Is the unsustainable too big to fail?

Pipelines to nowhere (cc: ForestGuardians)

Hey friends—

A quick riff here exploring how predatory delay works in our politics and public debate. It has a U.S. focus, but of course similar dynamics are at work everywhere, to varying degrees.

In this fossily frolic, we explore:

1. How civic sabotage produces not only immediate-term delays but also more confidence in the durability of unsustainable and untenable systems.

2. How building assets that are likely be abandoned helps unsustainable interests maintain confidence in a future of slow action, while also making fast action look more costly.

3. Why Rex Tillerson saying “the world is going to have to continue using fossil fuels, whether they like it or not” is not a prediction, but a political flex—and why the propaganda of continuity has been essential to sustaining belief in an orderly transition.

4. Why attempting to bargain our way into fast, large-scale action with powerful interests whose primary concern is limiting the pace of change is probably not a successful strategy.