Like the peasants and courtiers in Sleeping Beauty, the retainers, the lobbyists and bond traders will blink, shake themselves awake and find that the world has moved while they have been sleeping.
Tomorrow (the US is a day behind Australia) the US chooses a new President, and then the real fun begins. Neither candidate has even mumbled about reforming election funding (please correct me if I am wrong), and both candidates have promised to continue the siphoning of money from the public into private hands, such as military and energy contractors. His ‘Green Jobs’ notwithstanding, even Obama knows this is code for enormous subsidies for the coal and nuclear industries, neither of which are renewable resources. But New Jersey’s Governor is going for the real thing, and the rest will fall into line as the old economy shrinks. Even New York is going for LED lighting and turning off some lights at night.
Environmental issues have not been prominent in this campaign, except in relation to the need to fuel 4 wheel drives. Currently Britain is at the forefront of solving that problem, by announcing initiatives to encourage a mass market in electric and hybrid cars.
More importantly, neither US candidate has acknowledged the impending collapse of global ecosystems, and if you’re not with me on this one, far be it for me to bring this to your attention. We are all likely to get the governments we deserve.
I’m outta here in 10 days, escaping the US for the balmy, quiet suburbs of Canberra. There’s just so much entertainment one can derive from the new strip mall and tanning parlour down the road. In Canberra I can suck my thumb in a corner in some peace, knowing the Greens have the balance of power and are going to pursue a dual climate change/social equity agenda. Believing that when I see it, I will nonetheless leap into the See Change activities and workshops that are already having an influence. Perhaps my 14 climate change presentations in Canberra this past year contributed to that outcome.
Change is coming, and it will be going my way. This year marks the Great Awakening. This unfortunately coincides with the Great Disruption: http://paulgilding.com/scream-crash-boom-2. This piece deserves your attention, it is more positive than you’d think. And whether you are a hair-splitter, a lobbyist, or just a run of the mill head in the sand denier, change will still come.
One might also say tomorrow is the Day the Buck Really Stopped, and the day the merry-go-round of public subsidies for unsustainable economic policies started to grind to a halt. That Great Accountability is already happening in Argentina, where the public is not buying the government’s nationalisation of their pension plans to fund further spending.
So when Obama gets elected tomorrow he will find the millions of people who dug deep into their shallow pockets to give him small donations will want to see a return on that modest investment. So will the millions of young people who are voting for the first time. And they will be watching in some shock as the environmental poop hits the global fan. Would you like melamine with your doughnuts? Little bit never hurt ‘ya, and a few kidney stones are cheaper than approaching the monitoring of the global food supply on a global basis. Hey, you’re not a socialist are you?
For years I have been saying that the lies the American people were told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq are nothing compared to the lies they are being told about climate change. (The US gov spends some billions per year keeping information OUT of the public domain) And the overall picture of environmental implosion is a story that doesn’t get pieced together: who is looking at the combined impacts of soil degradation, chemical impacts on health, water scarcity, species decline, and energy issues? Or who is interested in listening?
But tomorrow the Sleeping Beauty of public participation will start to stir, as the magic wand of democracy sprinkles star dust over America’s bleary eyes. Watch that space.