The blame game

It's very easy to slip into a whiny tone when looking at all the nuttiness going on in the halls of power. There's natural human tendency to look for causes when things go wrong and the easiest targets for blame are other people. I've done my share of flailing the economists and politicians who sleepwalked us into our present mess. The solutions they seem to be proposing are simply more of the same, or more metaphorically (from Dmitri Orlov) "this new compulsion sweeping the land to shoot oneself in the foot while simultaneously setting one's hair on fire."

But it is important to remember that underlying everything are titanic forces beyond human control. From an ABC story which caught my eye this morning…

Towns in rural Australia are at risk of dying off as drought and Federal Government policy takes a toll on agriculture and forces a "mass exodus" in some regions.

But the government does not control the climate. The role of politics is and always will be the distribution of scarce resources among competing claims. But the game is set by nature. The climate is changing. The amazing bonanza of cheap oil and the power it has given us is a geological fact, not a political one. We must look beyond the blame game and see what nature has in store for us if we want to survive.