https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2021/12/10/why-the-us-is-a-failed-democratic-state
12.14.2021
What We Knew (Climate Change)
https://www.nytimes.com/shared/opinion/world-on-fire/climate-sos.html
What did we know? What do we know? I've been spending some time doing some writing on the deficiencies of mammalian brains, overpopulation, climate change, and so forth. Things are not looking good for human civilization. Due to collective action problems, it is likely that the world will not hit temperature targets for 2050 and runaway global warming is a certainty. There are a host of ills that will come by 2100. Extreme weather will be common, and large swathes of the globe will become uninhabitable. We don't need any more proof or science to know that this is the case. Deniers are clearly self-serving capitalists that have more short-term monetary gain in ignoring the obvious and smearing those that fight for change.
I feel like Moishe the Beadle from Elie Wiesel's Night. Without having gone anywhere physically, I have come back from the future to tell those of the present the ghosts and horrors of what could be.
What are our opportunities? What are our choices?
1. We've learned from Covid that individual choices do not work to move aggregate population health decisions. Not enough people will voluntarily make changes like using masks or vaccinating to prevent disease and death. As a result, mandates have been the only successful option worldwide. I see the fight to mitigate climate change as ultimately a public health decision. As with Covid, it might seem costly or unpractical to mandate universal changes, but failing might result in the collapse of civilization. Essentially, do you want to pay more? As a result, rich nations like the US, those that have military power, should mandate immediate and severe carbon limits globally that not only slow global warming, but go well beyond it to attempt to halt or reverse it if that is even possible anymore. Those nations that do not immediately comply should face financial and military consequences.
2. Because I'm not a politician, and I have virtually no power to make #1 a reality, I'm also thinking about what to do at an individual, and family level. The history of my people, the Jews, is one of wandering, often forced wandering to find places where we would not be persecuted, always towing our torahs, talmuds, and rituals from place to place. If I was to move my family somewhere, it would be important to take not only money, but our learning, knowledge, science, technology, just as the Jews have taken their torah which is literally just a collection of ancient stories to study and debate and instruct. More than money, which has come and gone over time, has been the power of knowledge. I like to think of this as creating one's own Schindler's List. Who is on the list, and what is on the list, and what do you take if you have to move and uproot, and how do you re-create democracy in a 2.0 (3.0?) version that is more human, more sustainable, and protects against demagogues, megalomaniacs, tyrants, or oligarchs?
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