Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinordi
Do you think dealing with climate change means fundamentally reorienting our economy and society or can we incrementally transition without significant social upheaval?
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A corollary to that question:
What political mechanisms do we have at hand to fundamentally reorient our economy and society?
It's one thing to speculate what humanity could or should do if it were governed by a wise and benign global ruler who wields absolute power. Another thing entirely to plot a roadmap for dozens of individual states, most of which leave their economic decisions to hundreds of millions of private citizens, and which have constitutions and laws that prevent the concentration of power in the hands of the state.
Let's say discretionary air travel is identified as an extremely wasteful activity in terms of carbon emissions. Could a government step in and say its citizens have to enter a lottery in order to be awarded the privilege of flying in a plane, and no citizen can enjoy this privilege more than once every four years? In the scope of reorienting our economy and society, it's a pretty modest step. And yet it's hard to imagine such a measure being undertaken in a free-market democracy.