RE: Ideological Failures at Addressing Climate Change
The problem with ideologies, religion included, is that they tend to settle into entrenched bureaucracies, carving-out departmental fiefdoms. In a sense, like the planet has a complex interaction with life and life with the planet, the entrenched bureaucracy necessitates the continued persistence of the problem/issue it was designed to resolve. In an entrenched bureaucratic fiefdom, the incentives are perverted to not only maintain but exacerbate the issues/problems, since worsening situation justifies increase in funding, with which the bureaucrats can increase their influence and power. The property functioning of government requires a vigilant and ruthless mind, who can bring down the iron fist, when certain departments amass too much power without any results. Representative democracies are notoriously poor in reigning-in bureaucratic excesses, due to its ludicrous political structure.
The First Law of Bureaucracy: The survival of the bureaucracy must come first, even beyond the bureacracy's stated purpose.
The Second Law of Bureacracy: The bureaucracy must seek additional funding, jurisdiction, personnel, and power, even beyond reasonable levels.
The Third Law of Bureaucracy: Exacerbating or failing to solve the problems the bureaucracy is tasked with solving or managing can act to grow the need for, and thus the power of, the bureaucracy.
Can you think of any more?
It is like a parasite, but less fit to survive than those that inhabit animals and humans. Bureaucracy is like the ravenous filarial worms that kill the host outright, rather than flatworms that take what they need without depriving the host of too much resources. Unchecked bureaucracies tend to expand to the limits of resources a society can provide, then begins to cannibalize the very host till both the society and the bureaucracy are no more. Yet, structured and ordered means of social regulation is necessary to prevent a community from degenerating into tribal cannibalism. A well-functioning bureaucracy ought to function as a parasite that limits unchecked growth of certain human tendencies that are ultimately destructive to mankind in general; the parasite, in turn, need to be checked, so that it does not kill the very society from which it feeds.