With the rise of an agrarian economy, collective learning excelled, and propelled us forward from our hunter gatherer beginnings through agriculture and eventually into industrial revolution, when collective learning accelerated again.
Our collective learning (given the number of potential innovators (+7 Billion) alive and connected to each other today) has the greatest potential EVER for better ways to do things.
To help put this post into a larger context, say 250,000 years of context, watch the video from the Crash Course Series: The Modern Revolution: Crash Course Big History #8, it is 14 minutes long.
Throughout history, human population has always grown to the point that it stresses out the natural environment to its maximum carrying capacity, such as when agricultural societies exhausted their regional resource, or contaminated their water supply. Then the population is adjusted by things like wars and disease etc. The Industrial Revolution has now exceeded the carry capacity of the entire planet. Human population is currently being adjusted by climate change, which also will trigger wars and disease (not to mention mass migration) along the way, not just sea level rise.
We extract energy from our environment. It is what we do as humans. Always have, always will. We have gotten better and better at it. (Farming/harvesting crops, food and labor from animals, burning wood, burning coal, making steam, burning oil, etc)
Energy literally falls from the sky all day long, everywhere, in real time. (This is the same sun energy we have extracted in its many other forms, forever) We have the technology available now to harvest sun energy directly: Solar power (photovoltaic panels) supported by storage systems and distributions systems.
In every other period in history, human kind has created and welcomed the next step leaps to a new technology that is better at extracting energy from the environment. With our negative impact on our climate fully apparent, why not now? With climate change about to disrupt all of our man-made systems, why would we not be out ahead of this, applying the proven technology we already have available to us to solve our problem of too much CO2 in the atmosphere? Why not avert pain and suffering, death and starvation, and take advantage of our collective learning capacity and largest pool of innovators ever?
Money and power. (I know, that is like, one thing.)
Political power
Individual political power is a relatively short cycle. Long term solutions are not rewarded at the polls. It is always an election cycle. A “What have you done for me lately” mentality from the voter. Campaign contributions (aka bribes) control the agenda, and it is an artificial agenda. It is status quote policy making.
It is not the normal progress of next step innovation that has served us through history. It is a lie.
Money: A Fossil fuel industry that has figured out a way to make big, big money, and would rather continue to do so, at literally all cost to society as a whole. We are addicted to their drugs.
They and we have so far avoided having to pay the true cost of using fossil fuel energy: any of the cost of the destruction that fossil fuel pollution (CO2) causes. That real cost is now being past down to you and me, and our children and grandchildren, and so on.
We need to harness the sun, wind, wave and geothermal energy that is readily available, with our technologies that are readily available and stop emitting CO2 into the atmosphere now.
We need to remove the false barriers that prevent us from executing the innovations we already have available to us.
Michael R. Carlson, Architect 