An author I discovered only in the past decade, though he's been active since the 1970s, is William Ophuls.

He was amongst the first to write of the political dimension of addressing global catastrophic risks. Initially, that was largely focused on the concept of resource limits. Global warming isn't unrelated, though it's a sink limit: boundaries on the ability of the environment to absorb the consequences of human activity without making that human activity itself untenable.

What Ophuls realised, and what I'm increasingly convinced of, is that it's not the technical element, but rather the political, social, cultural, and economic (commerce, finance, trade, power) aspects which will prove the most challenging. And he seems to have been correct.

I strongly recommend all his work, though Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (first published in 1977, revised ~1994) and Plato's Revenge (2011) are probably the best starting points.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-scarcity-prologue-to-a-political-theory-of-the-steady-state/oclc/1222878433

https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-scarcity-revisited-the-unraveling-of-the-american-dream/oclc/1033584104

https://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-the-age-of-ecology/oclc/8162554740

Also available via Archive Org:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=william%20ophuls

Ophuls has a website with more recent writings:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190311104851/https://ophuls.org/essays

As he's on in years, I've looked for others who are carrying on his tradition. Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon is referenced by Ophuls several times and seems closest:

https://homerdixon.com/

#ClimateChange #WilliamOphuls #ThomasHomerDixon

@Hamishcampbell This is true.

It's also ... common.

Very nearly all wars are at heart resource wars, and the resources now in contention are both environmental sinks (for ever-increasing industrial pollutants, including but not limited to CO2).

I recommend as strongly as possible the authors William Ophuls (Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity and Plato's Revenge most especially) and Thomas Homer-Dixon (The Ingenuity Gap, among others), who've explored both the ecology and politics of the era of scarcity and limits.

https://ophuls.org/
https://homerdixon.com/
https://homerdixon.com/writing/books/the-ingenuity-gap/

#WilliamOphuls #ThomasHomerDixon #ecology #scarcity #limits #HardProblems

The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare

What seems to have pushed the United States to the brink of losing its democracy today is a multiplication effect between its underlying flaws and recent shifts in the society’s “material” characteristics. These shifts include stagnating middle-class incomes, chronic economic insecurity, and rising inequality as the country’s economy – transformed by technological change and globalization – has transitioned from muscle power, heavy industry, and manufacturing as the main sources of its wealth to idea power, information technology, symbolic production and finance. As returns to labour have stagnated and returns to capital have soared, much of the U.S. population has fallen behind... Economic insecurity is widespread in broad swaths of the country’s interior, while growth is increasingly concentrated in a dozen or so metropolitan centres.

Two other material factors are key. The first is demographic: as immigration, aging, intermarriage and a decline in church-going have reduced the percentage of non-Hispanic white Christians in America, right-wing ideologues have inflamed fears that traditional U.S. culture is being erased and whites are being “replaced.” The second is pervasive elite selfishness: The wealthy and powerful in America are broadly unwilling to pay the taxes, invest in the public services, or create the avenues for vertical mobility that would lessen their country’s economic, educational, racial and geographic gaps. The more an under-resourced government can’t solve everyday problems, the more people give up on it, and the more they turn to their own resources and their narrow identity groups for safety.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-american-polity-is-cracked-and-might-collapse-canada-must-prepare/

Thomas Homer-Dixon, whom I strongly recommend reading, at the Globe and Mail.

Dixon's website with more publications: https://homerdixon.com/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778363

#ThomasHomerDixon #Collapse #Fascism #UnitedStates #Politics #Trumpism #Risk #Institutions #LiberalDemocracy

Fear is Good (2009)

... Ultimately, it isn’t undue pessimism that is dangerous, but undue optimism. Over the past two decades, undue optimism produced irrational exuberance, housing bubbles and unbridled confidence in the benefits of financial innovation. Undue optimism also encouraged commentators to label anyone who expressed doubts about the trajectory of the global economy or about the dangers of financial innovation as a crank, which served only to discourage healthy skepticism ...

https://homerdixon.com/fear-is-good/

#fear #risk #bias #optimism #pessimism #ThomasHomerDixon