Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

the upshot: what is to be done? S 207
Second, the president must launch a public process to consider
long-term changes in our systems of governance, politics, and law.
The goal is to create practical recommendations that enable us to
anticipate and surmount the challenges ahead and ensure, as much
as is humanly possible, that we never again stumble to the brink of
global disaster. To that end I propose the appointment of a broadly
based presidential commission to consider changes in governance
and politics, including the necessity of a second constitutional
convention. Neither idea is new. Presidential commissions have
long been used as a way to engage thoughtful and distinguished
persons in the task of rethinking various aspects of public policy
and governance. The Ash Council, for one, laid the groundwork
for what eventually became the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency. And the idea of a new constitutional convention has
been proposed by legal scholars as diverse as Sanford Levinson and
Larry Sabato, among many others (Levinson, 2006, p. 173; Sabato,
2007, pp. 198–220). In Sabato’s words, the founders:
had risked life, limb, fortune, and birthright to revolt against their
mother country, determined to stand on principle . . . But they
might also have been surprised and disappointed that future generations
of Americans would be unable to duplicate their daring
and match their creativity when presented with new challenges.
(pp. 199–200)
Facing challenges that dwarf any that the founders could
have imagined, we should be at least as bold and farsighted as
they were. Whether a presidential commission would propose to
reform governance by legislation, amendments to the Constitution,
a full-scale constitutional convention, or some combination
of measures, their charge would be to reform our system
of governance to improve democracy and promote deliberation
in ways that soon produce wise and well-crafted public policies
that accord with ecological realities. Beyond proposals by
experts like Levinson, Sabato, and Robert Dahl that aim to make