Open Winters

I wanted to crosspost this from a comment I made on GOS.

I wish I could say I was optimistic. Unfortunately, until our problems start being addressed seriously, our standard of living will decline, radically whether it is Democrats or Republicans who run things.

1. When we were born, nobody understood or as few as to make no difference, the threat of anthropogenic climate change.  Now, many people understand the threat, but there is no political will to ameliorate the change or plan for a future on what to all intents and purposes will become a different planet than the one on which we were born.

2. When we were born, the internet did not exist, but the notion that we were a nation of men and not laws got started in earnest during the Nixon administration.  Since then, this notion has solidified and expanded to the point where our continued existence as a functioning representative government is under daily threat.  It is said by some we do not have any kind of democracy anymore; as I get older, I’m more and more inclined to believe them.

3. Global food production has expanded to support 7 billion people, largely with the aid of pesticides, genetic engineering and industrial chemicals.  How will food production continue at that level with the sure knowledge these chemicals are destroying our environment and the oceans?   The oceanic food web is collapsing; our oceans and lands are being poisoned.

4. We have permitted corporations to despoil people and the environment on a global scale.  

5. Large segments of the American population are without insurance, or health care, and because of medical indigence and the threat of medical bankruptcy, make them too afraid to visit the doctor before it’s too late.  We are looking at the apex, right now, of our life expectancy — it will go down from here, because we do not have health care as a right, and costs are spiraling to the point where no one except the wealthy will be able to afford quality health care.  In particular, heart disease and treatable diseases such as diabetes will begin to spiral out of control.

6. Income inequality.  This is not a world, anymore, in which people can accumulate vast riches and somehow “the little people” can make do due to an expanding resource pool and untapped exploitable resources.  Our ability to expand our resources by utilizing new parts of the planet in new and novel ways is gone.  

This is not the world of 1850 or even 1960.  Every part of the planet now is being used to the maximum allowable possible benefit to the human species.  There is nothing more to plunder.  We are moving into an era in which the Earth is more like a house with a limited income and less like a vast playing field.  If we do not recognize this reality and deal with it with the utmost seriousness and urgency, life will deteriorate accordingly.  And our political system is not geared to deal with problems with the swiftness or seriousness necessary to avoid this hell.  We do not in some instances have years to spare, to say nothing of decades.  Republicans want to further despoil — but Democrats do not understand that the challenge was not to step back from the brink of annihilation, but to move the other way, at warp speed.

You will die, never having seen the faces of your killers

-Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek, the Next Generation.