Paris 2015

Paris is in the news again. In the run up to the climate summit, National Geographic dedicated its November issue entirely to the climate challenge. The November issue contains a rather complete overview of all consequences of our booming activities on this planet. Why is it so difficult to tackle this problem?

On the individual level, it is clear that the climate issue will force us to live differently. People don’t easily adopt a behaviour where the cost is on the individual and the benefit is on the community. We always do the opposite: we maximise our individual benefits and put the burden as much as possible on the community’s shoulders.

At the political level, we face two problems. The first is that climate issues have time horizons of 10 to 50 to 100 years. Politicians are elected for a period of 4 years. Long term policies are not as well rewarded as short term policies. Another problem is that our politicians are elected by the national states. Therefore they represent the interests of the national states, they don’t represent the planet Earth. And as we have seen in a previous blog, groups and states tend to behave in a very selfish way.

Sooner or later the national states will need to delegate power to a supranational authority where the delegates are no longer chosen by national member states, but by a planetary council. Also remember that the issue is urgent. Until now, we haven’t created emergency exits on our planet. Of course, prevention is better. But the urgency is now so high that we have to do both: we have to do prevention and we have to build emergency exits anyway. How this can be done is described in my blog Biosphere 2, I refer to my earlier "sustainability" blogs in English and in Dutch.