SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
"I've heard many times that although democracy is an imperfect system, we somehow always muddle through. The message I want to give you, after long and hard reflection, is that I'm very much afraid it is no longer possible to muddle through. The issues we deal with do not lend themselves to that kind of treatment. Therefore, I conclude that our democracy must grow up. I'm not going to give you a magic recipe on how that will happen—I wish I had one—but I offer some thoughts that I hope will stimulate your thinking.
What's principally lacking on the federal scene, it seems to me, is the existence of respected, nonpartisan, interdisciplinary teams that could at least tell us what is possible and something about the pluses and minuses of different solutions. Take energy, for instance. What I would love to see established, with the National Academies or any other mechanism to confer respectability, is a team that will ... say, 'Okay, there are lots of suggestions around, and most of them won't work. But here are six different plans, any one of which is possible. We'll tell you what each one costs, what's good about it, what's bad about it, how dangerous it is, and what its uncertainties are.' At least each option would be a well-integrated, clearly thought-out plan. I do not trust democracy to try to put together such a plan by having each committee of Congress choose one piece of it. Suppose Congress designed an airplane, with each committee designing one component and an eleventh-hour conference committee deciding how the pieces should be put together. Would you fly on that airplane? I am telling you we are flying on an energy plan, an inflation plan, and so on that are being put together in exactly that way.
Unfortunately the original 1980 article that this was excerpted from is paywalled.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 02 2017, @12:43AM
Name one that involves things we could do right now.
The obvious example is laissez faire. Humanity is in the midst of the greatest improvement in the well-being of humanity ever. We have a proven process for creating wealthy countries that everyone is implementing to some degree, even the worst of countries. And wealthy countries are far better positioned to deal with the effects of global warming (or its absence for that matter). Extreme weather is easy for a wealthy country to deal with. Wealthy countries have better and more sustainable agricultural systems. Wealthy countries can adapt to rising sea levels more easily.
It should be a warning sign that adaptation is being ignored here.
because we're not doing any of the things we know would solve the problem
There are other problems than just climate change such as overpopulation, poverty, habitat and arable land destruction, etc. Solving climate change in a vacuum ignores these bigger problems.
I think there is a deliberate attempt to exaggerate the harm of global warming precisely to create the false dilemma we see here. Sure, it's obvious that we have a global warming problem. But it's also obvious that we have many other problems as well. And some of them can kill billions of people in a far shorter time frame than global warming is alleged, without evidence, to be capable of.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Monday January 02 2017, @01:28AM
Extreme weather is easy for a wealthy country to deal with. Wealthy countries have better and more sustainable agricultural systems.
Sure, because the US handled Katrina so flawlessly, and California never has water shortages.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 02 2017, @02:54AM
Extreme weather is easy for a wealthy country to deal with. Wealthy countries have better and more sustainable agricultural systems.
Sure, because the US handled Katrina so flawlessly, and California never has water shortages.
I said "better" not "perfect". I'll note that aside from Katrina, you have to go back to 1972 [wunderground.com] to find a hurricane that has killed more than 100 people in the US. And Katrina was so bad due to unusually incompetent leadership at all levels of government from New Orleans (which badly screwed up the evacuation, leaving 100,000 or so people behind in the city) up to the federal level (where a poorly managed reshuffling of bureaucracies left no one in charge of the duties that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (or FEMA) normally covers).
And the response to Hurricane Katrina is probably the worst managed disaster in the developed world over the past few decades.
As to water management, there are plenty of developing world regions that have far worse water management issues, such as Syria's epic mismanagement of water which led to civil war.