ENVIRONMENTAL ARMAGEDDON:
THINK ABOUT THE FUTURE
By Trevor McNeil
Opposition
Conservatives and Liberals rarely agree. Which only stands to reason given the nature of the partisan system. Candidates will often speak on the same issues, but this is usually because the issue is one that has identified as being of concern to voters. As the old joke goes, if you want to know a politician’s principles, look at the polls. One issue in which Conservatives and Liberals disagree is that of the environment, and by extension, environmental policy, particularly in terms of carbon emissions and CO2.
Attack And Discount
A primary mode of attack Conservatives use when going after Liberals is to say that Liberals are elitists with no idea how “normal” people live. A notion which all but discounts the existence of Eco-Futurists.
Who Is the Hypocrite Again?
One recent example of this line of attack was when Conservative commentator Daisy Cousens said that Green Revolution activist Greta Thunberg wasn’t a good role model because Thunberg was invited to speak at the United Nations, Thunberg didn’t act like a giant hypocrite and took a solar powered boat from Sweden to New York instead of flying, planes, being notorious polluters. Cousens’ argument was that this is a bad example because not everyone could do it. An argument which becomes ridiculous. Sort of like saying, “I’m not going to quit smoking, so neither should you”. Really? An obvious absurdity.
Liberal Environmental Policy
By the fact that most people aren’t usually invited to speak at the U.N. either. What was Thunberg supposed to do, swim to New York? Something else most people can’t do and even if she did she would most likely get criticized for that too. Not to mention the flack that Al Gore got when he was found to be taking a jet to deliver his infamous PowerPoint presentation which, non-the-less was very important. Or the ribbing the Green New Deal got before it was revised. The original version posted online seeming to confirm all of the Conservative’s worst suspicions about Liberal Environmental Policy.
Think about the future
It can be true that Liberals focus on the future, particularly in terms of environmental policy but that does not mean that they are therefore ignorant of the present; and the concerns of people here and now. As shown by the very existence of Eco-Futurists, who tend to be very much of the left, but still able to see clearly when it comes to data analyses. In general, Futurists are social and natural scientists who examine cullet trends through a complex method called “systems thinking” and make projections based on past and present trends. Basically trying to predict what will happen tomorrow by what happened yesterday.
Using Powers For Good
Generally this tends to be used to predict social, technological and financial trends, in order for the Futurist to advise political and business entities on the best course of action. Eco-Futurists, such as Guy Dauncey who wrote the book The Eco-Futurist and runs the website “The Practical Utopian”, use systems thinking to examine current environmental issues and predict where things might be going in order to devise solutions, such as sustainable technology alternatives, before things get out of hand.
Paris Agreement
Several of the items in the Paris Agreement were based on recommendations made by Eco-Futurists such as Dauncey, who all but the the most self-centered and idiotic leaders seemed to realize knew more about environmental issues and how to fix them than any politician of any political stripe. It may be time that we start listening to them.
A Dangerous Future
Everywhere we look we can see the effects of climate change. Soon there will be no glaciers in Glacier National Park. There will be a year round NW ocean passage in the Arctic Ocean. The South Pole is collapsing at an alarming rate. It is time we let fear direct our environmental policy.
RESIST. CONFRONT. VOTE.
