Originally Posted by
Adam Strange
I'm an advocate of multiculturalism to some extent. Not to where my neighbors are slaughtering goats in their back yard, but rather where people are providing unexpected solutions to problems that aren't being solved. We've solved the problem of putting goat meat on the table without creating a neighborhood health hazard. No one needs to tell me that slitting the throats of animals and draining their blood onto the driveway is a necessary part of their religion.
I actually don't see an influx of refugees as a likely impetus to get everyone to come together. I don't know of a single incidence of this happening in the past, and I don't see it happening in the near (1000 years) future. In any case, given that there are so many competing interests and competing voices in democracies, it is most likely that nothing will get done to curb global warming, as long as the very rich (not you) can still get power to their air conditioners.
The times that Democracies have mobilized to overcome a societal threat, as they did in WWII, resulted in serious curbs on social liberties and concrete moves towards dictatorships, because this is the form of government that actually gets things done in an emergency. Will this happen to combat Global Warming? Most likely, No. Too many vested interests will fight tooth and nail to keep things at the status quo, because that's where their money comes from.
It may be possible to avert a global catastrophe and have a soft landing, if the human population of the earth can be rapidly reduced sufficiently to reduce our global footprint. As things presently stand, we are consuming more than one earth's renewable resources every year, and are generating a huge amount of pollution in doing so. And even assuming that we can reduce our footprint, no living creature has ever been able to live in its own waste products.
When the Roman Empire ran out of barbarian villages to steal resources from, and couldn't overcome the Persian empire to steal resources from that part of the world, it had to start living within its means, which were meager. The Roman empire was entirely solar-powered. It was hugely overextended at the time, so it retreated from Britain, then from Gaul, and then from Italy itself in favor of moving to Constantinople, which has some truly impressive walls to keep out the barbarian refugees. The Western empire fell apart, but the Eastern empire continued to limp along for another thousand years by radically simplifying. No standing armies, no government services, fewer politicians, and generally less of everything. By radically reducing its footprint, it managed to survive to the time of the Czars (the Caesars, corrupted) when, finally, a source of power that was not dependent on sunshine (oil) was discovered and the human race could start expanding again.
That might be our best option in the next few centuries.