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I don’t know what to make of your comment. One of the politicians during yesterday’s CNN climate change debate said the following: "No individual can be expect
by js2 7y ago
I don’t know what to make of your comment. One of the politicians during yesterday’s CNN climate change debate said the following:
"No individual can be expected singlehandedly to solve this problem. It's going to require national action. And by the way -- this is why we invented government. It's for dealing with issues that are too big for each of us to do on our own."
This is a humanity scale problem and government, by way of politicians and lawyers, and yes engineers, is how we deal with humanity scale problems.
Scientists and engineers put us on the moon, but it was government that directed and enabled them to do so.
- wolfgke 7y ago> Scientists and engineers put us on the moon, but it was government that directed and enabled them to do so. Rather: the government was arguably the only institution that could spend a sufficient amount of money for this mission. If there had existed another insitution with similar financial backing that was willing to finance such a mission: I doubt that the government would have been necessary.
- mLuby 7y agoI think they meant government-directed (mega-)engineering projects will solve this, not individual efforts. When the US wanted to get to the moon, its government created and funded a huge engineering program (Apollo) but the most individuals could do was pay their taxes and support the program—no amount of individual-scale collective action would ever put astronauts on the moon.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThe problem is that the (US) government doesn't care about climate changes, so what individual-scale collective action could do is to make them care, in order for that government to start sponsoring engineering mega-projects, which will then have actual impact on the problem.