The solvability of unsolvable problems

What Digby said:

Future historians are going to look back at us and declare us collectively insane. We have:

1) The worst financial crisis in 70 years, with mass unemployment across the world, caused by a parasitic and near useless casino financial sector;

2) A global climate change crisis that quite literally affects humanity and the fate of civilization as we know it; and

3) Energy and efficiency technologies that can help curb carbon emissions while putting millions of people to work.

All it would require is just a little cooperation from the countries around the world so very busy protecting their own “national” interests, and the subordination of the temporary interests of the global jet set plutocrats to the future of the species. It’s not even that the billionaires wouldn’t still be billionaires. They’d just have a little less, in exchange for a decent middle class and protecting our collective future.

But no. Instead, we’re going to spend this generation bluffing over which nation-state can put up the most pointlessly aggressive geopolitical stance against the other, aided and abetted by a global network of insecure plutocrats afraid they might have to give up their 3rd yachts.

It’s sickening, and I have no idea what to do about it except holler as loudly as I can. The system is totally broken. Conservatives think that Jesus/Moshiach/Madhi is coming to save them, or figure they’ll be dead and therefore don’t care. And way too many liberals want to revert to the sort of nation-state protectionism and environmental localism that will only accelerate the problem.