Paralysis will doom mankind to the worst effects of catastrophic Climate Change.
Our political systems are incapable of mustering the political will to break through the objections of the rich and their precious obsession with protecting their entrenched wealth. The rich simply cannot see beyond their own greed and cannot be expected to act in the best long term interests of mankind.
Moreoever, our political systems are not well designed to hatch and execute strategies for problems of the time scale of something like Global Warming. One could make the argument that we need to hedge our bets with a wide spread of different term limits for different positions in government.
Whatever the solution, one can't help but recognize the inherent inclination of politicians to avoid tackling issues of a scale that would span multiple administrations. Just leave it to the next fool. In fact, just let it fester until it becomes an unmitigated catastrophy (can you say "Credit Crunch"?), because only once it is a catastrophe will anybody be motivated enough to respond to it - and then usually the rich will still just opportunistically use the crisis to push through whatever selfish agenda they desire. Even our business cycles become tuned to the frequency of political changes.
While I am a strong backer of renewable energy, I don't find myself feeling particularly inspired by humanity's resolve to rise to the occassion. I live in fear that, as smart as we think we are as a species, we're really just doomed by our own stupidity and greed.
Rich shelving CO2 cut ambitions as economies slow