The Name of Action
In the video The Name of Action we note that, in spite of decades of warnings, there has been little progress on controlling climate change. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continue to climb. Why? Why has our response been so inadequate?
Broadly speaking, there are three types of organization that can take climate action. They are governments (national and international), business and industry, and individuals and small group. All are important, all are needed and there is a lot of overlap between them. However, we have mainly relied on governments to take the lead. They have failed to do so.
Businesses — including the oil companies — are, however, providing effective leadership. That leadership, combined with technical innovation, may help us avert the worst of the climate crisis. Only time will tell. The hour is late; the hour is very late.
A print out of the presentation (including the notes pages) is provided here.
Swtzerland is an interesting example because the government is just all the people who decide by direct vote.
Born 1941 into a scientific milieu I was taking the LtG-report very seriously. Already in the Seventies in Switzerland we tried with some like-minded individuals to introduce some of the reasonings into political action within the existing political parties. When this proved impossible we founded the Swiss Green party in the early Eighties. We were then a bunch of liberal and scientifically interested people of bourgeois background and we postulated to finance old age pensions with taxes on fossil fuels and emissions, instead of taxing the salaries. We were met with a front of hostile and uninformed reactions of all other parties and the media, we were decried as "leftists" and "communists" and it was impossible to have any fair discussion. After the fall of the Sowjet Union the Greens indeed became inundated by former Marxists who continued to dream about a dictature of the proletariat, now founded on ecology, dreams which blocked any further discussions and actions. In 1991 - then being a Green member of the Swiss parliament - I already became convinced that the cause was lost, because all the developments pointed into the wrong direction. A main reason for this was and still is a failure of the media to really inform and discuss the basic issues. And this has a reason: The media are not directed and run by scientists but mostly by people trained in language, philosophy, politics and history, fields where there are many (legitimate) opinions and fewer hard facts. Therefore they think that the laws of nature are just other opinions which can be held, discussed and tweaked at will. That this is not so will dawn upon them too late.