Photo: Climate Justice Now! Statement on Climate Change from COP-15, Copenhagen, December 2009. Photo: Neil White/Guardia
Story submitted by Eric Worrall: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, a taxpayer funded media organization, has just asked whether we should consider restructuring democracy to ensure an efficient response to the climate “crisis”.
The first paragraph;
“Is it democracy that is blocking progress on climate change or the current limited version of it that pervades Western society?” pretty much sums up the rest of the article, which spends several paragraphs praising authoritarianism, before chickening out and trying to suggest that governments are acting contrary to the wishes of voters.”
The article quotes one of our old favorites, Naomi Oreskes, who celebrates China’s authoritarian political process; “China’s ability to weather disastrous climate change vindicated the necessity of centralised government … inspiring similar structures in other, reformulated nations.”
To me, what this bizarre effort suggests more than anything, other than a disturbing lack of commitment to democracy, is that Australian greens are still having trouble accepting that in the last election, they were soundly rejected. Greens are blaming imagined flaws in the democratic process, rather than trying to understand the reasons for their rapidly fading appeal to ordinary voters.