Pirate's Cove

This is certainly not the first Warmist article complaining about democracy getting in the way of Doing Something (implementing Big Government solutions which give a central government more power over the lives of citizens, private entities, economies, and energy, all while refusing to change their own lives to accord with their belief set), nor will it be the last. Nor will it be the last which dinks and dunks around the edges of exposing that these folks are Progressives (nice fascists)

Hidden crisis of liberal democracy creates climate change paralysis

A “burning platform” with big, tangible impacts on our everyday lives is often the tipping point for concerted action. We call these crises.

Think of the G20’s actions in the wake of the global financial crisis or the global response to 9/11. Both events left governments and decision-makers with no choice but to act.

Then there are the hidden crises. These are usually not a single, explosive event, rather a pattern of events whose impacts are difficult to connect.

As such it takes time to bring to the surface the underlying cause and have it widely recognised as a crisis. It takes even more time to convince decision-makers to act.

Climate change is an obvious example of this knowledge-action gap.

Uh huh

Specifically, the failure to tackle climate change speaks to an overall failure of our liberal democratic system to:

• deliver competent, future-focused policy that can guide and give context to the pressing need for action on core challenges

• reconcile expert knowledge and community opinion to deal with the big issues of our age

You darned stupid freedom and democracy loving people!

Yet the crisis of liberal democracy remains intangible. This is because we prefer to blame the idiosyncrasies of leaders and bad leadership, rather than the system itself and its growing pattern of policy gridlock and dysfunction.

In the process, we overlook the fact that our delivery mechanism of democracy – liberal democracy – evolved out of a pre-21st century world. It was a world where the speed, scale and complexity of policy were of a dramatically lower order.

So in a globalised, digitally saturated world no longer bound by speed limits, our hands are tied by political and policy machinery, like parliaments, designed to synchronise with the 20th century’s comparatively languid rhythms of decision-making.

See? Democracy Bad! So, what can be done?

It means understanding that liberal democracy’s governance machinery – and the static, siloed policy responses generated by such democracies – is no longer fit for purpose.

It means coming up with disruptive solutions – like coalitions of countries, cities and companies to tackle climate change – that re-align this machinery with the new order of scale, complexity and speed that defines our 21st-century world.

Solutions like

More deliberative systems that directly engage citizens and deepen debate. Such systems would work to capture and grow long-term vision, values and objectives – rather than static perceptions of incremental policy decisions made for tactical reasons.

And

Granting more decision-making power to institutions independent of the government of the day, but still accountable to parliaments (such as the Parliamentary Budget Office or Infrastructure Australia). This would increase the capacity of policy planning and decision processes to have staying power beyond individual political cycles.

Wow, it’s almost like they want to take power out of the Hands Of The People and just give it to Government. As one commenter wrote “This article has Orwellian self interest written all over it.” The writers want to hand power to Government and “experts” (IPCC, anyone), which, in reality, would be even less accountable that Government and politicians are now. All for an issue that is mostly fake. But sure seems to be a way to push the Progressive (nice fascist) goal-set.