| This strikes me as the real question here. The world is (one hopes) just beginning to emerge from a global disaster of a known variety, for which there has been longstanding scientific and technical understanding, as well as existing paybooks for dealing with the situation. Response by the most capable and technologically-advanced countries has often been abysmal. The coming global energy transition is going to be orders of magnitude more complex and fraught than the COVID-19 pandemic has been. And this is uncharted territory, with no tested playbook (the IPCC guidelines and publications are at least a playbook), and ongoing dissent within and among countries as to measures to be taken and how costs are to be allocated. William Ophuls studied this question beginning in the late 1960s. His PhD dissertation in political science at Yale was published as Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity[1] in 1977 (it's been revised since), and the question has been Ophuls's life work.[2] In particular, Ophuls's assessment of the global situation in the 1970s, the likely developments in ensuing decades, which 44 years on we can compare against history, and likely sticking points yet to come, stand out. Ophuls is a realist, but an optimist (perhaps somewhat less of the latter with time). He does see a path out. But it hasn't been the path chosen over the past five decades. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Ophuls: https://archive.org/details/ecologypolitics00ophu 2. Bibliography: https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=au%3Ao... |