How are we to get a world dictator or world president or anything else without a world war?
Who picks this global dictator, and how does he enforce his authority?
Suppose it’s Obama, and he decides the US isn’t reducing its CO[sup]2[/sup] emissions enough. Does he impose a trade embargo? Get the Chinese to invade? Send us a sternly worded note?
How does he compel the Chinese to shut down all their coal-fired power plants?
I don’t think this idea has been well thought thru.
Regards,
Shodan
By the OP’s logic we are doomed. If it’s the only way to stop Global Warming, and the Biosphere is being destroyed by Global Warming, then we might as party likes it’s 1999. There is simply no way to go from where we are to an “earth government” in any foreseeable future.
This is what people don’t understand about dictatorships. They think a guy just shows up and he’s declared dictator, and everyone follows his orders.
Except how does he become dictator? Dictators get to force other people to follow orders, yes? How does that work? It works because the army and the cops and the government apparatus follows the orders of the dictator. And if people don’t like it, the government clerk doesn’t stamp their form, or the cops arrest them or beat them up, or the army shoots them in the face. So people follow the dictators orders. But why exactly does the army follow orders? Why do the cops follow orders?
If we could summon the popular political global will to appoint a dictator to combat climate change, we wouldn’t need a dictator, we’d just do it. But without a consensus, how does the dictator enforce his decrees? With what army? Literally, with what army? If China doesn’t cut emissions, does the dictator invades China to make the submit? What national armies make up the new global army that invades China? How many people will die in this war? What will be the environmental consequences of the war? Will nuclear weapons be used?
When people complain that they don’t wanna follow this or that order of the dictatorship, what happens to them? A bullet in the back of the head? Who is pulling the trigger? Which cops? What motivates the cops to shoot protesters and internet whiners? Or does the dictator ignore public opinion? Thing is, dictators never ignore public opinion. We think they do, but they don’t. How do they remain dictator? People have to agree to follow their orders, or the orders don’t get followed.
The notion that dictatorships are efficient at accomplishing things is laughable. Dictatorships squander money, resources, human talent, everything. Welcome to a boot stomping on a human face, forever.
Yes, it’s irrelevant to humans ('cause we’ll be long dead), but in the long run the Earth will be fine no matter what we do. My point is that we need to stop climate change to protect humans, not to protect the Earth. Hyperbolic “the Earth will die!” stuff is both inaccurate, and counterproductive, in my view, since selfish concerns are much more effective and convincing to others, I believe.
Not to mention that ideas like those expressed by the OP are every Climate Change Denier’s dream come true. See? It’s all about power!! They’re using Climate Change to force a dictatorship on us!!!
Find some Dutchman to burn down the Reichstag.
Regards,
Shodan
What does it mean to FORCE a country to curb it’s emissions? Let’s say we get most or all of the world’s countries on board, but there’s one that just doesn’t want to play and they do nothing. Do you enact sanctions? What if those sanctions cause major economic issues to other countries that ARE playing along? What if those sanctions cause serious human suffering in the noncompliant country? What if those sanctions don’t have the desired effect, do you increase them? Do you resort to military action?
Another scenario, what if a country is reducing their emissions, but they can’t keep up with prescribed numbers? Maybe you cut them a break at first, but then what? What if they’re significantly behind other countries for years? What if they have legitimate complaints about the costs, whether it be capital, resources, manpower, etc.? Do you reallocate resources from other countries to them to help them meet the emissions? It seems unfair to punish countries that were compliant by taking away resources from them to give to another country that’s failing.
Or another scenario, what if the geography, economy, or other factors make certain numbers given to some countries unreasonable for others. For example, a lot of manufacturing has moved from more developed nations to less developed nations. As a result, surely these nations have less pollution from manufacturing and probably have more resources to spend to cut back on transportation emissions, etc. But for these countries that depend on things that are more polluting and, as a consequence, other countries depend on as well, how do you adjust numbers accordingly?
And let’s say that we can solve all of these problems, what about ALL of the other baggage that comes along with this. In theory, a world government sounds great, but look at the vast differences in ideology just among the powers like US, UK, France, Russia, China, etc. How could we all possibly agree to a single government over something like global warming when things that we can all at least agree are even more pressing issues, like human rights violations, terrorism, etc. can’t reach common ground?
Yes, climate change is a big problem, and it gets worse the longer we put off long term solutions to it, but this sounds like a cure that’s worse than the disease. I don’t think the answer is government. Right now, the government can subsidize alternative fuels, public transportation, etc. I think the bigger issue is that we need more research on better sources of energy. Even in fairly progressive countries with significant renewable energy, it’s extremely expensive, inefficient, and still doesn’t provide much. My question is, are those resources best spent implementing current technology in that state or is it best spent on research and development to implement more efficient, cheaper to produce, cheaper to install, cheaper to maintain, cleaner forms of renewable energy in the future?
So now, I’m not even sure a world government with teeth could do much of anything to fix the problem, but now we’ve created this beast that, frankly, seems like a huge step backward, particularly if taken in haste to solve a single problem. Should that government give up power once that problem is solved, or should they stay in power and start trying to solve other problems?
Unfortunately, it seems to me that the most likely way of solving the problem is that fossil fuels get so expensive, either directly in terms of dollar, or in terms of other costs associated with getting it, whether it’s wars or whatever, that we start demanding those funds being spent to get oil or coal start being spent on other things.
This cure is worse than the disease. I’d rather die drowning in boiling Midwestern oceans than live as a slave. There is simply nothing that makes a dictatorship worthwhile. Not even saving the world.
I, for one, welcome our new climate-fixing overlord.
If you read the remaining 90% of the article. It’s all bad news. The blue line in the graph is best case scenario but the real line of where we’re headed, and the hypothetical line of what a complete fulfillment of the paris accord, by all nations (good luck with that!) is also catastrophic and still results in over 2% global warming.(as you acknowledge).
Sounds like wishful thinking. But I hope you’re right. Musk is trying his best.
I’m the opposite of a denier. I’m not saying it’s too late. If we get an earth president before 2020, we’ll be ok. We’ll follow that beautiful blue line in the graph that GIGObuster mentioned.
I should have said “the biosphere useful to us” instead of “our biosphere”. (ex: we’d rather have tuna than jellyfish in the ocean.). You’re right that life will survive and continue thriving.
We use different and sundry species of insects, plants, fungi and animals to concoct medicine, foodstuff, recreational drugs and enrich our scientific knowledge to benefit us in invaluable ways.
The rate of extinction of thousands upon thousands of species is skyrocketing because of global warming. We are losing treasures worth more than gold daily. I don’t want to lose 25% of species on earth!
You caught me. This is so embarassing 
But I meant Dictator in the way the old roman republic thought about it, a temporary position in times the entire planet is in dire need of a commander. Even they had it, and they were very weary of kings and emperors. In fact, they killed Caesar when he got too comfy on that chair.
the World Senate representatives will need to stab him with knives until he dies, just like Julius Caesar.
How about an elected president instead of a dictator? should take care of your objections 
Yeah, a lot more draconian than if we had decisively acted 30 years ago 
Based on history, if a title like “Earth President Whose Word Cannot be Opposed” were to come available, he would resemble Genghis Khan more than Mahatma Gandhi, and “Fixing Global Warming” would take a back seat to “staying in power.” I’d be hard-pressed to think of a problem that could be solved by a global dictator. Trains run on time pretty well without them, most places I’ve lived. And the solutions to Global Warming would drift away from “sustainable solar panels” and towards “gassing the Kurds and Tutsis.”
Y’all realize the topic says “Earth President”, right 
. I was just using the romans as an example of a place where they sometimes gave a man extraordinary power because they need unified leadership. I only said dictator because that’s the roman word for it. Please forget I used the word dictator. Let’s just call him an elected Earth Prez, like the title says.
Getting there is hard. I’ll give you that. But “no way” ? That would indicate a 0% chance but I think it’s a (remote and slim) possibility.
[QUOTE=Gozu]
Yeah, a lot more draconian than if we had decisively acted 30 years ago
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If only we had perfect knowledge of the future and an unlimited ability to act regardless of what other people think! Sadly, we don’t. 30 years ago this wasn’t even a blip on most of the worlds population, and you’d have had an even more difficult time getting, say, the Chinese or Indian’s to acted against what they would have viewed to be their best interests. Even knowing what we know today, 30 years later, it’s difficult because there aren’t any magical solutions or silver bullets to fix the problem. There would have been even less solutions 30 years ago than there are today, so I disagree you’d have had to be more draconian today in any case…I think you’d have had to be more draconian then, since you’d have had to stifle China and India big time and hold them back much more…and you’d have done it with less evidence than we have today of what we can or should do to ‘fix’ the problem, and less justification to the majority of folks who would see your dictatorship (even assuming it would work the way you think, which I highly doubt) as one crushing them and holding them back deliberately.
I’m unsure why some folks always seem to think that draconian dictatorships are so great or that they can do so much, given the staggering lack of evidence that they have in the past, or why market solutions to issues like this are viewed so negatively and given such ridiculously short time frames to ‘fix’ major problems like this (5 years? seriously???). Can you explain what you think your dictatorship could REALISTICALLY do or have done to ‘fix’ global warming that the market hasn’t done? Seriously, maybe start there…how would it work, what would it do, and how would it do it and how would it deal with the massive push back of trying to impose solutions (and one’s that only recently are a large percentage of the population coming to accept AS problems) across the globe? I mean, when I think about what you are talking about the only thing I think of is North Korea…they certainly don’t generate a lot of CO2. Is that the model you envision??
Fine, but, how do we get an Earth Prez without a world war? We’ve had the UN for decades, and the nation-states show no more readiness to willingly cede their sovereignty to it now than when it was founded.
That’s an excellent question. I guess we’d have to convince the majority of the population in virtually every country to vote for an earth president and give him legitimacy. He would rename all their leaders governors, like we do in America and they’d keep most of their power. Well…some of it.
How do we convince the population? I don’t know, but it’ll probably involve getting tens of millions of volunteers worldwide dedicated to the idea.
It will require some original thinking. That’s for sure.
Convincing the population is less than half the problem – we’d need to convince every country’s government, and not all are democracies.
Without near-absolute power, such an Earth President would have the same problems the current de facto Earth President, Obama, has had getting worldwide support for such reforms. A single person just doesn’t have that kind of sway over the rest of the world, and shouldn’t. Once the rest of the world agrees on the problem and most likely solutions, an Earth President could enact meaningful climate reforms, but by that time an Earth President wouldn’t be necessary, because individual countries would be on the job already, spurred into change by their populace.
Leaving that aside, who would vote for an ‘Earth President’ in sufficient numbers to elect someone who would be imposing draconian measures to stop global warming?? I mean, sure, there are people who would vote for it, but assuming the details about what said president would be doing I seriously doubt citizens in India or China (or the US or even many European nations) would vote in the majority. Also, is this president the sole ruler or would there be a world congress/senate/parliament? If so, and assuming it’s representative from all the current nations and the ‘president’ doesn’t have fiat powers (not a dictator, right?) then how will it be that much different than today wrt global warming? Large blocks of the congress/senate/parliament would be opposed to major changes that would negatively affect their local voters…just like in real life here on the real world. If the ‘Earth President’ is being voted in as sole ruler, then how in this magic fairy kingdom does he wield supreme power? How does he control all of the worlds militarizes, their governments, their financial centers, etc etc??
Agreed. I’m strongly in favor of action to stop climate change, but I think your solution is both unobtainable and undesirable. I think we’re better off with realism – doing what we can in the present political system, which means supporting environmentalist candidates, donating and volunteering for good causes, and the like.