Sometimes I get the feeling I'm being groomed to accept things I normally wouldn't.
Sort of a cross between Rotherham and Hegelian dialectic, given two awful choices, choosing the one that seems slightly less awful but that's not enough so rinse, repeat.
From Professor Mazzucato writing at Project Syndicate, September 22, 2020, via MarketWatch:
We are approaching a tipping point on climate change, when protecting the future of civilization will require dramatic interventions
LONDON (Project Syndicate)—As COVID-19 spread earlier this year, governments introduced lockdowns in order to prevent a public-health emergency from spinning out of control. In the near future, the world may need to resort to lockdowns again—this time to tackle a climate emergency.
Shifting Arctic ice, raging wildfires in western U.S. states and elsewhere, and methane leaks in the North Sea are all warning signs that we are approaching a tipping point on climate change, when protecting the future of civilization will require dramatic interventions.
The world is approaching a tipping point on climate change, when protecting the future of civilization will require dramatic interventions. Avoiding this scenario will require a green economic transformation—and thus a radical overhaul of corporate governance, finance, policy, and energy systems.
Under a “climate lockdown,” governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling. To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.
Three interconnected crises
COVID-19 is itself a consequence of environmental degradation: one recent study dubbed it “the disease of the Anthropocene.” Moreover, climate change will exacerbate the social and economic problems highlighted by the pandemic. These include governments’ diminishing capacity to address public-health crises, the private sector’s limited ability to withstand sustained economic disruption, and pervasive social inequality.
These shortcomings reflect the distorted values underlying our priorities. For example, we demand the most from “essential workers” (including nurses, supermarket workers, and delivery drivers) while paying them the least. Without fundamental change, climate change will worsen such problems.
The climate crisis is also a public-health crisis. Global warming will cause drinking water to degrade and enable pollution-linked respiratory diseases to thrive. According to some projections, 3.5 billion people globally will live in unbearable heat by 2070.
Addressing this triple crisis requires reorienting corporate governance, finance, policy, and energy systems toward a green economic transformation. To achieve this, three obstacles must be removed: business that is shareholder-driven instead of stakeholder-driven, finance that is used in inadequate and inappropriate ways, and government that is based on outdated economic thinking and faulty assumptions....
....MUCH MORE
Hegelian Dialectic is no more than Johnny Carson's first rule of comedy: If they buy the premise, they'll buy the bit.
Thesis (premise, awful) — antithesis (even more awful) — Synthesis (resolution but moved further toward the thesis)
