Engineering and Meta Cognitive Dissonance

From the pages of Arup - this is probably the #1 issue that engineers will have to deal with this century.

"There’s not a nation on Earth where the drive for increased economic growth isn’t still the dominant political shtick. And there’s not a nation on Earth that isn’t signed up (theoretically, at least) to the scientific consensus that we should be doing everything in our power to ensure that the average temperature increase by the end of the century stays below 2°C.

We’ve all heard of cognitive dissonance – the ability to hold two or more contradictory ideas at the same time. The paragraph above falls into a new category of Meta Cognitive Dissonance: the ability on the part of nation states to subscribe to two totally contradictory ‘big ideas’ in order to keep alive that even bigger idea of ‘progress’ as we’ve known it since the start of the Industrial Revolution."