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Originally Posted by Shaden  What I don't understand is how the government make all doom and gloom about the situation of global warming and then go ahead and do absolutely nothing about it. That confuses me - and proves we have incompetent world leaders. Oh my what a surprise... |
I don't think they're incompetent, I think it's a matter of time scales. Political careers are measured in years, climate change is measured in decades.
It would take a brave politician to say "This will be a huge problem in 30-50 years, so we're going to raise your taxes and start dealing with it". It absolutely needs to be done, but any politician who does it risks being voted out, because the voters' concerns tend to be more immediate.
Politicians realise that there's political points in making noise about climate change, but that to actually
do something about it would require unpopular changes (eg. look how much people whinge when petrol goes up 20c - can you imagine the career of a politician who taxed it?). So they just make the noise.
Politicians will fix the environment if they can do it without disrupting the economy. But they can't, because the economy is unsustainable ; it draws too heavily on finite, damaging resources.
The problem can't be fixed at the level at which it was created, but people are still thinking at that level.