IB Times UK
Jason Blackstock asks how politics will cope with the uncertainty of new technologies
Governance is a word on everyone's lips these days, and for good reason. Global governance is certainly not getting any easier, with destructive financial ripples, inscrutable oil prices, surging food costs, and unsettling national uprisings. These familiar concerns remind us that even long-established governance systems, with rich historic experience to draw from, are increasingly caught unprepared by the rapidly changing social, political and technological realities of our new century.
Now against this backdrop, try to design a new international regime that can head off dangerous human interference with the climate system without exacerbating the multitude of other looming calamities which are barely being managed already. With virtually no historic experience to draw upon, forecasts about how climate policies would actually impact those tender bits of our global society – such as jobs, energy supplies and food production – appear at best uncertain. And that's before contesting predictions from differing political camps are washed into the mix. In this context, the continuing lack of a global climate deal, while no less disastrous for our planet's future, is sadly somewhat understandable.
The sense of dismayed 'inevitablism' about climate change evoked by such thinking has been a key factor in bringing the notion of geoengineering into scientific and public prominence. Some hope this might make the climate challenge more manageable, both by limiting the downside risks and costs and – just maybe – by frightening societies into reducing their carbon emissions (because the prospect of having to geoengineer our global climate is quite scary)...!...[Full Article]
