“We already knew, so why not start working on it before the problem manifested itself in full” sounds very reasonable, but look at how it’s going with climate change. Even with COVID if you remember there were a couple of months at the beginning of 2020 when various people were like “eh, maybe it won’t come over here”, or “maybe it’s only in China because their hygiene/healthcare is poor” (which was ridiculous, but I’ve heard it. I’ve even heard a variant of it about the UK when the virus started spreading in northern Italy—that apparently the UK’s superior health service had nothing on Italy’s, so no reason to worry). Then people started dying in the west too and suddenly several governments scrambled to respond. Which to be sure is absolutely more inefficient and less well coordinated than if they had all made a sensible plan back in January, but that’s not how political consensus works; you don’t get enough support for that stuff unless enough people do have the ability and knowledge to extrapolate the threat to the future with reasonable confidence.
“We already knew, so why not start working on it before the problem manifested itself in full” sounds very reasonable, but look at how it’s going with climate change. Even with COVID if you remember there were a couple of months at the beginning of 2020 when various people were like “eh, maybe it won’t come over here”, or “maybe it’s only in China because their hygiene/healthcare is poor” (which was ridiculous, but I’ve heard it. I’ve even heard a variant of it about the UK when the virus started spreading in northern Italy—that apparently the UK’s superior health service had nothing on Italy’s, so no reason to worry). Then people started dying in the west too and suddenly several governments scrambled to respond. Which to be sure is absolutely more inefficient and less well coordinated than if they had all made a sensible plan back in January, but that’s not how political consensus works; you don’t get enough support for that stuff unless enough people do have the ability and knowledge to extrapolate the threat to the future with reasonable confidence.