Why is the design principles of the Internet are like Climate Interventions are like a bicycle helmet laws?

1. For a long time, people argued about whether the Internet should have reliable, flow controlled link layers. In olden times, physical transmission systems were not as good as today, so the residual errors and multiplexing contention led to all sorts of performance problems. There were certainly models that suggested that for some regime of delay/loss, you were better off with a hop-by-hop flow control and retransmission mechanism. As the physical network technologies (access links like WiFi, 4G, Fibre to the home) and switches got faster and more reliable, the end-to-end flow control&reliability, and congestion control seem to be a more optimal solution (I'm tempted to add security here too!). But here's the key point I want to deliver - if we had built a lot of switches with additional costs of hop-by-hop (e.g. just one of many) mechanisms, we would have added a lot of latency, which would have led the network to take a lot longer to reach the operating point where a pure end-to-end set of solutions might never have come about - indeed the sunk cost in deploying, and maintaining much more complex switches and NICs would lean against the removal of such tech.
2. So how is this like climate? Well, people are now sufficiently worried about global heating, and the failure to slow our emissions to anything approaching the necessary low to prevent even 2C temperatures, and worse, that chain-reaction effects may be imminent, that now we are re-visiting arguments for geoengineering, or what I sometimes call re-terraforming the Earth. One such mechanism involves seeding the upper atmosphere so that it reflects a lot more sunlight than currently - an affordable approach exists and could mitigate 1-2C of global heating almost right away. Aside from the downsides (for example, you might catastrophically interfere with precipitation so that things like the Monsoon could move by 1000s of kilometers and months), any such technology would also slow down the effectiveness of actual viable long term solutions like solar power generation. So the short term fix actually directly messes up the better answer.
3. And how on earth can this be like bicycle helmet laws? So the arguments for wearing bicycle helmets are good - in the event of an accident, they definitely can save your life, or reduce the risk of serious brain injury. No question, there. There is a small amount of plausible evidence that cyclists who wear more visible safety gear do attract a slightly higher risk from drivers who drive closer, based on (unconscious bias) perception that the cyclist is less likely to do something random. That's not the main problem. Statistics from countries that make cycling helmets mandatory conclusively show a large scale reduction in the number of people that cycle, and this leads to a reduction in population health, both from reduced opportunities for exercise and from increased pollution from other modes of transport. Some of those people that don't cycle will actually die as a result of not wearing a helmet, in some sense. So the long term solution is to make cycling safer and to remove the need for personal, unsafe, cars or their drivers who are the root cause of the risk. Autonomous vehicles, and segregated bike lanes seem like things one should continue to argue for, rather than forcing a short term solution on people that is counter productive (i.e. reduces the inherent, healthy actual demand for cycling.).

So there you have it - the Internet Architecture is like Geoengineering and Helmets - as easy as falling off your bike,