Excellent article, Fred. A good mirror to look into.

Two points: What can each of us do right now to bring our footprint down? Turning out one light bulb times 8 billion people is a lot of energy. Not delving for bitcoins and not storing our information in the cloud may even be a better way to reduce our energy use.

The other point (my favorite one) is to blame governments and the way we have set up governments. Afghanistan could have become a democracy had we only put in the correct version of democracy and not just any kind of democracy. This time around corruption was able to stay in place for 20 years, and that does not give folks much hope.

But looking into our own mirrors, and you are making that point clearly, we see a corrupt government in almost all nations when discussing climate change. Everyone is waiting for others to make the move. We don't have governments that do their best for us; they are all competing for the green backs or whatever color your money is.

Simplifying democracy is a smart move forward: proportional voting for small nations in single Houses (the Scandinavian model) gives voters the greatest amount of empowerment over their governments.

Large nations should be more careful, but like Germany the top layer of the political system should be proportional (Germany votes in districts, i.e. winner-take-all, but it is adjusted at the top level to give all voters their representation proportionally, if larger than 5% of the votes).

When governments are elected in sane formats of democracy (in contrast to insane formats of democracy, think USA and Italy), then our political leaders can make better decisions. We need to remove especially those nations that support the race to the bottom so that the collective of governments ends up being smarter.

Will it happen, Fred? I am giving you the same answer you gave your reader.