<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/25/is-democracy-getting-in-the-way-of-saving-the-planet>
"What the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report confirmed this
month is that the stable climate many of us grew up with is gone and has been
replaced by a fundamentally unstable one. Sea levels will almost certainly rise
and storms will get more intense. Amid a drumbeat of depressing news and
decades of inaction, there’s a sort of folk wisdom emerging that liberal
democracy might just be too slow to tackle a problem as urgent and massive as
the climate crisis. It’s an enticing vision: that governments can forgo the
messy, deliberative work of politics in favour of a benign dictatorship of
green technocrats who will get emissions down by brute force. With a
punishingly tiny budget of just 400 gigatonnes of CO2 left to make a decent
shot of staying below 1.5C of warming, is it time to give something less
democratic a try?
It would be easy to look at the longstanding stalemate around climate policy in
the US, the world’s second biggest emitter and embattled superpower, as
evidence that something more top-down is needed. Yet the failure isn’t one of
too much democracy but too little. The US Senate empowers West Virginia’s Joe
Manchin – a man elected by fewer than 300,000 people – to block the agenda of a
president elected by more than 80 million. Climate-sceptical Republicans,
backed by corporate interests, have attempted to gerrymander their way to
electoral dominance, halting progressive climate action in its tracks. The
fossil fuel industry can engulf lawmakers with lobbyists and virtually
unlimited campaign donations to sway their votes. And as the Republican party’s
leading lights flirt with authoritarians like Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor
Orbán, comprehensive bipartisan climate action remains a pipe dream."
Via
libramoon@pluspora.com.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
