Bruce Sterling gives the Viridian perspective on the Current Situation. Required reading.
However: our core issue, the Greenhouse Effect, is
not going to forsake us. On the contrary: the USA is about to undergo a military-entertainment dust-up with one of the poorest and most stricken countries on Earth, a place of incessant gunfire, poxed with landmines, that hasn't had a decent rain in 3 solid years. People who can live on naan bread and goat cheese are starving there from bad weather. Is it an accident that a place like that hides people of the Al Qaeda ilk? They're the New World Disorder, and they've learned how to ship.
Look at the economic impact from the sudden loss of two skyscrapers in New York City. It's colossal. That's straight from the file we Viridians like to label "world becoming uninsurable."
Now try to imagine New York hit by a Category 5 hurricane. Imagine the payout crisis around, say, 2050, with all the coral dead and the seas rising along entire continental coastlines. There are serious people in the re-insurance industry who claim that weather damage in the 2050s will outmatch the planet's entire GNP. Smashing skyscrapers with aircraft full of blazing fossil fuel — that is by no means a Greenhouse disaster, it's just a war crime. But that event is of the scope and scale of the disasters that society is courting.
(Thanks, Stefan!)
