Yesterday while taking a walk I met an older man who worked at a chain grocery store and who told me that Corona is a hoax to impose socialism and that it didn’t kill that many people

We’re in a city that, according to the Times, has 20k dead. Folks like him are the most at risk

— Molly Crabapple🇵🇷 (@mollycrabapple) May 3, 2020

Once upon a time, I naïvely used to believe that once people were directly affected by climate change, they’d start to believe in the truth of it. Now I know this was wrong. People could literally be drowning from climate-change-induced flooding and they’d still deny its actuality and its effects.

Molly’s anecdote above demonstrates that mode of cognitive failure perfectly. Now I realize there is nothing — nothing at all — that’d make a very large percentage of people believe the truth if it’s something they are dead-set against. Once it’s tied into one’s identity, most would rather die than admit the veracity of something that contradicts that identity.

This is why we cannot and will not solve climate change, but it will solve us.