2 ms·

In a quite real sense the general public does decide the rules through representative demoracy in western countries, and the ignorance and complacency of voters

• jacquesm 3y ago
  That is true in the abstract. But in practice people are - usually - not single issue voters and on paper at least almost all political parties that you could vote for have some climate fig leaf in their party program. And that's as far as most people's political interest goes. Attempts to communicate these 'uncomfortable truths' and their ultimately utterly predictable outcome unfortunately have to deal with the fact that the consequences are conveniently over the horizon for pretty much everybody of voting age today. There may be some mild discomfort but unless you happen to live in regions where there are already concrete troubles today you can easily ignore the problem. And so people do just that: they ignore the problem, because it doesn't affect them. Yet. And by the time it does it will be too late. This is how you get into very bad situations. Democracy is ill suited to deal with this sort of challenge (though it works well for lots of other kinds of problems). As is capitalism. And yet, those are the two main building blocks most of the developed West are constructed out of. And we're not even close to wanting to let either one or both of these go to deal with climate change.