The Stakes Are High
Listening to: The Metal Song - Shihad
When you start to look at climate change you realize that the stake are high. But I never fully understood how high:
For market economies, and the Western model of democracy with which they have been associated, the existential challenge for the foreseeable future will be global warming. Other threats like terrorism may well be damaging, but no other conceivable threat or combination of threats can possibly destroy our entire system. As the recent British official commission chaired by Sir Nicholas Stern correctly stated, climate change “is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.”
The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report’s recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations.
If the latter proves the case, and the world suffers radically destructive climate change, then we must recognize that everything that the West now stands for will be rejected by future generations. The entire democratic capitalist system will be seen to have failed utterly as a model for humanity and as a custodian of essential human interests.
That’s everything folks, your strawberries in winter at one end and your democratic rights at the other.
On the plus side… I am reminded of a comment by Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn). In a recent podcast he said that the best market to enter into was one with no competition and the second best was one that had slothful competitors. Our traditional systems are full of slothful competitors who are ostensibly trapped with a particular world view (one which Stern says is responsible for “the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen“).
If everything is at stake, then everything is up for questioning. Time to tackle some BIG questions I think :-D.
src: The Washington Note.
