Peer2Politics

Three years ago, MIT's Climate CoLab attempted an ambitious feat: crowdsourcing an international climate agreement, with the results presented to the U.N., Congress, and the Department of Energy. The 2011 entrants were given a different challenge (figuring out how to evolve the economy to deal with climate change), but with the same promise of presenting ideas to influential governmental organizations. This was back in the good old days when people still had a shred of hope that national governments could come to some sort of reasonable climate agreement. Those days are long gone.

There's a consensus among leading scientists that global warming is caused by human activity

Plus, today we're facing a number of rapidly converging global crises--not just global warming, but energy and other resource depletion, collapse of biodiversity and the food web (no food chain, no food), an increasingly toxic world which creates our increasingly toxic bodies, economic collapse, growing poverty, and other social ills such as the loss of our sense of community and connection to all that makes life worthwhile. We are not isolated, rugged individuals, and this is why activism or civic engagement is so necessary for wholeness--for personal, social and planetary health and well-being.

The world is getting hotter.
In fact, it’s supposed to rise 11 degrees fahrenheit over land by the 2060s if we don’t meet our goals to reduce carbon impact, said Robin Chase, founder of Buzzcar, a peer-to-peer car sharing service and co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar, a car sharing service.

The world is now connected by the news feeds of twenty-four-hour networks, and so together we watch the slow-motion, real-time disasters of Hurricane Katrina, Deepwater Horizon, and the Fukushima nuclear plant--as well as what feels like the utter ineffectualness of our leaders to do anything about any of it. CNN put up a live feed of the BP well spewing out its oil into the gulf and kept it in a corner of the broadcast continuously for months. The constancy of such imagery, like the seemingly chronic footage of Katrina victims at the New Orleans Superdome holding up signs begging for help, is both unnerving and desensitizing at the same time. With each minute that goes by with no relief in sight our impatience is stoked further and our perception of our authorities' impotence is magnified.