Urgent collective action is humanity's only hope

Urgent collective action is humanity’s only hope of avoiding the worst of climate change.

That, however, is extremely unlikely.

Such an action demands the voluntary suppression of individual private wants and elevation and celebration of public needs.

That won’t happen.

Individualism has such a powerful claim on even the most humble of us that it is rare to encounter a soul willing to relegate his or her private wants, either practically or psychologically, and filling the resultant vacuum by prioritizing public needs.

It appears quite a natural human trait to exercise events, circumstances, and moments in life to advantage personal wants, but corruption driven by what is now a market-driven society has had such a deleterious impact that we are now witnessing such events as the so-called “Panama Papers”.

The “Panama Papers” is the leak of more than 11 million documents from the Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, that sells shelf-companies around the world aimed at allowing individuals to conceal their business affairs.

The content of those papers is alarming for two reasons first, they demonstrate the alarming brutal greed of many people and second, they illustrate that public needs are not in any way on the horizons of those individuals.

The idea that they might be a part of a public collective push to help the world avoid the worst of climate change has never even been an “aside” in their thoughts.

The essence of the Panama Papers may well be within legal boundaries (that’s debatable and no doubt the world’s legal firms are rubbing their hands in glee at the  prospect of near endless court cases), but what has happened and is happening, is morally and socially wrong, and could well be a near fatal wound to the human experiment.

If nothing else, the Panama Papers show that private wants and public needs appear innately opposed to each other.

The optimists see beyond such moments as the Panama Papers, while the pessimists, with whom I stand, see useful collective action evaporating with similar rapidity to that of which those essentially greedy people consolidate their wealth.

Effective action to counter climate change demands that we “all get on board” - humanity has disturbed an angry beast and if we are to ever to calm and corral it then we need commitment, collaboration, and a conspiracy about answering all our public needs and within that make our private wants redundant.

by Robert McLean.