The recent disaster in New York is warning to redirect funds into rebuilding the infrastructure of our cities. Clearly . . . we need to rethink our spending.
That being, spend money to fuel production vs austerity. This is pre-climate change, 20th century thinking and our paradigm should be changing.
To me, when I look at climate change, I think we need not shed another ounce of carbon that is not in the name of making a post-carbon life as good as possible. This probably means we should not necessarily be rebuilding complex infrastructure that requires immense energy to maintain. We should rather be simplifying our infrastructure and society that our standard of living will rest upon, and building multiple levels of regional resilience in all communities.
This thread starts with a malnourished child. Is it lost on some people that at the peak of the industrial age, half the world's population is chronically deficient in some required nutrient? Its all downhill from here due to climate change, and making stronger or more high tech cities simply follows humankind's pattern of banging our head against the wall. Instead, the focus should be on how we will feed everyone when America will no longer be able to grow soy, wheat or corn in 40 years.
We are tool monkeys. We think we must always be doing "something". Now we suffer from an over production problem, and the only way some people want to address it is with further production. Are we going to really be able to produce our way out of an over production problem?
Its time to transition past this age of ostentatious waste, and that is going to require visionaries ready to tackle the real issues of the 21 century; likely, those visionaries will not be able to come from any existing parties that are growing increasing irrelevant as we head for famine and ruin.
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