I say that for two main reasons:
1; The next four years are likely to be the most tumulchous in human history. And I do not say that lightly.
Severe weather is here because of so much extra accumulated heat. And as long as there is a significant repository of ice at the poles, that increasing differential wll cause ever more large, heat transfer events, which is, of course, what evaporation, condensation, and convection are all about. The wind, the rain, and the tremendous pressure changes, that these processes bring about, are all just side effects, horribly damaging though they may be.
How long the ice will last is the question, and the main worry for me. And I have to say, with the way the trend line has been changing so precipitously, in the last year or so, there is good reason to be very worried that our ability to keep that differential will cease altogether; which will soon have us intimately contemplating the old saw about going from the frying pan, to the fire.
The bottom line here, ultimately, is simple either way, though. And that is because in either case, whether it be with catastrophic storms, or with sea rise generally, the world may well know draught, and flooding, and destruction in general, like it has never seen in... well for a very long time. And this will be, eventually, because not only will a few places get way too much rain, continuously, but far too many will be getting very little, at all any more, precisely because ordinary circulation patterns, as life has known them for hundreds of thousands of years. will finally cease.
The economic and social effect of this will be catastrophic, to say the least. But this will only be the beginning of our troubles. For co committant to that will be the increasing tensions of the, already terrible competitions for resources, and viable markets, which will become even worse yet, by the amplified competition, of a system gone horribly mutated. An opportunity for which, unfortunately, that represents nothing but sweet gravy to the authoritarians of the world; as nothing serves to cement more "us against the evil outsider's" thinking more than having your people become ever more fearful in general, certainly, but with particular emphasis, when you can claim that the outsiders are going to, supposedly, steal food, and needed strategic materials, from you, and your children (with the real complexities of sustainable resource use be left to damnation, of course, because you won't be getting much of the truth about anything after that, any more either).
2: This creates, in case you hadn't noticed, the perfect setup for putting a patsy in power for a while. A patsy that will allow ownership of the bad that's coming to be transferred. And they'll do this knowing full well that, even if the patsy party could get, at least some, good legislation passed, it wouldn't be nearly enough to prevent market collapse, and the layoffs that will inevitably follow, for the reasons already stated above.
More to the point, though, would be the opportunity here for the out of power party to throw, without having to be too obvious about it, monkey wrenches into any effort to start making things right again. And of course they would do that because it would make taking back power not only so much easier, it would also likely end any further ability, of the left, to confront the right again, from within what will then become of government.
From my perspective, it is a hard thing to not want to make the Right own the majority portion of what is coming, as far as seriously bad times for one, and all, on this planet, are concerned. The traditional, Liberal Left has a lot of responsibility as well, because they've been just as invested in making more money, as much of the right has, and that is why Capitalism itself has never been as fully questioned as it should have been, since Marshall McLuhan, at least, made it clear (along with Harold Innis) that very large changes in the instrumentality we use to extend our faculties with, must also come with changes in the way all of our major social institutions must work as well. But that catastrophic coming to terms, with what has actually been done to the planet, as well as to our own sanity, is about to dawn on even the most strident of Trump current supporter. And maybe that's one rude awakening that we need to have in order to have any chance of getting a majority of folks on the same page; as far as being willing to compromise goes, in any case.
Let's just be clear one more time. Capitalism wasn't designed at all to be able to handle the electrification of experience retrieval. How could it when one of the bedrock components of its foundation was the fundamental assumption of the human uniqueness of skill application. Now that robotics takes that assumption away, it no longer has a viable foundation at all.
Let's also be clear that keeping information as a commodity, which capitalism must, unfortunately, impose with great vigor, insures that Democracy cannot survive. That we are in, now, this chaotic world of people being saturated within the info environment of truth going to the highest bidder, ought to tell you exactly how frightening this should be to you.
The bottom line for me is that it is highly unlikely that we will get the real change we need if we continue with the current, completely corrupted two party system.
No, If the last, nearly seventy years, since 1950, when our economic clout really started taking off (precisely because of the electrification of information) has taught us anything, it is that Capitalism cannot be made to be socially responsible. No matter how many laws you might try to pass to make it so.
The only way real change will occur is when enough of us stop participating, in the farce as a whole, to make it stop; and the best way to make our intention clear towards that end would be the instigation of across the boards stikes, involving as many aspects of the American economy as we can manage to include. Strikes and community gatherings, so that we can start engaging each other more directly; so that we can begin to see that, with electrified tech working for us, instead of us working for it, we can set things up to actually make a "Grand Compromise" possible. It will mean finally taking responsibility for ourselves, but that is the only way we will ever be able to begin to heal this planet, and us.
See Also:
Tornadoes and flash floods threaten millions from Texas to Missouri
