Exactly, this is why wearing masks and getting vaccinated worked so effectively at curbing the pandemic. People didn't want to change their way of life. Stopping the pandemic would have required an extreme economic shut down in April, far more extreme than what we saw. Sure this economic hit would be much less than the long run impact of pandemic never really going away, but it was too much for people.

So they all agreed that wearing maskings in public and private gathering, plus universal adoption of the vaccine would be the easier, if not ultimately more expensive path.

While the pandemic did stick around for a bit, by spring it was basically gone. Now when I go out I see people in packed clubs, happily drinking and dancing mask free.

Sure by comparison universal mask adoption and vaccination is to climate mitigation like building a lego castle is to building the pyramids by hand, but since we solved that problem so effectively I'm extremely optimistic about how we're going to tackle climate change.

We showed that we can solve pandemic without effecting the economy or our lifestyles, and we can just as easily to the same for climate change.

This an extremely alarming comparison, because western nationstates basically observed people dying in Asia in spite of massive (chinese) mitigation efforts and did not do SHIT (for months!) before the pandemic arrived at their homes.

With climate change, once we really start to feel the symptoms it might well be too late to change the trajectory and we might suffer the effects for millenia...