All right, so here comes my first comment:
(alas, please bear with me, but I feel the need to identify myself first as "not a Koch Brothers stooge" - In that vein: I'm the son of german WWII refugee and displaced parents. I was a very young punk in 1979, living by "never trust a hippy". I turned out a Hippy-Punk, building the Green Party in my home town in the nascent 80's. Strong kinship to the Joschka Fischer RealPolitik wing. In city council, all my proposals were gunned down from left, right, and center [literally - we had a unique party scape]. I was young, many things happened, I ended up living in many different cities and countries, now for twenty years in Vancouver, BC. It ain't heaven. Fun fact, on return visits to my home town in Germany's rust belt, most all of my original proposals had become policy, but yet implemented by the majority party that was a boisterous opponent of them just two decades prior.)
Yes, if you managed to read this far, you will say: we don't have two decades to act!
True.
Alas, again, I do have a certain view about what "human nature" is.
It's grand, to shout Utopian conceptual changes at your fellow citizen, highlighted by the facts of a cold, hard changing environment.
Once more, alas: would you think, shouting at a child about dire consequences for certain actions if no Zen-like, Utopian spirituality is acquired, like, Pronto!, will have the effect that your paternal instincts desire?
In my life, that approach never ever worked.
So, fast forward to the topic at hand:
Good starting points for change are concepts outside of the box that deal with the reality we live in now.
Off the top:
- Proposal concepts for rail trasses to move material for dykes into habitat endangered lowlands.
- Schemes for holding ponds and dyked canal systems that are drained by wind and solar
- global calculations, how solar powered "labour" of moving said rocks for dykes benefits the global warming balance sheet (a much better approach then all the ideas of "geo engineering with all the un-knowns of unintended consequences"
- Clearly defining where new food production growth will be possible, and "Profit!" can be had, will save more people from starving in the near future than "Horticulture" alone will
Okay, cheers all,
and before you all throw sticks at me:
I volunteered on a series of anti-Northern-Gateway pipeline public service announcement, and work with a dear friend on a
marketable documentary about the Canadian Arctic.
Okay now, have a go at it, I'll duck....