Bill Clinton warns of looming disasters - Yahoo! NewsFor once, I actually agree with Pres. Clinton - that we do need to look ahead. But not with a panic-stricken "we gotta do something right now!" approach.CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Former President Bill Clinton said Friday that disasters such as worldwide famine and an obesity epidemic could destroy the U.S. health care system unless politicians begin to look ahead and cooperate.
Clinton, speaking at a forum sponsored by Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, said governments fail to act even when disasters are anticipated because leaders are distracted by fulfilling campaign promises and scrambling to respond to immediate emergencies. Big-picture planning gets "crowded out," he said.Rephrased another way - the squeaky wheel gets the grease. But the immediate emergencies ALWAYS take a lot of money and attention - and of course the most important job for any politician is to stay elected so there you've got the two most important factors. Long-term planning affects what might happen after you're out of office - and that's nowhere near as important.
"This is coming," Clinton said. "And I know there is no great political constituency for it, but we can avert these disasters for not very much money if they can be put into the public debate and people understand clearly what's going to happen."What's going to happen, or what some folks THINK is going to happen? There's a difference - remember the year after Katrina how it was going to be the worst ever regarding hurricanes?
The Kennedy School is spending $1.5 million over two years to study why governments across the world have failed to act on threats such as heat waves and hurricanes, even when they know they are coming.We have hurricane control? Who knew?
From looking back at Hurricane Katrina and forward to the absence of firm plans to cool the planet or stem malaria, some of the school's top researchers will study the roots of government inaction.As I've noted before, I think plans to 'cool the planet' are a bad idea. As far as malaria goes - DDT was doing a fine job killing off the vector mosquitoes... but suddenly 'Silent Spring' came out, postulating a DDT connection to eggshell thinning (a connection that didn't have an apparent mechanism to account for it, and still doesn't) and the push was on to ban it.
Planning for the future's really tricky, especially when you don't know what you're supposed to be planning for. Best-guess scenarios abound - but in the end, they're just guesses.
The real problem arises when you take those guesses and act on them as if they were hard fact. If that had been done in the '70s when global cooling was on the radar, or the "Population Bomb" advocates were predicting mass famines due to overpopulation - then it's entirely possible to base your suppositions about what to do about something which isn't a problem in the first place.
The human being is a pretty adaptable critter. We'll get by, as long as we react to what's actually happening instead of to what we're thinking is GOING to happen.
J.
Comments (1)
That is why I put up my Top 5 disasters for North America, actually #1 is of global concern, as global warming and other such 'threats' don't really cut it. But then I am a simple geologist, looking and hundreds of millions of years of data, not a mere century.
And do note that these 5 actually *will* happen with the severity indicated as the underlying causes are not amenable to humans, human technology or anything we will get until the planet can be Terraformed. The threat to the Nation State, for mere human contrivances, is deadly, and just as inevitable as it entails the loss of freedoms and human rights as the basis for those goes under. But that starts with individuals not forces of Nature. And in the case of the #1 disaster, Nature can be very, very, very forceful.
Posted by ajacksonian | May 7, 2007 11:17 AM
Posted on May 7, 2007 11:17