As climate change accelerates, the political environment will start to boil. It’s happening already.
More and more ordinary people are beginning to connect the dots between extreme weather, rising climate related death tolls, collapsing ecosystems, refugee/resource crises, and other grave anomalies.
The political outcome of all this will either be a reactionary or progressive response.
On the reactionary side, the tendency will be to put up strong national defenses and seek out convenient sacrificial lambs such as migrants and refugees. It will attempt a screeching halt to cosmopolitanism, liberalism, and globalism.
On the progressive side, either some of the old parties will broadly transform themselves or new parties, such as the Greens, will seize new ground. Here the tendency would ideally be to aggressively endeavor to bring about a rapid phase of global/local decarbonization combined with generously funded technological-ecological innovation whether geoengineered or otherwise.
Whether we choose the former or the latter, will in large part be due to whoever has the greater political will as well as the power to transform that will into effective organizations.
In Europe, particularly in Germany, the Green party is beginning to show that something like this can and might be done effectively.
In the United States, both mainstream parties have yet to show a serious concern, other than mouthing platitudes, about the potential catastrophic threat to long term health and wealth.
Due to the two-party system in the United States, the Greens have a formidable barrier to political entry to confront. However, either a shake up in their party leadership or, better yet, a defection of a major political figure (such as Bernie Sanders) to their camp would definitely help their cause.
But if the US Greens are ever to have a chance at power of any kind, now is the time for action.
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One of the main migration routes is to head for Turkey, then to Greece in order to proceed towards the Balkans and Italy, and finally branch into France and then the United Kingdom. Another route sees passage via Romania, Hungary, and Austria, with the final destination of Germany. This route has drawn a lot of attention over the past few weeks as the number of migrants opting for it has dramatically increased. Note that the Syrian refugees are very different from the African migrants, whose routes begin in West Africa and the Horn of Africa, converging in Libya, where human traffickers and criminal organizations force them to ‘board’ the infamous ‘boats’ and cross the Mediterranean powered by fortune and prayer in order to land in Italy or Malta. There are also less popular – more controlled – routes that run through Algeria-Morocco-Spain.
