Society Responding to Climate Change

In thinking about how we as a society need to respond to our warming climate problem, I mapped out a little matrix. This has been helpful for me in thinking about all the different actions and approaches needed to address climate change.

I've organized my thoughts around three main groups of actors, and three main goals:

Actors/Tools: Government, Corporations, Citizens

Goals: Reducing Consumer Waste, Cleaning Up Industrial Processes, Energy Efficiency

Most of the actions and approaches we could take can fall into one of the nine numbered quadrants in this table. For example, on the note of Reducing Consumer Waste, it is not just consumers who need to take action. Government and the Corporate world can both invest in policies and practices that support changes in consumer behaviors. A specific example: the city of Boston could invest in a substantial number of recycling bins around areas with heavy foot traffic and could invest in a marketing campaign to promote more recycling and less waste.

There are many more examples of actions and approaches to responding positively to climate change that fit into this matrix, and probably a few examples of things that don't. But generally, I find this matrix helpful for mapping out things we can do and how these three major bodies within society can work together and take responsibility.

5 Books that Shape My Perspectives

Five books that I have read have played an important role in shaping the frames through which I view the world.

These five books contain ideas that not only pique my interest about how the universe and human beings operate, but that shape how I understand what I see, and provide lessons about how I can best operate in the world I see. I will be clear in saying that I rarely understand what I see, and can rarely prove my understandings to be accurate, but at least I can identify some of the ideas that have shaped hwo I interpret what I see, the ideas that shape by perceptions.

These also happen to be the five books I most often recommend to the unfortunate people to whom I offer un-soliited reading and perceiving advice:

A General Theory of Love

The Power of Now

Non-Violent Communication

The Fifth Discipline

[I have only read four of the five books that have deeply effected how I see the universe. I haven't yet read the fifth book, and don't yet know what it is.]

Response to Sicko/High Cost of US Healthcare

People who argue that the cost of socialized universal medical care is too high ignore the high costs imposed on our economy and citizens by the US health care system.

The large health care expenses we pay in the US go to support a large, wealthy health insurance industry that, more than anything else, makes our system more complicated than it should be. The general role of a middle man in a supply chain is to extract as much profit as possible without adding any value or efficiency, a task that the US health insurance industry excels at.

Along with this primary cost to the citizenry of the US, there is a tremendous amount of money and energy lost to the transaction costs of hospitals and doctors trying to coordinate their care with health insurance agencies.

The current US system basically takes money from average citizens and people who are sick or hurt and gives it over to a superfluous industry that actually seeks to reduce the quality of healthcare in this country. All of this, of course, is sanctioned and encouraged by the US government.

Our system of healthcare is really a form of charity to the health insurance industry, not to mention the pharmaceutical industry. This is not surprising - our political system is set up such that the government is a service provider to for-profit industries. Industries pay government officials and agencies in various forms, and the government, in return, provides a sort of political road-paving service, smoothing the way for corporations and industries to seek profit with fewer barriers.