Comment by fallingfrog

I don't think it's just pulling the levers the wrong way. The problem is that the same attributes that made a system successful initially are the ones that bring it down. One example might be the ancient Maya: they had a king who was also the head of their religion (and an athlete, and a musician.. he was a big celebrity). That worked great for a while because it helped to bring people together to have a leader like that. Anyways the Maya were having issues with deforestation, and trade routes moving, and so forth. Now the king was supposed to be talking to the gods to avoid this sort of thing. If he was to say, "we need to go back to more sustainable agriculture, and deal intelligently with having less wealth for a while" his subjects would probably kill him. He's not supposed to tell them to make sacrifices, he's supposed to be perfect and he's supposed to arrange things with the gods so they don't have to make compromises. So he has to say "the gods are angry, they demand temples and sacrifice" and so the Maya went on a construction spree while also launching costly wars against their neighbors. This did not improve the situation.

Take a look at capitalism. It's predicated on competition in which the company that can expand the fastest, grow the fastest, wins and eats the other companies. And profits must increase every year or else capital just packs up and goes somewhere else. It's great if you want development at maximum speed. But not so great if you grow so much you threaten the earth you live on. But, our whole society is structurally unable to do anything else than this. Faced with economic problems, the only answer our system can give is to double down, do more capitalism faster and more aggressively. The bigger the problems, the more we double down on what worked before. Not the best idea. But since power and wealth in our society comes from holding capital, and since holding capital only brings you that power and wealth if it can move and grow- that means to do anything else than double down would require all the people to hold power and wealth in our society to lose that power and wealth. They'll see any threat to their power as a more immediate problem than global warming, which is slow moving and will affect everyone else first before they suffer at all.