The human race now needs to do something(s) significant – actions that will really make a difference on the global scale.
Watching the debate over the last two years move the general consensus from 'sceptical about ‘Global Warming’' being a manmade phenomenon to being 'fairly convinced' has been most interesting. You can see all the sources of influence, listed below, at play. However this was bipolar debate – yes or no. And in my and other peoples' opinions, if treated as a risk management issue it is a ‘no brainer’ – we have to act even though it is the lesser of two evils – to act and bear the cost of acting, or not to act and face the risk of human and global disaster.
The imperatives now are:
- to act quickly
- those actions have to be effective
- the global population has to execute them willingly
- we have to be right first time – we can only run this experiment once as we are in the test-tube.
What actions and behaviour changes would make a significant difference and be achievable?
Human creativity can provide a virtually infinite number of ideas and opinions on this’ what?’. However which are the winners likely to be - the most efficacious, or the most popular? It requires wisdom to make the right choices, particularly if they are tough choices – I think of the Solomon story. My thesis is that mankind does not seem to have a framework by which to judge the options. I have investigated some of the most popular according to my framework and I'm left confounded as to their efficacy. The framework will start to be described in my next post.
How would the actions be executed willingly?
Anyone with major influence can achieve a lot by getting people to work in a concerted way. The question is who or what brings about that unity around a cause.
- Corporates directly control the conduct of their operations
- NGOs can influence and in some cases (the UN) mandate.
- Democratic governments can mandate changes in behaviour where it is vote winner – they have to gain political consensus where it might not be a vote winner
- Local government can encourage us to do things
- Individuals when united by a commonly held cause can achieve the most but that is difficult to attain. This likely to be the subject of a later post from me, but please say what you want to say now.
