When even those responsible for our national security are presenting environmental decline as inevitable , it is clear that there are no remaining levers of power that can be used against the might of extractive capitalism, for which environmental decline is both necessary and, perversely, desirable. National Security is just one more of those little luxuries - like clean water and fresh air - that we are going to have to learn to live without.
But the core of the problem, which is faced by all democratic countries, is that environmental problems only have expensive, long-term solutions, and we simply don't have the political mechanisms and infrastructure to establish them on a sustainable basis.
Politicians can see no further ahead than the next election, where the whim of the electorate could put them out of a job. A project that needs ten years of consistent manpower and funding to achieve anything also needs to maintain a vulnerable cross-party consensus on its necessity, and the political will to defend its budget against the more pressing claims of short-term projects that would yield tangible electoral benefits.
Paradoxically, the only country with the political will and long-term vision to actually solve environmental problems is China, where the demands of unfettered capitalism are circumscribed by the hard power of a repressive dictatorship, which has the leisure and the resources to make long-term plans without being in thrall to the billionaires who have done their best to stop them happening elsewhere.
