You can't get off a local maximum without going (metaphorically) downhill. It's been obvious to the CEO class since the 80s that climate change is real and will be a catastrophe. Doing something about it -- getting off the fossil carbon local maximum -- means going downhill, and the machine they're riding can't do that. There's no way to pick loss of relative status for everybody. The only way to do that is to replace it with some other machine, and no one is interested in building that. (In part because it would have to be very, very ruthless indeed in at least some contexts.)
Going more democratic might have been an attempt at an end run to that problem, or a desire to have someone distinct to blame, or just because power is having people do what you say, and it wasn't working because the massive propaganda efforts of Fox News do matter. (Nihilistic death cults with good PR have been a problem before, too.) Doesn't really matter; shifting the never-admit-error category to include Doug Ford in this present context of the local maximum doesn't result in worse decision making.
I mean, really; anything that isn't national mobilization, full industrial rationalization, we're going to renewables, glass, and aluminium in toolkit that can make sewing machines and autoclaves and windows and doesn't need more than ~500,000 people to maintain, we're decarbonizing agriculture, and we're getting everyone fifty square meters of potato greenhouse as quickly as possible, is laughably inadequate. And it's not going to end; even if we did that, there'd be a millenium of uncertain food and weather, the seas will come up, and all the current housing stock is worthless. Rebuilding the entire transportation infrastructure. Making sure there's more than four places able to make LED lights. (none of them on this continent, last I checked...)
Trudeau can't even manage to be opposed to new fossil carbon that's going to cost him his job. Scheer is an innumerate death cultist. The NDP can't manage to escape their respectability trap and talk about actual facts instead of a lost golden age. It's not just the right that's having a problem with facts, it's broadly societal.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2018-04-20 02:27 am (UTC)Going more democratic might have been an attempt at an end run to that problem, or a desire to have someone distinct to blame, or just because power is having people do what you say, and it wasn't working because the massive propaganda efforts of Fox News do matter. (Nihilistic death cults with good PR have been a problem before, too.) Doesn't really matter; shifting the never-admit-error category to include Doug Ford in this present context of the local maximum doesn't result in worse decision making.
I mean, really; anything that isn't national mobilization, full industrial rationalization, we're going to renewables, glass, and aluminium in toolkit that can make sewing machines and autoclaves and windows and doesn't need more than ~500,000 people to maintain, we're decarbonizing agriculture, and we're getting everyone fifty square meters of potato greenhouse as quickly as possible, is laughably inadequate. And it's not going to end; even if we did that, there'd be a millenium of uncertain food and weather, the seas will come up, and all the current housing stock is worthless. Rebuilding the entire transportation infrastructure. Making sure there's more than four places able to make LED lights. (none of them on this continent, last I checked...)
Trudeau can't even manage to be opposed to new fossil carbon that's going to cost him his job. Scheer is an innumerate death cultist. The NDP can't manage to escape their respectability trap and talk about actual facts instead of a lost golden age. It's not just the right that's having a problem with facts, it's broadly societal.