The Politics of Climate Change Part 5

Science has generated a psychological omnipotence or an arrogance in industrial societies regarding knowability and control humans can exercise over the physical and metaphysical worlds,  but its ongoing discoveries simultaneously undermine the very sense of knowability and control it creates. Climate change implies finiteness in our control and mortality of our very existence. The political, social, economic and cultural forces marshalling for and against the IPCC and the scientific community could be seen as reflecting these existential anxieties and the human desire to repress or overcome them.

If there is an outcome in all is, just as science, its discoveries and applications tend to jump ahead of a societies readiness to accept them, the exploiters of science tend to overcome the suppression of it. Maybe the alternative energy science and technology industries and environmental policy makers will triumph over the vested interests seeking to suppress them. What ever happens with the progress of climate science and the climate change debate, if the average citizen continues to be excluded and misinformed by the politics of science, the real danger is the rise of the anti-enlightenment movements reflected in the conservative fundamentalist political and religious movements across the globe will return science and public education of it to the time when human knowledge was held in the hands of a few to control the many, rather than in the hands of the many to free all.
CD