Only global government can save us from ourselves

March 31, 2025

Growing up in the sixties, under the threat of nuclear annihilation, our mantra was “we’re not here for a long time, we’re here for a good time”. It is our generation, and our offspring, who now govern our planet and its major institutions. We’ve never lost that mantra.

As Julian Cribb shows, in the decades since we have, through our unsustainable consumption and lack of concern for the environment which hosts us, so damaged our environment that it could become virtually uninhabitable. The rapidly shrinking glaciers, which provide so much of the fresh water on which we, and other life forms, depend, epitomise this. Our day of reckoning is now imminent, with a 40% global water shortage forecast just a few years’ hence.

Life on Earth has been the survival of the fittest: humanity is, as we stand now, unlikely to survive. Sadly, in that event. we would take both our descendants and much animal and vegetable life with us.

Cribb calls for an Earth Systems Treaty: what we need is an Earth-wide government with overriding powers. This could only be envisaged in the context of a global existential crisis. The coming water shortages may just be what that needs.