Politicians: Do you Understand the Exponential Function?
As it applies to the cost of climate damage… clearly not.
I recently re-read the old folk tale about the Indian(?) emperor who, thrilled that one of his subjects had codified the rules for the game of chess, promised him any gift he wished for.
The inventor asked for a chess board with one grain of wheat on the first square, 2 on the second, and so on, doubling each time.
As a mathematician, he understood the nature of exponential growth; his political boss didn’t.
The gift was undeliverable: the total on all 64 squares would be over 1,600 times the current global production of wheat (780.8 million tonnes in 2019).
This is an apt metaphor for politicians’ collective guilt in failing to understand, and plan for, the multiplying pace of climate disruption and its economic impacts.
They are supposed to plan for the the future; that’s what we tax-payers pay them for. Instead, all we get is adversarial bickering and party-political point-scoring.
As humans increasingly flout planetary boundaries (anthropogenic climate disruption being just one), a general economic deterioration is inevitable. We’ve used up the cheapest and most accessible energy and mineral resources; also we’re now saddled with the escalating costs of repeated infrastructure repair and insurance premium hikes as adverse weather events multiply. That will boost inflation as well as causing supply-chain issues and a growing inability by nations to pay for their imports.
These interlinked crises are complex and very hard to tackle. We’ve all grown to expect growth and prosperity; now comes the reckoning.
Politics being what it is, inevitably the government of the day will get the blame. That being so, why would an honest, moral citizen even want to work in politics? https://newptc75.medium.com/politicians-mental-health-f2b4aadf868e
The hunt for simplistic solutions (or scapegoats) could so easily embolden a rising tide of belligerent protest — the perfect recruiting ground for the demagogue, the autocratic strong-man who promises to ‘put things right’.
The parallels with the rise of Hitler, Franco and Mussolini are surely obvious.
Complacency could so easily result in rising inequality, the sly whittling away of press freedom and citizens’ rights, and ultimately autocracy. Hence Trump, Putin, Netenyahu, Lukashenko, Erdogan, al Sisi, Xi, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Orban, the vile Myanmar junta, and their lookalikes and wannabes across the globe. (yes, one or two of the above have been removed; but the overall trend is disturbing.)
The old aphorism “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” has never sounded more relevant or urgent.
