Excellent essay, and a good lead-in introduction as well.

After seeing the worst floods in two hundred years, the Brits (from the liberal Prime Minister, to Jon Finch, an Oxford University scientist, to the conservative Daily Telegraph) agree that this is not just a rainy summer, this is climate change; or, as some say, climate chaos.

..agriculture system, that is resilient?  Do local/state/federal governments need to buy up farms all over the country and just do it?  Buy up some suburbs?  Is there some kind of regulatory regime that could accomplish the same thing?  Or do we just wait for agricultural collapse, and then the government can move in with very strict regulations?

can build a bridge.  It takes an engineer to build one that barely stands up.

Nature's actually pretty good at optimization - it just has a much longer history than we do and has learned more lessons.  It's wasteful, both to mankind and to the environment, to build a levy that can withstand anything.  But then it's wasteful to build one that won't withstand enough.  I think as we come to understand how we're changing our world, we will begin to understand how much is "enough".

The author writes, correctly I believe:Our current economic system is designed to maximize outputs and minimize costs. (That's what we call efficiency.) Efficiency eliminates redundancy, which is abundant in nature, in favor of finding the one "best" way of doing something -- usually "best" means most profitable over the short run -- and then doing it that way and that way only.

This implies to me that we have to throw out capitalism, a system I think may have been appropriate for growing an economy as fast as possible without regard to environmental consequences and with unlimited supplies of cheap energy and other resources. Now it seems to me our situation demands a rethink of how we "make our living" if we are to save the Earth.

Now of course centralized command-and-control economies have also been discredited. So we really need to come up with something new. I think we could put our collective heads together to come up such a new system. But I just don't see enough people thinking outside of the box.

That's exactly right -- we need a mixed economy, with a form of socialism for managing the critical life support needs of this planet sized spaceship, with capitalism (which is exceedingly efficient at meeting wants) retained for the non-essential goods and services sector.

In other words, we need what are essentially Scandanavian policies.  Necessaries (food, clothing, shelter, health care, and education) are distributed equitably according to need; luxuries are available and distributed through capitalism.  High taxes well-accepted because they provide high services, which support high quality of life and longevity.

I'm not sure how many people are aware of what a radical thing that Norway has done with its North Sea oil wealth, to take just one example of how much better we could have it:  they banked it.  They recognized early on that it would be a one-shot deal, and rather than squandering the wealth on a big party for a few billionaires, they took the money and banked it to meet the needs of the whole society (which is a good thing, because they've already peaked).

So I'm not sure that the thinking hasn't been done--most of it has, and the best practices are in place in various settings.  The developed country that does the worst by its citizens is, you guessed it, the good ol' USA, where painting government as the enemy was raised to an art form by Ronnie Ray-gun, reading scripts prepared by leading economic thinkers like Uncle Milty Friedman channeling Any Rand.

What our system of state capitalism has to contend with is that while it's very, very, very good for a tiny slice at the top, it's very bad for a vast chunk in the middle and disastrous for the vaster chunk at the bottom.  

The job of the media is to prevent those at the bottom from understanding any of this, especially how our economics works to transfer wealth to the wealthy and how our politicians are bought and sold in a market that could be put out of business in an instant if campaigns were publicly financed (which is why this is derided as "welfare for politicians" -- because it threatens the masters who need to keep politicians in dire need of contributions at all times).

Alas, this is a very wasteful way to organize a society, as its "winner take all" nature inevitably means that the wealthy have the absolute right to squander vital resources just as much as if they literally took the bread off the tables of the poor -- which is what we're gearing up to do with biofuels.

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.