Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Friday, August 19, 2011

The Politics of Climate Change

We need to reframe the climate-change debate in a way that encourages rational discussion.


This is Part 3 in a three-part series on tackling climate change. Part 1 addressed the obstacles that human nature poses to dealing with these sorts of long-term problems, and Part 2 focused on the tools available to overcome them. Part 3, found here, explores the political dimension of the issues, and what needs to change.

In the first two segments of this series, I suggested that the unhindered progression of serious challenges like climate change is partly due to our tendency to deny and rationalize, but that things can still be turned around. One condition, however, is that we must recast the “framing” of the debate in a way that is not only in accord with our core beliefs and nature, but that also encourages rational debate. In this regard, there are number of things to keep in mind:

1. We have to start by transforming our political culture so that long-range thinking outweighs the immediate imperative of the short-term election cycle. This increases the chance that policy will be grounded in fact, not fantasy, and developed using our best ethical judgment.

How do we do this?

a) Revamping education is crucial.

We need a root-and-branch revamping of our educational system. Today’s version has let us down badly. Our young people are being given technological training for today’s job market, which is reasonable, but has been achieved at the expense of history, civics, applied ethics, and critical thinking, not to mention basic literacy, despite the fact that the latter are essential for the development of a responsible, well-informed, engaged citizenry.

This is where all change must begin, for only public awareness will make things happen.



According to David Suzuki, it’s not hard to poke holes in the “science” that attempts to discredit climate change. See what he has to say about it here.



With better-educated citizens, we will be able to have an informed debate about how to solve our global dilemmas. This might help reduce the disproportionate influence of the wealthy and their corporate and media acolytes, who have sold us the pernicious fiction that the only thing that will help us is endless growth.

b) The media are part of the problem.

Unfortunately, the modern press and electronic media, which have such potential to inform and inspire, increasingly offer predigested, opinionated pap, rather than critical analyses. Indeed, in their superficial, trivial entertainment mode, the media play the same role as Roman bread and circuses, distracting the people from real life and problems.

An enlightened citizenry would surely demand more, and, within a generation, such educational reform should help to bankrupt knee-jerk, shoddy news sources and reward more reflective, critical outlets.

Of course, interfering with free speech is a cure worse than the disease, and strong economic trends have reinforced the gutting of newsrooms, making critical and informed reporting (which requires times and resources) a less-frequent occurrence.

But some simple changes might nudge the media toward balance. Consider advertisers’ enormous power to shape content, as well as their use of psychological techniques to exploit our weaknesses. In light of this, let’s eliminate the income-tax deductibility for commercial advertising and reduce the amount of advertising on radio and television. Let’s allow public-interest groups time to respond to ads that they believe distort reality. Maybe we should also increase the CBC’s funding and sharpen its mandate to inform, and to promote understanding among Canadian regions. (Any political party that wants to privatize a revitalized CBC should be voted out of Parliament.)

c) We need world bodies with teeth.

According to Transparency International’s 2011 Global Corruption Report, “Climate change is arguably the greatest governance challenge the world has ever faced.” Traditional forms of national sovereignty will have to be supplemented by more robust and binding common rules, although not necessarily by a world government.



In a debate hosted by The Mark, Greenpeace squared off with the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association over the safety of our energy pipelines. Check it out here.



Examples like the International Criminal Court, the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, and musings about the need for a powerful Department of Finance for the European Union show that this could happen. So does a network of climate-change agreements that are being established among municipalities, states, and provinces, even while our modern national Neros are fiddling.

But Canadians need not wait for binding international treaties; we can start responding at home right now. In fact, many countries are far ahead of us.

2. We already have the tools to shape a renewable-energy future and reduce climate change.

Much has been written by Mark Jaccard, Amory Lovins, Lord Nicholas Stern, and others like the International Energy Agency about why and how we should convert the world’s energy system to a no- or low-carbon model. We should adopt their ideas.

One of the surprising things that such thinkers point out is that what some call “costs” are often profitable investments in such areas as energy conservation or renewable-energy technologies. (This is another example of how the debate has been framed by supporters of the status quo.) And, of course, we’ll get more bang for our buck, because developing a sustainable-energy system and society will simultaneously reduce global warming and energy consumption.



According to one expert, the only place that climate change seems to be taken seriously these days is in the military. Agree? Disagree? Read more here.



Another surprise for non-Albertans is that many scions of the oil patch are receptive to this project.

And, finally, an additional surprise is that most of the knowledge needed to develop cost-effective replacements for present infrastructure already exists – what’s lacking is the political will to mandate and finance the commercialization of new technologies. It is to be hoped, though, that a new generation of critically thinking politicians will carefully assess the siren calls of megaprojects like carbon capture and sequestration, or global climate engineering, which, in the long run, may be too expensive and/or involve unacceptable environmental risk.

In conclusion:

We are all responsible for our common future, starting with every lifestyle and political choice that we make. Let us tread lightly (conservatively) on the Earth, seeking fulfilment through our relationships, rather than trying to buy it with material throughput. We need co-operation, not competition; fair distribution, not delusions about ending poverty with perpetual growth.

We must all join together – at work, in pressure groups, and in political parties – and insist that decision-makers implement this new agenda. Let us never give in to despair, or to the belief that “nothing I do can make a difference.” Millions of individual efforts, in the aggregate, will move mountains.

Our alteration of the Earth’s climate may be gradual, but the results will play out over many millennia. And the difference between “moderate” and “extreme” scenarios will be so dramatic that our descendants will curse us if we don’t act now.

The last word goes to Roland Wright, who summed it up perfectly in his book A Short History of Progress:

Things are moving so fast that inaction itself is one of the biggest mistakes. The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will stand or fall by what we do, and don't do, now.

The reform that is needed is not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking. From recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle.

The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise.
Origin
Source: the Mark 

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