It is wicked hard to convey the destruction, loss. Especially to policy makers.
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Methinks the best thing all governments could do is operate with an open ledger. All receipts, contracts, expenditures, procurements, permits, everything publicly posted in real-time.
It's hard to govern not knowing what the hell is happening. Even policy makers are kept in the dark. And they definitely don't have the staff to keep up.
I've done numerous FOIAs (public records requests). It's onerous and almost completely ineffectual. And by the time you get the data you've asked for, the window of opportunity has passed.
Great point re data. The tools for dissemination of data are getting better and there is a growing open data movement within government. My own experience has been that greater education is needed for policy makers - they often fear releasing data in case it will be used against them or don't understand the potential benefits of releasing data. In the GIS world there has also been resistance due to policy makers wanting to recover the cost of data acquisition.
The problem is that data needs to be transformed into a story, in order to communicate anything meaningful.
But as soon as you turn data into a story, you introduce some degree of bias, which inevitably becomes politicized.
The only way around this is there's no way around this. We have to accept the reality that the agenda hawks (on both sides) will continue to polarize issues. Continue to use the tools and data available to us to tell the best stories we can, while understanding that no one story is the truth. All the while, we have to avoid succumbing to the deep polarization being used against us to divide and conquer. We are all in this together.
Governments and universities have been quite successful inventing the big stuff, and they're also best situated to fight climate change via the other, equally important, avenues: getting agreement on worldwide collective action, incentivising the private sector , and transforming economic structures, habits, cities etc. For example, Germany almost single-handedly financed the 90% reduction in the cost of wind power generation with subsidies.
One initiative from VC-land that might be of interest to you is Y combinator's research effort into the future of cities. That may seem only tangentially related, but a well-designed city could probably eliminate the need for private car ownership and radically reduce the energy need for heating. Add in reduced use of materials for construction (apartments instead of single-family houses), smart concepts to share equipment among neighbours (washing machine, tools etc) and a few lifestyle choices we already see people in cities making, I wouldn't be surprised if energy usage could be reduces by 2/3 without loss in quality of life.