This is a depressing article that also offers solutions although, ultimately, the outlook is bleak….
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More depressing is the paywall. Dont doubt the content though, humans are on a self destruct path
The guardian doesn’t have a paywall - it’s their principal to have journalism freely available.
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I do think that this does go against the Guardians long standing stance of ‘freely available’ to a certain extent in that you will have to agree to all the cookies to read articles and I really don’t want to give permission to be tracked across the internet and profiled. It is easy to circumvent though as long as you don’t use the Chrome browser.
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In the Firefox browser I just click the X button at top-right of the pop-up window. Simples. No need to pay or agree to anything.
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I like the guys answer to the question of how we can avoid global collapse. He said ‘don’t be a dick’ 
.
More seriously, I’ve read a few articles on exactly this same issue and there does seem to be a fair consensus amongst anthropologists and cultural historians that we may be heading for societal collapse if our past is any guide. The author here sums it up pretty well.
people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites
The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism
Todays society is far more sophisticated, but also more vulnerable to the outcomes of collapse than past collapsed societies and there is disagreement on whether we are more or less vulnerable to collapse. The one thing that is certain though is that collapse would be much worse in most ways than any previous collapse.
Edited to clarify a point.
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A(greed). 
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not some farcical aquatic ceremony.
I was watching Phil Moorhouse (A Different Bias) on YouTube last night and he was explaining why the UK’s Reform Party has decided that they want to abolish all Net Zero targets, remove green energy subsidies, restart fracking, and increase North Sea oil production.
80% or more of their party funding comes from millionaires who have interests in the fossil fuel industry.
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Use an ad blocking utility and the web version, not the application.
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Interesting help, I also have the Brave browser on my phone which I should make more use of.
Now back to the topic…
The trouble with all that is that it’s not the government that exploits the resource, it’s the oil companies. They can be given incentives but can’t be forced to invest the money to exploit the resource. If they think it’s not economically viable (and it isn’t at the moment) then they won’t do it. This is the exact situation Trump finds himself in with his ‘drill baby drill’ mentality. Last year the vast majority of energy projects in the US were wind and solar with some natural gas. The reason is that now wind and solar coupled with storage solutions is much cheaper over all time scales. This trend is predicted to continue into at least the next three or four years. When Trump offered new oil leases in his first term, there were almost no takers. The same will happen this time. The truth is that to ‘drill baby drill’ you have to capture a fair chunk of the energy market with your oil and gas and short of a complete ban of wind and solar that will never happen.
Edit: At the moment, you do still need a fair amount of baseline production to cover the variability of wind and solar even using energy storage. That currently is mainly gas with some nuclear. Getting rid of that is very hard but it’s use will only decline, not increase.
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Yes I’m sure your right that fossil fuels have had their day and green energy will win in the end - but politicians are still capable of meddling and slowing things down. But it is to be hoped that Farrago and friends will never get into office in the UK, rendering the question moot.
Mind you we said the same about Trump.
We get the best government money can buy. (Mark Twain)
Politicians are very capable of generating lots of hot air headlines for consumption by the masses, just like Trumps ‘drill baby drill’ but if the oil companies aren’t interested in extracting the oil then there’s little they can do. Trump is currently trying to hobble renewable energy projects in the US but it’s making little difference because the economics still work.
It’s interesting that one of the most Republican of Republican states and home of the US oil industry, Texas, is one of the most interested and progressive states when it comes to renewable energy and produces more renewable energy than any other state. The reason ? $$$$$$$
…this is true but we pay a wee bit each month to The Guardian and also NY Times (I think) and also a Dutch one (can’t remember the name) just to try and keep some semblance of freedom of speech…
Whilst there is no actual punishment for ministers and civil servants being useless or flat out corrupt, we will always get a shower of activists/thieves/muppets running the planet.
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There are some grounds for optimism.
There’s a cut down video version here, where Maitlis puts some difficult questions (unfortunately, given the format, the answers are painfully short): https://youtu.be/izH1-vYMmiI
What’s the TL:DR version?
More young folks believing in sky pixies or less?
Depressing indeed.
I would hope there are more than only the two extreme possibilities posited.
The author advocates:
escaping global collapse could be achieved. “First and foremost, you need to create genuine democratic societies to level all the forms of power that lead to Goliaths,” he says. That means running societies through citizen assemblies and juries, aided by digital technologies
A sort of updated and tech version of social rethinks that have been tried before - Socialism. Communism. Unfortunately, they didn’t work as planned.
I’m not a fan of unfettered capitalism but I can see any system that enables the collective good over individual good (success / riches / power) is going to be a very hard sell. Everyone would vote for equality in theory but most would then like to be selective about who is equal to what.
The current plan of building walls and stoping boats is not going to work in volume and time. However, I did rather like the suggestion of limiting personal wealth as long as it were transparently unilateral. Might solve London’s housing crisis in a massive sell off. 
Doesn’t mean we should stop looking for new ways to share and preserve this world. We must find one. Our survival depends on it.
None (it would be “fewer” anyway 
).
But many rejecting the atheism of their parents’ generation and finding a purpose in their faith. And finding peace.
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