Climate Inaction: Let the Bumbling Begin

Never mind that the sum-total of all available evidence is so profound that the only plausible chance anyone has of not believing that Climate Change is upon us is to either be so naive or so maliciously ignorant that it is impossible to admit this fact into their personal conceptual vocabulary and interpretive framework of reality. Also, disregard that the accelerating rate of Global environmental change is currently tracking towards a “worst case” scenario – you know what happened on Venus with a runaway Greenhouse effect, right?

No, the single most significant indication of the extreme urgency and perilous nature of our current, rapidly devolving environmental context is the rank ineptitude of Global leadership to do anything substantive about it. There is a general principle of Government and large-scale organisational entities that their ability to effectively and rapidly act on issues tracking towards impending Global catastrophe is inversely proportional to the severity of the consequences incurred by those disasters.

There may be as something innate to large-scale organisational systems that produces a self-validating requirement for proliferating economic and sociological problems – the very same problems that those large-scale organisational systems both create and are (thus) structurally and functionally oriented towards. By proceeding to recreate precisely those problem sets that they are implicitly biased towards attempting to solve, they unwittingly – and largely unconsciously – produce the self-propagating necessities and rationales for their own existence.

All of this would be fine and we could resign ourselves to a “Business As Usual” of economic meandering and ideological fiction-mongering but the essential reality of our situation is that we are facing planet-scale catastrophe and all that the Governments of the world are doing is fiddling while the world burns. No political party, no world leader has the courage or the intellectual wherewithal to stare down the big corporations who, in macroscopic rendering of each of our own enlightened self-interests and pursuit of continuity and life, are each endemically-oriented towards their own continuing contextual tenure. Never mind that the base and foundation for all economic systems would have to be the meteorological and environmental stability of (at least) the last 10,000 years which has allowed us the opportunity to cultivate this nascent Global civilisation.

So, watch as the bumbling begins, as the blame game kicks off and even as our nations burn and wither under the persistent and unmanageable entropy of an environmental dissonance and turbulence that we ourselves have created, we will see panicked stock markets, crippled economies and global geostrategic instability, while our political and economic systems continue to fail us.

Do you think that it will costs us our comfortable (and for many – uncomfortable) lifestyles to even begin to remediate this horrific mess we have made? Yes, it will – but consider the endless cycle if natural disaster, economic and social chaos, insecurity of food and water supplies, proliferating conflicts and ultimate potential to produce an uninhabitable planet for humanity. Some costs are worth bearing when the long-term benefits are the lessening certainty of self-extinction. The only real question is: is our current Global patchwork quilt of ideology, pride, greed and political self-interest even vaguely able to approximate to the scale of action now required? If (clearly) not, then what are we going to do about it?