An Unprecedented Opportunity

[raspberry-blower]

Another excellent article over at TAE that takes a critical view of Nafeez Ahmed's recent Guardian article:

If you assume that people want such a civilizational form, then first answer this question: why don’t they already have it? For one thing, certainly such a form, like everything else, is easier to set up in times of plenty then times of misery.

If you can’t answer the question why so far people have not opted for such a form, and instead chose the unsustainable one we have now, how are you going to know that we are capable of turning around on a dime and “creating” a form that is “in harmony with our environment, and ourselves”?

Or to put it differently: if you had to choose between the option that we’ll “create a civilisational form that is in harmony with our environment, and ourselves” versus the option that we’ll burn on through until we hit the wall at 1000 miles an hour, which one would you put your money on given human history as we know it?
Article in full

[emordnilap]

Yeah, a realistic view of the "we-can-have-green-sustainable-equitable-growth-in-fact-it's-inevitable" optimistic pseudo-journalism which tends to abound, because that's what people want to hear.

We still have a functioning grid; car sales are up; airlines are busy; trucks are hurtling round the country; tv is functioning 'as normal'; etc etc. All the signs that there's nothing really to worry about are there, things will 'turn a corner' if we're patient and we all accept what the spin says.

People put two and two together and get five, which is growth.