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U.S. Intelligence Report on Global Trends 2025 could have been written over a decade ago.
Thematically, most of the trends in the report just released by the US National Intelligence Council could have been easily identified a decade ago. In fact, people have been studying these trends for years. So the Bush administration didn't catch on until now? After eight years of governing with gross negligence and willful blindness? Is this a demonstration of great foresight or 20/20 hindsight?
It seems like a last minute purge of "don't say we didn't warn you". What we can say is they didn't prepare us for the future.
The Bush administration shackled this country to the 20th century. Every policy, foreign and domestic, was embedded with unprecedented arrogance. As a result, American ingenuity was stifled and big oil companies
laughed all the way to what used to be the U.S. banking system.
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The three pages on climate change seem like they WERE written a decade ago. It doesn't really come to terms with more recent research from the IPCC, nor even the Stern Review which it actually cites.
November 24, 2008 12:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
Here's the bottom line:
a) we are running out of cheap sources of energy
b) we are running out of fresh water
c) we are breaking the back of the Earth faster than the Earth can heal itself back to equilibrium (this is an overpopulation issue).
This "report" could have been written 50 years ago, and first came to mind about 40 years ago with renewed interest in the planet's biosphere.
No nation has set a policy to deal with this in a serious way. Why? Because it would mean humans would have to give up the illusion that we are smart enough to do anything our greed impulses desire.
It seems the system will have to break before people address the issues seriously.
Until then, we can help the economy by generating more reports.
November 24, 2008 5:57 PM | Reply | Permalink