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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIs Our System of Government Incapable of Meeting the Challenges We Face?
http://www.alternet.org/environment/our-system-government-incapable-meeting-challenges-we-faceThe first evidence linking climate change and human emissions of carbon dioxide was painstakingly assembled in 1897 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius. What began as an interesting but seemingly unimportant conjecture about the effect of rising carbon dioxide on temperature has turned into a flood of increasingly urgent and rigorous warnings about the rapid warming of Earth and the dire consequences of inaction. Nonetheless, the global dialogue on climate is floundering while the scientific and anecdotal evidence of rapid climate destabilization grows by the day.
We have entered a long emergency in which a myriad of worsening eco-logical, social, and economic problems and dilemmas at different geographic and temporal scales are converging as a crisis of crises. It is a collision of two non-linear systemsthe biosphere and biogeochemical cycles on one side and human institutions, organizations, and governments on the other. But the response at the national and international levels has so far been indifferent to inconsistent, and nowhere more flagrantly so than in the United States, which is responsible for about 28 percent of the fossil-fuel carbon that humanity added to the atmosphere between 1850 and 2002.
The perfect storm that lies ahead is caused by the collision of changing climate; spreading ecological disorder (including deforestation, soil loss, water shortages, species loss, ocean acidification); population growth; unfair distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of economic growth; national, ethnic, and religious tensions; and the proliferation of nuclear weaponsall compounded by systemic failures of foresight and policy. As a consequence, in political theorist Brian Barrys words, it is quite possible that by the year 2100 human life will have become extinct or will be confined to a few residential areas that have escaped the devastating effects of nuclear holocaust or global warming.
Part of the reason for paralysis is the sheer difficulty of the issue. Climate change is scientifically complex, politically divisive, economically costly, morally contentious, and ever so easy to deny or defer to others at some later time. But the continuing failure to anticipate and forestall the worst effects of climate destabilization in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence is the largest political and moral failure in history. Indeed, it is a crime across generations for which we have, as yet, no name.
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Is Our System of Government Incapable of Meeting the Challenges We Face? (Original Post)
xchrom
Oct 2013
OP
No, but by 2100 the population will be substantially smaller, which will help a lot.
FarCenter
Oct 2013
#4
bemildred
(90,061 posts)1. Look at the long sweep of our history since WWII. What do you see?
To me, it looks pretty ugly, stewardship-wise.
sibelian
(7,804 posts)2. Well, when your system of Government IS one of the challenges you face...
...
Nuclear Unicorn
(19,497 posts)3. Your choice of governments are
A) people can argue about their differences
B) they can't
The second type don't save people from calamity, they are calamity.
FarCenter
(19,429 posts)4. No, but by 2100 the population will be substantially smaller, which will help a lot.