Rational progressive change doesn’t happen without conflict in modern democracies. We can’t even sort out something as obvious and actionable as shifting from a fossil fuel economy by consensus. Instead we have the spectacle of the politically powerful edging into increasingly absurd contradictory positions as they bend over for the oil super-rich while at the same time trying to look like they might actually be doing something useful to ameliorate a citizen’s increasing risk of being extinguished in an extreme weather event (or even, if you live in the richest of those oil-rich states, the risk of beheading for opening your mouth).
None of this looks likely to change until the Whitehouse spontaneously ignites in a 55°C heatwave or the Kremlin gets washed away by a surging Moskva. But by then, of course, it will be too late for us citizens and the dregs of the human race will have congealed into slug-like singularities and be travelling on privately built interplanetary craft looking for a new utopia to cover with their destructive slime (all funded by leveraging the oil driven economy before it collapsed).
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