It’s been said a thousand times, by people higher up the food chain (step forward Gillian Tett, among others), but the pending ecological debacle is just like the financial crash of 2008.
“We” know the System is unsustainable. We have chosen to ignore the warnings, or to put forward the most tokenistic “solutions” imaginable. We believe our ‘experts,’ our trajectories. The powerful are too busy having fun/accumulating via dispossession to think what will happen when the music stops.
No-one is willing or able to take away the punch-bowl, and everyone is dancing with the one that brung them (See here) with one eye on the fire exit.
And they are thinking to themselves – “fuck it, we’re too big to fail. The state will bail us out. And if that doesn’t work, there are our own private bolt-holes.”
The security apparatus grows, metastasizing in front of our eyes. We say “meh.” The privatised systems will have the added bonus of less and less accountability. Not foia-able, “commercial confidentiality”, the demented game of pass-the-parcel when something goes wrong (and it so often does). Welcome to the United Kingdom of Great Campsfield, have a nice stay.
The scientists’ warnings become fainter and fainter under the clutter of twerking and nuclear, and the inevitable fact that a repeated warning is an ignored one.
The main differences seem to me to be
a) there is no human institution that can “bail out” an ecological phase shift on the scale that seems possible, if not probable. How are you supposed to feed your populations if there is simultaneous crop failures in Russia, the US and Australia? I am sure someone has a modest proposal…
b) the rich I think over-estimate the ‘resilience’ of their Plan Bs. Or maybe I hope they overestimate it?
We are picking up dimes in front of steam rollers, and expecting the private health clinic to unflatten us with a comedy bicycle pump if we stumble and are squished, like in one of those Looney Tunes cartoons.
Have I been watching too many zombie movies? The “End” is more likely to be a series of gradual whimpers rather than one big bang, no?
dwighttowers.wordpress.com 
“b) the rich I think over-estimate the ‘resilience’ of their Plan Bs. Or maybe I hope they overestimate it?”
It must surely be the former. What use a bunker if you can never step outside it… and cannot live forever within it? Perhaps this explains the recent noises about missions to Mars; more in terms of ‘more research is needed to create permanently-viable self-contained living accommodation’.
I don’t grok the latter. Why would you hope that they do overestimate the resilience of their Plan Bs? Were this the case, wouldn’t that relieve the pressure on those best placed to find a resolution to Plan A? Surely the ‘hope’ must be that they become increasingly convinced that their Plan Bs are not and can never be viable, which would leave them with only one option — ie the one the rest of our poor world needs them to concentrate upon.
Ben Elton, “Stark”. That is all.
Thanks. I’ve read a few of his — “Gridlock” and “Inconceivable” spring to mind — but I don’t think I’ve read “Stark”. Another one for the reading list… thanks!