Campi Flegrei supervolcano is still acting up, and for multiple days already there are reports of elevated CO2 levels in people’s homes at the volcanic site; basically, people are reporting dizziness and nausea at the Pozzuoli village. The government, however, is sweeping the whole thing under the rug and basically telling people that nothing is going on, but do install CO2 meters because we wouldn’t want you to suffocate.

This reminds me of the covid situation, where the governments initially under-reacted and said nothing’s going on, everything is fully contained, even if this obviously wasn’t true, and when it became obvious that some serious shit is going on, they over-reacted to the point of breaking the civilization. Basically, first they didn’t want to face the crisis and be responsible for saying that it’s real, and later nobody wanted to be responsible for ending it and saying that it needs to be handled rationally and not hysterically. Basically, they act in binary modes, where there’s either no problem whatsoever, or every life matters so much that if we can save it, it’s worth breaking the civilization and potentially killing hundreds of millions and reducing the standard of life for billions in decades to come. It’s worse than manic-depressive even; it’s like putting female school teachers in charge.

The covid is not the first instance of such foolish under/overreaction; there was the case of the Icelandic volcano, the Eyjafjallajokull, where they completely grounded all air traffic in Europe because of negligible risk of trace amounts of volcanic ash in the air to the jet engines. Abundance of caution, they call it. No, abundance of caution would be if any actual planes were damaged by the ash, and then you try to establish safe levels of ash particles in the air, monitor the condition and ground air traffic only where it’s actually necessary. Not ground everything until everything is perfectly safe, because absolutely any amount of risk is unacceptable. Well tough shit, bitches, because risk is part of life and there’s always an amount that has to be deemed acceptable or you’ll end up failing to live it at all.

With the Campi Flegrei and Santorini volcanoes currently acting up, the obvious rational measure would be to evacuate the afflicted areas completely, but the politicians are cowards who fear saying the “v” word (volcano) or “e” word (eruption), because they don’t want to be responsible for either panic, or frustration of people who had to evacuate if it turns out to be a false alarm. However, an adult response would be to tell people to suck it up – sure, it can turn out to be nothing, but even a small event will cause large local casualties because people for some reason like to live on volcanoes. You can’t assume it’s going to be a big one, because the probabilities and historic record are against it, and if it is the big one you can’t do anything about it that wouldn’t be almost as harmful as the eruption itself. You can, however, clear the Pozzuoli village and the Santorini island, and make tsunami preparations and drills on the projected impact areas in Greece. That would be the reasonable level of reaction, but no, the governments alternate between “nothing’s going to happen, everything is fine” and “the sky is falling, let’s make everything ten times worse now”.