Ludwig and Taswegian. It is good to see that there are some people on OLO who have got a brain and can understand the problems that are facing the coming generation. One wonders about some of the others who seek to emulate the ostrich. Nor are they content to squander our limited resources, they also seem to have no compunction about polluting our environment as well. Unfortunately, there seems to be little that we can do to convince them of the error of their ways. Evidence and logical argument seem to be something they don't understand.

David

Bill McKibben - whose book 'The End of Nature' was a classic work of popular communication of essential scientific fact, and is still required reading for anyone seriously interested in all this, including Warwick McKibbin - is of course right. What Bill does not give us is ideas on how we generate urgently needed policy change at government level. For this, I suggest, interested OLO readers might look at my new book 'Crunch Time: using and abusing Keynes to fight the twin crises of our era'.[Scribe, September 2009].
[http://www.scribepublications.com.au/book/crunchtime]

'Yes, we can' - if we shed our minds of false myths and illusions about what democratic market-based societies like ours can deliver in cases of existential life-threatening emergency, once the threat is correctly seen. We were somewhere like this in Britain in 1938-39, and we changed the way we organised our society and industry, to prepare for unavoidable war. We survived the threat of Nazism. We can survive this threat too, once we recognize its true dimensions and respond accordingly.

I'm guessing Bill McKibben's just cheesed off because, for all his grandstanding, not only could he get not get himself arrested at his little anti-coal demo, Mother Gaia also had the gall to mock him by snowing out the whole thing.

"They chanted slogans like "Who is hot in here / There's too much carbon in the air" while huddling against the windchill" - Time magazine, "Despite Snow — and Irony — a Climate Protest Persists"

A wide range of policies to dramatically reign in carbon pollution are well known to our politicians. Only the Greens have advocated the rehabiltation and new lifestyle policies that our envirnomental science demands of human kind.

Sadly, the dangerously inadequate polices of Labor and the COAL-ition are similar to the actions of tobacco dealers, supplying their clients, gross carbon and methane polluters with their fix, under the mantra of delay, delay, delay, all will be okay.

We are witnessing the greatest failure of governance ever. Perhaps history will record one day that the elected 'representatives' of the nation with the highest per capita green house gas emmissions in the world, acted more than most to hasten the demise of the Holoscene period and ushered in a new, period of searing heat, bushfires, hurricanes, mass extinctions on land and sea, horrendous poverty, famine in a new period on Earth that could be aptly named the Searascene.

Billie boy this is why
a) you do not frighten me and
b) you have no credibility.
Scary pictures of a dust storm hitting Sydney? Well Bill you crawl under the table and have a sook there's a good academic.
Mate there was a similar occurrence in Melbourne over twenty years ago. There were similar dust storms in the "Dust bowl" in the USA in the 1930's. This is a natural phenomena and you are using it to try and frighten the gullible. I find this all very distasteful that someone who has never done a real days work in his life is not satisfied with bludging off the rest of us but then compounds the insult by trying to pick our pockets too.
The banks, power companies and the politicians are going to try and tax us with this and I believe they will pay a heavy price. This is duplicitous and dishonest behavior. The pay back will be in reverse order of these benefits.

my contention is that democracy fails us in situations like climate change (indeed, look at human history and ecology). Advanced western democracies are more or less at a state of glut; notwithstanding drastic disparities, cultures like Australia are bourgeois heaven. Living standards (consumption) are decadent--based on considerations like equality and sustainability. This is a comfortable place indeed, and people are loath to give it up. It's all very well celebrating government by the people, but the fact is that people are not driven by altruism, or even their own good; they are driven by ambition for wealth and influence, in default of which they will cling tenaciously to what they've got!
Over this basic self-serving drive, that ultimately governs, there is a civilised pretence of altruism that is forfeit when holdings are threatened. Most miraculous of all, any actions deemed necessary to preserve wealth and power are alchemically rationalised as all to the good.
This is not to assign the whole human race base motives; there is a broad spectrum between selfish and unselfish, but to assert that the affluent voting majority are influenced more or less by these drives. Many will congratulate themselves on "being" altruistic, but they will vote conservative--that is to preserve their investment in the status quo when it comes to the crunch. That is why both major parties are conservative, and why action on climate change is grudging, slow and slight. Government and Opposition "are" the people, wrought by polls and ultimately the vote. it is electoral suicide to threaten the stash of the ruling middle classes--who have also ideologically enslaved a great many of the not-so-well-off.
Democracy is a great idea if it is somehow constrained to operate within ethical, equable, and sustainable limits, but it is predicated on the exact opposite! Moreover, those human drives are actually "cultivated" by an economic system that thrives on them.
Democracy cannot be left to decide the fate of the planet; the voting majority lives for the moment and will punish any government that reduces their holdings.