[mschuster91]

> Let's assume that the world is incapable of solving this problem.

Incapable not, but unwilling most certainly - just look at the state of politics across all Western countries and that doesn't even include China and India who're hell-bent on growth.

> What can an individual do to not suffer?

Move to somewhere high up north, these places are going to be those where climate change will at least not cause them to get uninhabitable.

[marginalia_nu]

> Incapable not, but unwilling most certainly - just look at the state of politics across all Western countries and that doesn't even include China and India who're hell-bent on growth.

Unwilling and incapable are sort of two sides of the same coin. Our political and economical systems are set up as a greedy (in the CS sense) optimization process.

This makes solving long term global scale problems all but impossible in any case that would entail any sort of short-term inconvenience, and anyone seeking to solve such problems by such means are (by definition) politically and economically irrelevant.

I think in general there's a somewhat unfounded notion that someone is actually in control that's getting harder to defend in the light of what's been several decades of fairly public failures to address obvious problems in society. You to look very hard to find examples of public policy successfully addressing any sort of problem, and even in that case it's questionable whether the problem was actually solved or whether it's just a case of regression to the mean.

[mschuster91]

> I think in general there's a somewhat unfounded notion that someone is actually in control that's getting harder to defend in the light of what's been several decades of fairly public failures to address obvious problems in society. You to look very hard to find examples of public policy successfully addressing any sort of problem, and even in that case it's questionable whether the problem was actually solved or whether it's just a case of regression to the mean.

I think it's obvious by now when all that began: with the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia in the early 90s. With the corrective against capitalism lost, everything defaulted to greed in the following decades.

Before that, humanity showed many times over that it could cooperate on critical crises and to ban dangerous stuff: sulphur in fuel was banned after "acid rain", lead and asbestos were banned, CFCs were banned after the ozone hole, nuclear weapon tests were all but abolished, biological and chemical weapon developments as well. Even the right to wage wars of aggression was under pretty solid control.

[patmorgan23]

Do we have the technical capabilities? Probably yes Do we have the organizational/coordinating capabilities? Maybe