabilities. Apparently they were running a corral full of cowboy programmers coding each instance by hand.

The problem, though, lay in the excesses in the protocols which allowed incompatible exchanges to be set up: expect N bytes … here are M bytes. Or vice versa, in the case of the Heartbleed exploit, adroitly memorialized by XKCD

Interesting to me that there are two quite different kinds of ‘branching points’ being talked about here. The 2016 election, and maybe Brexit/Bush v. Gore, is one sort: where in actual history it could easily have happened that they went differently, and things would be different now as a result.

The other sort is obviously major events, with huge consequences, that don’t strike me as obvious ‘branches’ in that they were already pretty much baked in by prior events. What would it mean to imagine, for example, ‘the same world’ except that policymakers anticipated and prevented the 2008 crash? You’d have to go back a lot further to change the trends that made the failure to stop that crash semi-inevitable, wouldn’t you?

From a [narrow] US perspective, the most important event of the period was the start of universal surveillance of domestic communications in February 2001, i.e. long before 11 September and literally G. W. Bush’s first act in office. This has been completely memory-holed.

But the real point is that where we are is the product of everything that has ever been done, even all of the insignificant things. What you are talking about is not changing the timeline, but changing the narratives around the timeline. This tacitly assumes that the narratives are more real than the timeline itself. Insofar as they are, that points to the real problem, which is not that mistakes (pick your favorites!) were made, but that the body politic has been infantilized to the point where no mistake can be learned from, or its implications understood, or its consequences processed, still less remedied.

Agree with Fergus. Branching points ought to mean decisions with clear alternatives that were not taken imo rather than world events of unclear causal provenance.

Looking for specific branching points us towards the Great Man theory of history. It’s often criticized, but it can be a useful framework when you change it to the Terrible Man theory of history. In most times and situations, there’s only a narrow set of decisions and actions that make up good leadership, and good leaders therefore act pretty similarly, but like the Tolstoy quote about families there’s infinite ways to be a bad leader. We can say that social and economic forces meant Germany in the 30s would inevitably elect some sort of authoritarian demagogue, but the fact that it was specifically Hitler with his specific personality defects had a huge effect on 20th century history. So the best candidates for branching points probably involve decisions and individuals that represent particular incompetence or amorality, and those do indeed seem to be the sort of candidates people here are leaning towards.

@Hidari 65

In Italy, 1969, a group of left leaning terrorist attempted to kidnap, hold hostage for many days and finally assassinate the centrist premier Aldo Moro ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldo_Moro ).
Moro himself was from the Christian Democrats party, but he was willing to do bipartisan reforms with the italian communist party. More extremist groups both from the extreme left (who tought the communist party was losing its way) and from the extreme right (who tought Moro was giving too much space to the commies) hayed him; the ones who actually killed him were commies but there is a lot of suspicion that they were helped by far right groups and from “deep state” guys (the gladio organisation or similar).

So what changed? What would have been different if they failed?

I think not much in the end.

The killing of one single politician in itself isn’t very important, unless it happens in very specific conditions.

And this happened in 1978, damn smartphone.

The game is beguiling. I offer a far earlier date: 1948, when Lyndon Johnson was able to secure the Democratic nomination to the US Senate (in Texas, election was assured). What might have happened to the Vietnam adventure, but also to the civil rights movement?

Yes:
Bush v. Gore
2008 financial crisis
Arab spring
Brexit
Trump

No:
Iraq invasion
9/11
Eurozone crisis
migrant crisis

The nos are either effects of the yeses or products of systems beyond human control imo

Climate change seems like a pretty ideal case of something that is not the result of a tipping point phenomenon, but the rolling result of millions of small cumulative steps. None of the steps is indispensable to the outcome; change any five or ten of them and the results are the same. It’s a very robust, resilient catastrophe, not a fragile one.

The passing of section 230 seems like a big deal in retrospect. Without it, arguably no social media. Perhaps no Trump, therefore.

80, that is an interesting point. I suppose the counterpoint would be the ozone hole. We 0 scientists, businessmen, politicians, etc. – found out that it was happening, if I have the history right, in the seventies, after James Lovelock invented a device that made it clear that cfcs were destroying the ozone. CFCs were massively related to refrigeration systems, as I know from being the son of an HVAC man. And there was a lot of industrial pressure to do nothing. But as the extent of the problem became unignorable, In the U.S. and elsewhere, the responses in the 70s were incremental, but by the late 80s that was obviously not working. So the U.S. under Bush did the common sense thing and simply banned the ozone destroying substances: https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/12/us/bush-orders-end-to-ozone-destroyers-by-1996.html#:~:text=In%20response%20to%20new%20evidence,of%20chemicals%20that%20destroy%20ozone.

Of course, it wasn’t just the U.S. The Montreal Protocol worked pretty well. Even though there were thousands of outlets of cfcs, they were, actually, muted by concerted action. And in the U.S., this was done not by a Jimmy Carter like president, but by an otherwise ineffectual rightwinger, Bush. I don’t know what the world would be like now if we were thirty years into ozone hole expansion, but I am imagining disaster.

So there is a convergence between worldwide problems and collective planning. There, I’ve said it – collective planning. Imagine that! The horror! But it worked.

The internet. Giving an entity, a la Sam Chevre, a nanosecond of attention to spew his hate on a platform has caused exceptional pain.

roger @84

Several years ago I attended a seminar presenting results from modeling experiments that explored a non-Montreal Protocol world, and as I recall one of the concrete examples of what might have been was the potential, in current times, for getting sunburn at mid-latitudes from five minutes of exposure to direct sunlight.

Another path not taken that I’ve heard of is the use of bromine-based compounds instead of chlorine-base ones. Supposedly the choice of industry to use predominately one and not the other was something of a matter of chance, and bromine-base compounds are far more effective at attacking ozone, depleting it far more before we understood what was happening. So that could have cashed our collective check, apparently.

I think you’ve all missed a big one: the bat that started it all.

Midgley also seems to have died from strangulation in the rope-and-pulley device he devised to help himself out of bed (due to polio). A prof I worked for wanted to coin “The Midgley Effect”.

@
”Less than a month since the end of the transition, and already bad blood
…depressing”.

Very much so –
as it is such a simple ”branching point” – the choice between ”solidarity” and unsolidarisches ME-ME-ME –
and so –
perhaps? –
when the Germans bought all the British car companies –
years ago –
they shouldn’t have left some of the production in Great Britain?
They should have moved ALL production to Great Britain –
and then our British friends never would have had a ”Brexit”?

My Dad died in 1985 and I’ve often thought that the two things that he would be absolutely gobsmacked by in today’s world are:

Gay marriage (date depending on your country), which was unthinkable at that time,
Ubiquitous computing and all that goes with it(if we need an event, the iPhone launch in 2007).

Of course, the cause/event question has no answer, and I’m NOT saying these were causes of subsequent things, but as symbols of certain changes they stand out for me.

@nastywoman. No.

@casperc, here from the continent. My impression is that your particular question plays stronger in the UK than here. “But what does {thing X} mean for Brexit” is obviously a more relevant question for Brits. Here is gets more lumped on the great stack of stuff we wish (and expected) that governments had done better. That might still change.

A lot of leaks and and articles come from Germany. I think the Germans are most confident that they would have gotten vaccines faster on their own. Many countries do not have their own vaccine factories, and the current mess is an object lesson that they could have been in a Europe with multiple UKs and little hope of vaccines anytime soon at all.

Here in the Netherlands, the debate is over our own internal vaccination rate, which is yet again slower than the deliveries (though I think this partially and indirectly due to the delivery date). Brexit is just not that high on the agenda at the moment