Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Conversation has published yet another green attack on liberal democracy. According to The Conversation, Liberal democracy is old fashioned – it’s antiquated institutions produce climate change “paralysis”, which the authors suggest can be resolved, by transferring democratic powers to unelected panels of national and trans-national bureaucrats.
According to The Conversation;
… Specifically, the failure to tackle climate change speaks to an overall failure of our liberal democratic system…
… Successfully tackling climate change and other big policy challenges depends on making tangible the intangible crisis of liberal democracy.
It means understanding that liberal democracy’s governance machinery – and the static, siloed policy responses generated by such democracies – is no longer fit for purpose.
Naturally The Conversation has a solution for this crisis. My favourite from their list of suggestions, is their idea that democratic powers should be transferred to unelected bureaucrats, who would still somehow be “accountable” to parliament, despite having “staying power” beyond individual political cycles.
Granting more decision-making power to institutions independent of the government of the day, but still accountable to parliaments (such as the Parliamentary Budget Office or Infrastructure Australia). This would increase the capacity of policy planning and decision processes to have staying power beyond individual political cycles.
The authors of this critique of democratic freedom, are Mark Triffitt (Lecturer, Public Policy at University of Melbourne), and Travers McLeod, Honorary Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at University of Melbourne.
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Yet more proof, not that it is needed, that post-modernism rules the universities post ‘Gen VW’ (outside perhaps of a few hard sciences). As for the articulation of democracy – haven’t we come a long way, mostly downhill, since Orwell.
January 13th ,2014- IPCC chief Christiana Figueres stated- Democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming, Chinese Communism is the best model.
Obviously the UN had no problem with this. The UN has no problem with the iron fist of totalitarianism to “fight” a non-existent “problem.”
The people of the world should be up in arms over a comment like this.
A test for extremism is whether or not they are willing to abide peaceably by elections or if they dismiss the entire concept of democracy unless they get their way.
Yet more arrogant elitist nonsense that give academics a bad name. How anybody with two IQ points to rub together and any reading of 20th Century history could come out with this dangerous crap is beyond me.
It buries AGW/man made climate change even further.
It appears that the root of the problem is tenure.
Reblogged this on Daily Browse and commented:
‘Climate Change’ was never about science. Consensus is a political term, not a scientific principal. It’s all politics: anti-capitalist and anti-democracy. ‘Watermelons’: Green on the outside – red on the inside.
The whole idea is… well let’s skip that part. Climate change is not political, I think that is the biggest place this article has gone wrong. Democracy or not, things are happening on our planet that have not occurred since humans lived on it and survived through it. Before we existed Earth was happy existing peacefully, having balance and compensating for any sudden changes it encountered. Here we are, adding co2, deforesting and taking away the natural way to balance it out, and not adding any other solutions to off put our co2 contributions. Truth of the matter is co2 happens, other greenhouse gases happen, they are naturally occurring things, but they are not naturally occurring at the levels where they are at now. Congrats to the genius creativity and hard work of those who have progressed humanity and inventions and sciences. But balance is a pretty important part of life. It is not that the rates have never existed before, but not with humans. Earth may be just fine, but people and other species is another story. Perhaps if we were rising our co2 levels slowly, at the normal rate rather than 2ppm per year compared to 1ppm every 100 years. Regardless of if you think its humans or not, it is a drastic change that happens to line up with the industrial revolution. It’s also a rate of change faster than any species can adapt.
False.
Not a single sentence in your statement, and no conclusion, is correct.
Please, I invite you to rebut each individual statement with your corrections.
Elissa Barnes
April 25, 2015 at 12:28 pm
“It’s also a rate of change faster than any species can adapt.”
a) C3 plants ARE ADAPTED to high levels of CO2. That’s why plant growers ramp CO2 up to 1000+ ppm in greenhouses. Helps plants grow faster.
b) When I go indoors and close the windows, I not only ramp up the CO2 level in the room faster than the last 70 years took to grow it from 300 to 400 ppm. I also adapt perfectly well to it. When leaving the house the next morning, I have no problem at all adapting to an instantaneous drop in CO2 levels again.
So what’s wrong with you.
So far there have been 5 “mass extinctions” and although I personally was not present to tell you specifically how the climate was, scientists have suggested that abrupt and drastic changes in climate also took place.
That being said, I am all for more plants, happily adapted plants and anything that grows and lives thriving. I think it would be naive to say that this is a simple issue or a black and white topic. Perhaps it is a coincidence that the co2 levels follow closely in sync with the timing of the industrial revolution and have increased rather steadily as we have increased our output rather steadily. Let’s say it is a coincidence. It’s not the most terrible thing ever, to consider and look into what will be affected and how things will be affected in the future.
Elissa Barnes commented: “…. things are happening on our planet that have not occurred since humans lived on it and survived through it.”
Name one associated with climate.
The rate of co2 ppm increase per year as well as the levels of co2 we are currently experiencing.
CO2 levels. It is thought perhaps levels reached 1000ppm long before humans existed, but not since.
elissa barnes commented:
“CO2 levels.”
The last 20 years have produced empirical evidence that CO2 levels do not drive climate. If you go back further in time you can see where temperature and CO2 levels even diverge with decreases in temperature when CO2 levels increase, and vice versa. Temperature has risen, CO2 has risen, and man produces CO2 – therefore man is the cause of increased temperature is faulty logic from several perspectives and you don’t need to be a scientist to understand that. But also with proper evidence it could be proven true. Urban heat islands are anthropogenic and can be proven. What’s your evidence?
It is siimply “democracy” not “liberal democracy”. The word liberal has too many and often contradictory meanings to be useful in almost any context and in this one it is simply a semantic glow which falsely infers that those who self-label as “liberal” have a monopolistic claim on democracy.
You scratch a shiny green progressive, and underneath you will find a dark totalitarian. ALWAYS
There is always some reason, excuse or belief that makes it essential to force everyone else to do what you think is “best”. Nothing seems to change and history repeats and, this thinking always, always turns out very bad for Mankind.
Will we ever learn?