Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Will democracies survive global warming?

Down here in Australia we have Sophie Mirabella MP, shadow Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, dog-whistling the crazies to murder and mayhem. In reference to PM Gillard's proposed introduction of a price on carbon, Mirabella said:
"If Ms Gillard believes Australians want to pay higher electricity and higher petrol prices, she is as deluded as Colonel 'my people love me' Gaddafi."
Mirabella has joined the list of infamous politicians such as Palin for effectively calling for people to resort to violence.

Given the trend in US conservative politics to stop any research relating to climate and stop any regulation of pollution; and the trend in Australian conservative politics to not repair damage from weather disasters as well as to not do anything to combat global warming, I fear that democracy will not survive too much longer.

Mirabella is already dog-whistling for civil war. What will she call for when global warming makes the weather even worse than it has been this past decade? In her own electorate, people have suffered a decade of drought, more major fires burning more land than ever before in a similar time period, and just this summer, deluges the like of which have never been recorded. Still Mirabella doesn't want to take any action to reduce the cause of these disasters. If she and extremists like her in other countries have their way, we won't know what has hit us in a few years time.

Which countries will do better? Perhaps western-style democracy is not up to the task of dealing with the massive problem of global warming.

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