The Only Solution to Climate Change
And why you’re it
To avoid climate catastrophe we need urgent and widespread action across our political and economic systems.
This shouldn’t be too contentious.
After all, it’s inconceivable that we could limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius without a fairly radical change to the priorities of these systems.
So, let’s call this our objective — system change — and try to work back to a solution.
First of all — why hasn’t this happened already?
Our business and political leaders have known about climate change for a long long time. This is not a new issue and the need for change is not a new narrative, yet consistently they have failed to act with anything like the required urgency. These are intelligent people; they have reached the top of competitive professions, surely they can understand the severity of the threat, and surely they have enough of a conscience to want to do something about it.
So what’s stopping them?
The simple answer is that our political and economic systems are both structured around short-term gains. Businesses need sales and politicians need votes. Without these things, companies go out of business and political parties go out of power.
