The End of the West as We Know It?

[The2ndWheel]

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1228-24.htm

Every political, social and economic system ever created has sooner or later encountered a challenge that its very nature has made it incapable of meeting. The Confucian ruling system of imperial China, which lasted for more than 2,000 years, has some claim still to be the most successful in history, but because it was founded on values of stability and continuity, rather than dynamism and inventiveness, it eventually proved unable to survive in the face of Western imperial capitalism.

For market economies, and the Western model of democracy with which they have been associated, the existential challenge for the foreseeable future will be global warming. Other threats like terrorism may well be damaging, but no other conceivable threat or combination of threats can possibly destroy our entire system. As the recent British official commission chaired by Sir Nicholas Stern correctly stated, climate change "is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen."

The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report's recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations.

[applegrove]

1. Profound words & warnings. I like the way they point out the danger relative

to terrorism. K & R

[Odin2005]

2. Naw, the West still has around 600 years left.

IMO Western civilization is in the same stage in it's life cycle as the Graeco-Roman civilization was in 150BC.

[applegrove]

3. But they face the twin catastrophies of no more cheap oil and global

warming. So the markets will have to adjust and become like ecosystems where waste & externalities are costed. And everyone will be poorer..not to mention those whose fields go dry as deserts expand.