bill

1. The major environmental issues are still to come, and they will come sooner than later. The planning issue is of critical importance in this change. Democracy as a thought model consumes a lot of time and energy. Confronted to major crisis, this model will be show some limits, and public opinion will growingly ask for counter-democracy actions in order to fulfill basic needs (home, food, and health). The more the sense of urgency is shared among people, the more alternative decision-making models will be valued. The army decision model may eventually take a counter-intuitive positive image. To summarize, China and Russia might not be leading a classical production revolution as is commonly thought. They might in fact become leading political and collective models in times of generalized crisis. Obviously, this is not to be supported, but history has often demonstrated since Aristotle that demagogy follows democracy, and that dictatorship follows demagogy.

2. Confronted to such an unprecedented scope of required change, social and economic resistance will develop. The public opinion will discover through this process that the sum of individual behaviors do not necessarily prevent from collective non-sense. The volatility of public opinion will increase. But higher volatility will not only be limited to the "shluds" mentionned above and may also be noted from political bodies. Gustave Le Bon is a good reference on that : just years after the French revolution social movements had happened, he developped the view was crowds are mostly conducted by metaphors, images, emotions and face difficulties in structuring a reasonning over a long period of time. A parliament or a senate acts as a crowd. This is why a Parliament of well-educated physicians can be as dum as a non-alphabetized crowd when immediate response time is required. The difficulty of political bodies to structure value-add solutions to complex and urgent issues will re-inforce the first trend - and weaken the democratic political model.

Naturally, these are high-level pessimistic views. But the way political bodies do consider environmental issues do give some ground to such views. What's currently happening in France regarding the implementation of the well-regarded Grenelle de l'Environnement shows that resistance to intelligence and responsibility is not occuring at social individual level, but within the sphere of the Parliament...

In Australia, we should of course be running vehicles on CNG and building a more effective public transport systems but no one is interested.

I think it would be a good time for everyone to read or reread, "The Grapes of Wrath".