And I guess it will be interesting how the world does that. In the last 50 years world population has gone up and up, and fossil fuel consumption has continued to increase in absolute terms, rising higher and higher. I remember about 10 or 20 years ago there was a paper written by mathematician who explained that, essentially, the environmental movement refuses to understand basic math. It's all these notions about how we all make a small change and that will add up to a big change and so we all have to do something. He explained that, if everyone makes a small change, it'll only add up to a small change globally. And he seemed to decry that, that math seems to be too difficult for most people to understand.
But I don't believe that the higher level people who are driving the stuff are inherently stupid or deluded. I'm sure they're too smart for that.
I'd speculate that a potential more likely explanation is that, with the advent of nuclear weapons and the possibility nuclear proliferation, where any small rogue state could threaten superpowers, the main powers in the world felt that they had to somehow start exerting a much more powerful grip over the planet, and be able to more easily these destabilise and even erase individual nations. But that is hard to do when people identify with their nation state, so supernational concerns like the planet itself and the environment, are being pushed as narratives to try to deconstruct the individual's sense of national identity, and make them as it were, long for a planetary governance.
And that planetary government would ideally be under the control of your favourite superpower.
Personally, I'm not a fan of nation states, and nationalism, having caused major world wars, and ongoing geopolitical horrors, and I think it's abhorrent that a child born in the world today is severely handicapped just by the accident of them being born in Mogadishu versus California.
But the big problem is that politicians are inherently untrustworthy, and corruptible. So do we really want another supranational layer of governance above the nation states? I think even George Soros said in some interview clip somewhere that, the problem with the global government, is that if it turns bad then you've got nowhere left to go.
Anyway, I don't know, and that's all just speculation because the actual environmental movement and it's lack of understanding or admitting basic math, just makes me think surely there must be something else going, on because it just doesn't make sense. Smart, capable, powerful, knowledgeable, highly motivated leaders would not go about solving an existential crisis in such a slow and dumb way.
If you can't stop people reproducing and you can't stop them from consuming, i.e. you're not going to impose martial law to save the planet, then that suggests resorting to massive massive build out of nuclear, despite all its drawbacks, because the problem is existential survival, if the real issue was CO2.
And yet nuclear has always been negated and downplayed, despite the scale and severity of the threat.
Whereas instead, we get measures which seem to deconstruct nationalism, in particular attack racism and ethnocentrism, and deconstruct culture, and emphasise the common good, and emphasise global action and global justice, and emphasise new forms of taxation and new forms of value counting, like carbon credits, and these all seem to be more in line with some kind of global governance, and so why spend so much time on paperwork, rather than finding technologies that could actually make a quick impact on the basic math, starting 40 years ago, unless of course the point of it is the global governance? But as I say that's obviously speculative and to be taken with a large pinch of salt.
