The impending crises of Climate Change, resource scarcity, geopolitical instability and all the other environmental dangers that have been identified to date seem like an insurmountable wall that is built higher every time we discover a new threat. Well, I hate to stack another brick on the pile, but we must also be wary of the dreaded Negative Feedback Loop
A feedback occurs when the output of a system influences its input in some way. Any system that changes over time is subject to feedback mechanisms and feedbacks can be positive or negative. For example, the Earth's climate has many positive and negative feedbacks that serve to either raise the temperature (positive climate feedback) or lower the temperature (negative climate feedback) more than an initial warming or cooling signal would do on its own. The scary part of climate science is that the positive feedbacks are much stronger and act faster than any of the negative feedbacks climate scientists have identified.
That positive feedback means more warming and negative feedback means less is just because climate warming is described in temperature numbers and the corresponding mathematic verbiage is used in climate science. When describing other systems, especially in qualitative terms (without using numbers), positive feedback means a good outcome produces more of that good outcome while a negative feedback means a bad outcome produces more of a bad outcome. For example, when people try to lose weight, their ability to do physical activities might be limited by the weight they are carrying around. Losing the first 5 or 10 lbs may allow them to walk or run an extra mile, making the next 5 or 10 lbs a little easier to lose and so on. A negative feedback would be if someone gained 5 or 10 lbs and their activity level decreased a little because of the extra weight. If this cycle continued uninterrupted, the person gaining the weight would become more and more sedentary until morbid obesity set in.
Another negative feedback could be when funding for education is slashed much like we are seeing across the country. This may save money in the short term, but a region's economic competitiveness is endangered when the people living there aren't prepared to compete in today's job market. A poor education system eventually drags down employment, productivity and many quality of life indicators. Tax revenues are eventually depressed and then tough budget decisions have to be made, especially if those tax revenues are already artificially low because of political reasons. Besides, you can't save money by cutting education; you just end up spending more on prisons!
These feedback mechanisms are easy to understand, but when you look at what's coming down the pike over the next 20 or 30 years, things get a little spooky. Climate change and water scarcity are already upon us. The "Arab Spring" uprisings were kicked off in part by high food prices exacerbated by climate instability and water availability as well as high fuel prices. Fisheries around the globe are only producing a fraction of their peak tonnage while each year, the worlds farms lose millions of tons of topsoil. It all drains into the oceans, along with all that nasty fertilizer, causing low oxygen levels and killing anything higher on the evolutionary tree than a jellyfish. The biggest and best oil reserves have already been found, tapped and are quickly being depleted. What's left is in the hands of despots, or under 1 mile of ocean and 2 miles of rock, or in such a poor state like the "Tar Sands" that 1 unit of energy in the form of natural gas is required to extract and "upgrade" 4 units of crude oil that still must be refined, shipped and poured in your gas tank. Oh, and we're going to have 9 BILLION people on the planet by 2050 and at least a few billion of them already want to drive around in cars and eat meat like people from the U.S.. We can barely manage 300 million living this way, so how are we going to support at least 4 or 5 times that many?
I'm sure there are a few other crises that I failed to mention. The rub is, all the big ones on my radar tend to rear their ugly heads in a big way by the 2020's and will probably dominate the socio-geo-political environment much like terrorism did over the past 10 years by the 2030's. All these really big problems are caused by decades or even centuries of neglect or active antagonism on the part of countries and their leaders. All of these problems will take decades of sustained effort to either solve or make tolerable.
The solutions offered by the Right / "Conservatives" are wholly inadequate and in most cases, are the very approaches that caused all these big problems in the first place. It's really just more of the same. The Democrats have tried admirably on some things, but the political system in the U.S. has tied their hands and required that they ignore the stark reality of these major problems, at least on the surface, to be taken seriously by the Washington Establishment / Consensus / whatever. Seriously, considering the legislative contortions that the Democrats had to accomplish just to get a Healthcare Reform Law passed that didn't really cause the entrenched interests any real trouble even with their majorities at the time, try picturing ANYTHING close to the fundamental changes we needed YESTERDAY passing in this climate. Add in the breakdown of our democratic process via Citizens' United and all the corporate money infiltrating the system and you have an unstable setup that is ripe for devastation by Negative Feedback Loops.
Going by my previous definition, negative feedbacks amplify negative outcomes to be worse than they already were. The 12 years of Reagan and Bush I were bad enough, but their Supreme Court nominations and infiltration of certain key state governments by their operatives produced the profoundly negative feedback of the Bush II presidency. The Bush II presidency, via their own Supreme Court nominations and political rhetoric, produced another set of profoundly negative feedbacks like the Tea Party, lowered American prestige around the world and of course, Citizens' United. How this all plays out in future elections and all those future feedbacks is up to the political parties, outside groups and the activists like some of the people on this site.
If Romney or another (R) wins in 2012, expect the negative feedbacks to keep amplifying as the courts get packed with political hacks and progressive policies become impossible to enact. If the Democratic Party is continually seen as an ineffective group of weaklings that is unable to communicate in today's media environment, expect to see the activists that are impatient for change make their home somewhere else, strengthening Republican majorities even more. And around it goes.
Right now, The President has good (but not great) odds at reelection. But nothing is certain in this age of unlimited corporate money and a media apparatus that collectively suffers from ADHD. Imagine if only incremental progress is accomplished on the world's major problems until the 2020's, when the really bad climate-fueled disasters and resource wars will be the norm. This looks to be the case because our legislative system as it is now doesn't look up to the task of handling 21st Century problems. Imagine the same political parties in place; they aren't going anywhere at least in name and probably in function, teabagging aside. Big, contentious issues have NEVER been satisfactorily explained in a 10-second sound bite in recorded history, from the feud between Upper and Lower Egypt to Climate Change in our time. When these big, complicated problems arise, expect the Republicans to have quick, us vs them, reptile brain, dogmatic answers to everything. Expect the media to drool over their bravado and focus on the nicely-packaged and teevee-friendly utterances they invariably give. Expect the camera to cut to the kitten stuck in a tree story before the Democrats can even get their first point across. Given that there are so many more ways to be WRONG on an issue than there is to be RIGHT, expect the repub's knee-jerk reaction to be wrong and the dem's more deliberative approach to be closer to the correct way of solving the problem.
However, given that the average voter doesn't even remember that Wall St. fat cats and their bankster allies caused the financial collapse, expect the Democrat's messaging to fail and the narrative in the media to carry the stench of right-wing talking points. Say wildfires get really bad, or a series of monster hurricanes hit one year. Whoever is in power when one of these inevitable disasters strikes is in TROUBLE. However, that trouble means different things to different political parties. Hurricane Katrina might have been the rumble that caused the avalanche of Bush II's popularity ratings, but the media / Washington consensus is back again with almost the exact same policy prescriptions, some of which led directly to the disaster like cutting funding for infrastructure and aid to states while ignoring the plight of the lower classes entirely. The President is trying to improve an economy that was torn to pieces by deregulation, lack of oversight and a diminishing middle class. Here comes the "mainstream" opinion that we can't really try anything new when digging ourselves out of the hole created by 30 years of horrible policy. Witness Obama being blamed for not fixing it in 1/10 of the time with 1 and now 2 houses of Congress "tied behind his back". If he isn't reelected in 2012, the negative feedback of Bush II's crappy economic policy combined with an apathetic left and enraged teabaggers will produce a president that may be "Bush II Lite" but will still be mostly Bushy. The negative economic and environmental consequences of a third Bush term will then have to be cleaned up by another democrat, and if 2012 is a disaster, expect the same result then.
Add in that all these big problems come together at around the same time and that the democrats are REALLY ineffective in telling their side of the story and things look worse. Add in the fact that most of the plans for dealing with Climate Change and other 21st Century problems count on people eventually "awakening" to the crux of the issue and swiftly implementing the solution and you can plainly see that even 4 years of delay or downright antagonism towards the REAL issues of our time is not an option.