The United Nations has released a
web version of its first annual report. It covers the state of the climate as of 2017.
While the report reveals how action and financing of mitigation and adaptation measures remains stubbornly aspirational the web site does offer a library of documents that can be searched country by country back to 1989.
The most fearsome problem is that our politicians refuse to take global warming seriously. They are more than happy to ask the little people to change light bulbs or drive less but they won't do anything to disrupt carbon or any part of the plunder economy.
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ReplyDeleteI'm working up a post that addresses your point, Toby. It's how to assess a politician's sincerity and why their efforts so often fail or fall short.
You can tell when they don't follow a logical process. That involves a series of steps. You identify a problem. Step two: analyze the problem. Step three: identify options or solutions. Step four: choose some form of response. Step five: analyze what it's going to take to succeed. Step six: allocate the necessary resources.
Our foolish bordering on stupid approach to the Afghanistan mission is an example of when you're not in it to win. We knew we were taking the combat mission for Kandahar province. We didn't analyze the problem. We didn't identify solutions. We didn't allocate the necessary resources needed to succeed.
We went in with a force of 2,000 personnel, combat and support, later increased to 2,500. Counter-insurgency doctrine prescribed for a territory as large and populous as Kandahar province a minimum combat force of 15,000 to 20,000 fighting troops plus the essential support contingent. We were hopelessly under strength, something that forced on us the guaranteed-to-lose tactic of being a garrison force that typically fought during the day but had to retreat behind the wire at night, abandoning the territory to insurgent control wherever and whenever we were not present.
The effort wasn't matched to the problem and we spent more than a decade, wasting the lives and bodies of our young men and women for almost nothing.
It's this same sort of dysfunctional, gestural thinking that dominates on climate change. We don't identify what success looks like so we're left with the vaguest, aspirational goals that our gestural response will almost certainly never meet.
You can find a similar dysfunction in how we handle taxation, debt and deficits. It's how we wind up struggling "behind the power curve" again and again.
It's the sort of dysfunction that can only be accommodated in short-term thinking, election to election, utterly devoid of vision. That accounts for much of our malaise today.
It's not very smart is it? It seems it's all about doing the wrong thing. Anyong
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ReplyDeleteI'm not sure it's so much "doing the wrong thing" as foolishly trying to do the right thing in an utterly futile manner. And, no, it's not very smart. Not only is the money and effort invested wasted but so is the opportunity to do the job properly. In a problem as time sensitive as climate change that's a significant failure.