"It Is Profitable To Let The World Go To Hell" - Jorgen Randers On Why It's Not Working

[hatrack]

EDIT

As politicians and business leaders gather in Davos to look at ways to breathe new life into the global battle to address climate change, they would do well to listen to Randers’ sobering perspective. The professor of climate strategy at the Norwegian Business School has been pretty close to giving up his struggle to wake us up to our unsustainable ways, and in 2004 published a pessimistic update of his 1972 report showing the predictions made at the time are turning out to be largely accurate.

What he cannot bear is how politicians of all persuasions have failed to act even as the scientific evidence of climate change mounts up, and as a result he has largely lost faith in the democratic process to handle complex issues. In a newly published paper in the Swedish magazine Extrakt he writes:

It is cost-effective to postpone global climate action. It is profitable to let the world go to hell. I believe that the tyranny of the short term will prevail over the decades to come. As a result, a number of long-term problems will not be solved, even if they could have been, and even as they cause gradually increasing difficulties for all voters.

Randers says the reason for inaction is that there will be little observable benefit during the first 20 years of any fiscal sacrifice, even though tougher regulations and taxes will guarantee a better climate for our children and grandchildren. He has personal experience of this, having chaired a commission in Norway that in 2006 came up with a 15-point plan to solve the climate problem if every Norwegian was willing to pay €250 (£191) in extra taxes every year for the next generation or so.

EDIT

In my mind, the cost was ridiculously low, equivalent to an increase in income taxes from 36% to 37%, given that this plan would eliminate the most serious threat to the rich world in this century. In spite of this, a vast majority of Norwegians were against this sacrifice. To be frank, most voters preferred to use the money for other causes – like yet another weekend trip to London or Sweden for shopping.

EDIT

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/jan/19/davos-climate-action-democracy-failure-jorgen-randers

[leveymg]

1. It's worse than this. Disaster Capitalism has become economic orthodoxy.

The ability to hedge any risk, and make a profit from catastrophic failure of states and other actors, has locked the world into a chaotic downward spiral. Armageddon with dividends.

[GliderGuider]

2. Randers is far too optimistic.

Though it feels decidedly odd to say that about a LtG author!

[Nihil]

3. That is a key point.

I'd expand it to the following enabling behaviours:
1) The ability to hedge any risk and make a profit from failure rather than success.
2) The ability to outsource to less regulated countries.
3) The ability to engineer the overthrow of sovereign states for business reasons.
4) The ability to convince the gullible majority that criminal action is acceptable business practice.
5) The ability to convince the gullible majority that criminal action is acceptable foreign policy.
6) The ability to control entire governments whilst maintaining the veneer of "democracy".

The above combination has become so deeply entrenched that the "way of things" isn't going to
change until the organism that maintains it dies.

The difficulty is how to kill the parasite without killing the host.

One country might make headway at cleansing itself but, like the mythical Hydra, the remaining
global organism will turn on the "attacker" in order to "re-grow" itself in power again.