Republican Politicians

Republican politicians endear themselves to the rich for donations and conservatives for votes by providing laws to provide security, to protect the status quo and to maintain the illusion of a traditional social structure at the cost of the public giving up moral authority.  The Patriot Act is an example of costly, unnecessary and immoral illusion of security that gave moral authority to government and contractors.  The denial of Climate Change and the consequences is an example of protecting coal and oil industry, as well as the Koch brothers, to protect the status quo.  The fight against gay marriage, denial of racism and prejudice against non-Christian believers is an example of maintaining the illusion of a traditional society when in fact the real world has moved on.

Climate Holocaust

The Bad News

The Climate Holocaust is the catastrophe awaiting one billion people during the 2020s. Another billion people will be forced to migrate, contributing to premature deaths. The collapse of unstable governments worldwide will cause chaos, wars and economic hardship for billions of people. 

The catastrophe will unfold in stages. Corporations in collusion with politicians have had a program of systemic state-sponsored extraction of fossil fuels over decades that has changed the climate.  Even if this program were stopped today, there is a decades-long delay between burning fossil fuels and when humans will experience a change. There are millions of kilometers between the extraction of fossil fuels, the place where CO2 is released into the atmosphere, and the places where the changes in the climate have their greatest consequences. This means the consequences of climate change are separated in time and space from the release of CO2 into the atmosphere. Cause and effect are distant in time and space.

Over decades, numerous currents of gases released to the atmosphere, currents in the ocean, the jet stream currents, currents in society of political and lifestyle and other currents have merged into an uncontrollable system changing the climate. The natural psychological bias of humans has contributed to how humanity arrived at the beginning of this catastrophe. Denial, the things that hinder learning, self-centered lifestyles, American individualism and many other human biases have an effect on the outcome.

While billions of people’s lives are at stake, corporations view climate change as an opportunity to get access to northern hemisphere land and ocean resources previously unavailable. The ideal of individualism and the corporation having legal status of a person under the law contributed to the tendency that already existed in American society to acquire fossil fuel resources to maintain the lifestyle of the wealthy few at the expense of the billions of poor people.  The fossil fuel industry policy is to save the lifestyle of a valuable few while ignoring the consequences to billions.

US government policies and other world government policies have divided the population into two categories: the wealthy 1 percent and the 99 percent. The policies now in place essentially ignore the needs of the 99 percent. There is not yet in existence a clear-cut concept of abandoning a billion people to die and another billion to premature deaths. When climate change begins to be experienced by the wealthy in the present, then they will begin to triage who gets assistance and who does not.

The Good News

After WWII, improvements in global governance and in the lifestyle for millions, and advances in technology, contributed to a golden era in society. The same will happen after the Climate Holocaust ends. A great celebration will occur, then people will get back to work transforming national and global governance organizations so that this can never happen again. But also to continue to deal with and cleanup the consequences. Ideals will again be popular. A new golden era will begin for youth.

Heroes will be celebrated, the wounded will be carried for and the dead will be honored. Society will reorganize around a new set of policies that improve the outcomes for billions of people. The gap between the wealthy 1 percent and the 99 percent will shrink. Global education of youth, men and women, will expand to include everyone. Technology will not have rescued humanity from the Climate Holocaust, but afterwards the youth of the world will embrace technology as a tool for education, governance and social mobility.

Table of Experience

What We Do Not Experience	What We Experience
Climate	Weather
Average Temperatures	Actual Temperature Now
Melting Ice at the Poles	Summer where we live
CO2 Warming the Atmosphere	Air We Breathe
Ocean Currents	Ocean Waves at the Beach
Energy in Feedback Loops	Immediate Cause and Effect
Feedback loops in natural systems	Events, consequences, actions

Why Education Policy?

Systems-based reasons why education policy is difficult to get right:

First, policy is often crafted by committee in highly political and polarized environments.

Second, individuals rarely understand how the system operates, what policy innovations will lead to good outcomes, or even why successful interventions work.

Third, policymakers seldom agree on the system's purpose, how to prioritize conflicting goals, how to measure success, or what principles should guide their actions.