|
Democracy Is the Planet’s Biggest Enemy
Young people care a lot about climate change—but most of them can’t vote. Here’s how governments can adapt to accommodate them.
[OCS: Why should any government accommodate those who are fundamentally ignorant of subject matter knowledge and lack life experience.]
In an address to Parliament, [Teenage climate activist Greta] Thunberg said she spoke for the children who had been betrayed by politicians and voters who had failed to prevent climate change. She also claimed to speak for the unborn billions of people who will bear the brunt of a rapidly warming world. “I am 16 years old,” she said. “I come from Sweden. And I speak on behalf of future generations. … Now we probably don’t even have a future anymore.”
[OCS: The arrogance of the young, who believe they know everything and have the right to make their views known to the world while claiming to represent humanity.
Somewhat like the gun-control advocate David Hogg who attended a school where a mass shooting occurred. Flying around the country at the expense of gun control activists and telling us we should disarm all law-abiding citizens which would make more people vulnerable to criminals, crazies, and terrorists.
Most young activists lack the education, experience, wisdom, and common sense to realize that they have been well-indoctrinated by adults to promote an agenda they cannot see and cannot understand in a historical context.
Many simply cannot grasp the time scale before we could even discern a trend in climate amid the natural variability of climate. We are speaking of time scales of at least 1,000 years. Yet, they demand action NOW – before even knowing what is really happening and if man’s puny efforts can affect or alter climate. ]
Greta Thunberg … “The climate crisis is an issue that requires long-term thinking across the generations, yet electoral politics is geared toward responding to immediate grievances.”
[OCS: How prescient; observing that politicians act in the short term – notably linked to two, four. and six-year election cycles in the United States.]
Thunberg’s remarks showcased the profound gulf between younger and older generations when it comes to climate politics: the clash between those with the power to act and those who must live with the consequences if they don’t. The climate crisis is an issue that requires long-term thinking across the generations, yet electoral politics is geared toward responding to immediate grievances. Politicians can talk about taking the long view, but without institutional changes to the way we practice democracy, they are unlikely to look beyond short-term political gains.
[OCS: Huh? Live with the consequences? The consequences of any action will take hundreds, if not thousands of years – or longer to manifest. That’s the difference between weather (primarily dominated by various ocean-atmosphere coupled oscillations like the El Niño/La Niña phenomenon and long-term regression to the mean cycles.
Institutional changes in the way we practice democracy will not affect the climate, but certainly will affect our freedoms, our quality of life, and our safety and security.]
The young and the old increasingly look like two distinct political tribes, and the differences are perhaps starkest over climate change. Recent polling in Britain indicates that for nearly half of all voters aged 18 to 24, global warming represents the most pressing issue of our time. Less than 20 percent of voters over 65 think the same. In the United States, only 10 percent of eligible voters aged 18 to 29 describe climate change as a “not very serious problem,” compared with 40 percent of those over 65 who call it that.
[OCS: This is bullpucky. The young are being manipulated by the older generation, ranging from indoctrination in schools, the mainstream media, and the echo chamber of ill-informed peers.]
Observing the generational divide on climate change is easier than accounting for it. Thunberg’s rhetoric implies the distinction is a matter of morality: The older generations simply don’t care about the interests of the younger ones. Yet it is far from clear that older voters are less worried about climate change primarily because they won’t be around to see the worst of it. Older voters care about many things that don’t directly concern them. For instance, in the U.K., education ranks almost as highly for those over 65 as it does for those under 30.
[OCS: More bullpucky, especially given the geological time scales that are needed to bring about and identify real climate change that supersedes the natural variability of climate.]
Nevertheless, climate change has become a contest of worldviews split along generational lines—and it’s a contest that older voters are winning. That should be no surprise. After all, they are both more numerous and more likely to vote than their younger counterparts. When Thunberg speaks for the generations yet to come, she has the numbers on her side—the unborn limitlessly outnumber the currently living. But when it comes to actual voters, the math favors the climate skeptics or at least the people who have other priorities. Our world hasn’t just warmed rapidly in recent decades—it has also aged even faster.
If democratic politicians are to make good on their promises to Thunberg and her peers, one of the largest barriers in their way are their own electorates. And citizens may become more antagonistic as governments push forward on new policies. Tackling climate change is going to require significant behavioral change: in what we eat, where we live, and how we travel. Current patterns of food and energy consumption are unsustainable. If we and the planet are to survive, that will mean less meat, smaller homes, and fewer cars.
[OCS: Listening to a politicians promises is akin to a child digging through a pile of manure and expecting to find a pony.]
This is one of those cosmic jokes. Nothing we do will change the plate tectonics which produce most of the rise in local sea levels. Nothing will change the fact that land will rise as weight of the overburden is removed by a melting ice sheet. And has anyone noticed the Arctic and Antarctic are always cold and that many of the ice sheets are melting because of subterranean volcanoes, the friction of a great mass moving against the ground, and the underwater inclusions that lubricate slippage. Ever see a volcano up close and personal? You could remove all the meat in the world and it wouldn’t make a difference. Again, its about raw political power and the totalitarian presence to maintain it in the face of rising discontent.]
The old, however, tend to find changing their behavior to be more difficult than the young do. Again, this is not because they don’t care about the future of the planet nor simply because they won’t have to live with the consequences of failing to change. It is because age brings experience, and experience brings an aversion to loss. The older we are, the more likely we are to have things we don’t want to give up. People who have never driven a car will find it far easier to do without than people who have used one for their entire lives.
[OCS: I have an aversion to my loss of freedom and my ability to chart my own path. However, notice that the author has just revealed why the progressives are trying to kill the use of automobiles (along with curtailing easy mobility) and force people into mass transit and mass housing. And, truth be told, this is why many of the despot-controlled countries fail to embrace the freedoms and liberty they never had in the first place.]
One solution to this generational imbalance might be to simply wait it out, since younger generations will replace older ones before too long. If generational divisions are primarily attitudinal rather than material, there is reason to think that young people will persist in their concern about climate change as they age. Eventually the college-educated young of the present will become the college-educated old of the future. The climate crisis will rise up the political agenda as climate-conscious generations ascend the age ladder.
[OCS: This idea was expressed by Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist Max Planck who asserted, “science makes progress funeral by funeral: the old are never converted by the new doctrines, they simply are replaced by a new generation.” But facts are facts and one ignores them at their own risk.]
The problem is that the climate can’t wait that long. Today’s enlightened young will not age quickly enough; decisive action needs to be taken before 2030, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now insists.
[OCS: Another joke – progressives have been telling us the sky is falling for decades. We are still here as the Earth has been warmer, colder, with more and with less atmospheric carbon dioxide. At some point, the loons tell you that you have twelve years to live and then spend money on programs with lifetimes of fifty years of more. Hypocrisy or idiocy?]
One way to make that happen would be to redress the imbalance directly by lowering the voting age. Watching the 16-year-old Thunberg put Britain’s political leaders in their place, it was hard to think of a good reason why she should not be allowed to vote. But still, the politically plausible proposals—such as extending the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds—would not be enough to make a decisive difference. The changes that could actually tip the numerical balance—such as extending the vote to all school-age children—are too contentious to be practicable. Giving children the vote is unlikely to lessen generational divisions over climate change. It could make those divisions worse—and thus set back progress on climate policy—if it looks like an obvious ploy to diminish the voting power of their grandparents. Maintaining the current voting age but phasing out votes for the very elderly is likely to be just as divisive. Appearing to gerrymander the entire electoral system, even with the best of intentions, will do little to bring the tribes together.
[OCS: Yes, let’s lower the voting age and let pot-saturated children determine which progressives are deserving of their vote. Perhaps a Kardashian, Brad Pitt, or a Taylor Swift?]
Bridging the generational divide is likely to require other kinds of institutional change. The evidence of the last 30-plus years of climate politics suggests that electoral democracy is not well suited to reaching a consensus on what is to be done. The inevitable partisanship of this form of politics reinforces wider social divisions. Different perspectives on the long-term future get turned into polarized positions on climate change, making it harder to reach a shared perspective on carbon emissions and renewable energy. Party politics drowns out the pursuit of common ground.
[OCS: Not one scientist has put forth a plan that can lead to climate change. In fact, climate alarmism exists only in the minds of aggressive activists who believe flawed climate models and forget that we sometimes get extreme weather events like winter and summer. Attributable to the Sun and the rotational and precessional dynamics of the Earth.]
If electoral democracy is inadequate to the task of addressing climate change, and the task is the most urgent one humanity faces, then other kinds of politics are urgently needed. The most radical alternative of all would be to consider moving beyond democracy altogether.
[OCS: Who, in their right mind, would voluntarily sacrifice their freedom, lifestyle, and the future of their children to a non-democratic communist system?]
The authoritarian Chinese system has some advantages when it comes to addressing climate change: One-party rule means freedom from electoral cycles and less need for public consultation.
[OCS: You cannot get any farther away from American values and constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms than the political system found in Communist China. China is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide – that is if you believe the theory that carbon dioxide is at the root of climate change – and is constructing hundreds of coal-fired plants to support increasing industrialization.]
Technocratic solutions that put power in the hands of unelected experts could take key decisions out of the hands of voters.
[OCS: Already we are seeing progressive-led technology companies unilaterally implementing policies and procedures that are designed to curtail the openness and freedom of the internet to promote a progressive agenda. Even though these technology behemoths are privately-owned, they are greatly influenced by government grants, contracts, and regulatory policies.]
Another alternative would be more radical direct democracy. Politicians who are unmoved by electoral threats, and citizens otherwise committed to status quo policy, can sometimes be jolted into action by street protests, especially if they are sustained over long periods of time. Thunberg’s London trip coincided with widespread protests by the group Extinction Rebellion, which has adopted tactics inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and the U.S. civil rights movement. Acts of civil disobedience brought parts of London to a halt to raise awareness of the moral urgency of the issue. Some of those taking part were very young—Extinction Rebellion has a youth wing. But others were not, including Phil Kingston, who was arrested after climbing onto the roof of a train at 83 years old.’
[OCS: There comes a time when a peaceful protest becomes a riot and then a rebellion that needs to be quelled by the authorities – thus sowing more discontent and feeding a revolution. Sounds like a communist plan.]
Channeling more energy into these other forms of democracy—into citizens’ assemblies and civil disobedience, rather than elections and party-building—will change our politics drastically. But it may be the only way to ensure our planet does not change beyond recognition.
[OCS: Correct me if I am wrong, but aren’t these the same people who scream at the moon about racism and slavery? What do they think will happen when a totalitarian government takes over and the younger generation all become slaves to the state?]
<Source> |
