Can We Cooperate?

A friend asked me the other day what I thought would be required to bring humankind together in a concerted effort to deal with the impending climate catastrophe.

It’s a big question.  One has to think that such an event would be initiated by governments, but the COP meetings have been a huge disappointment, having taken us essentially nowhere.  That’s because moneyed interests stand to lose big, but it’s also due to the fact that the challenge with climate change mitigation is that the problem is presenting itself over a period of many decades, not months or even a couple of years.

Yet suppose that this were not the case.  Imagine we had an alien invasion from distinctly hostile beings. Would our leaders be effective in coordinating an effort to protect ourselves?

Even in that case, keep in mind that a great number of these so-called “leaders” are obviously sociopaths, whose judgement is anything but sane.  Think about Kim Jong-un, Putin, Duterte, Erdogan, Orbán, and, from 2017 – 2021, Trump.   On top of that, you have 50-or-so lesser-known dictators whose rationality and love of the human race is questionable at best.

It’s possible that cooperation, the commodity of which our survival depends, hangs out of reach.