Nuclear power

[Anomalocaris]

On the other hand, if you address the ultimate cause, the proximate causes go away. If never address the ultimate cause, the proximate causes never stop coming at you.

For example, global warming is the ultimate cause of more intense cyclonic storms, but it’s the storm itself that’s the proximate cause of your house to be flattened. I suppose you could continue to invest in ever-stronger houses, but that’s not really addressing the problem.

Boru

It is not possible to fully address the ultimate cause,   Ultimately “everyone loses if you don’t pull your weight” is usually not a adequate incentive for calculating economic classes, states and organizations to pull their weight. 

Proximal causes are not random.   They don’t just keep coming randomly.    A large body of them stem form the mismatch between the social, economic, political and geopolitical structure we inherited and conditions expected to pervail as climate change proceeds.   Address the mismatch, and you drain the pool of potential proximal causes considerably.

Because the targeted nature, and greater immediacy of their direct consequence, proximal causes offer more  room for better match between who pays the price and who gets the benefit.    So effort to address these proximal causes would be more likely be successful than efforts to reverse the ultimate cause,  so adapting that strategy would likely make a greater difference to probability of species survival than the strategy of revering the ultimate cause.