There are a lot of people who have problems with the idea that the two major parties are interchangeable. It's easy to see that in most cases, the Republicans are a lot worse. But here's where perspective is needed: of all the abuses that the worst of the agendas of the two major parties are capable of - among them, for instance, starting and maintaining unnecessary wars, precipitating  "collateral damage" from drone strikes, not prosecuting financial criminals, and packing the supreme court with ideologues - it really pales compared with the real problems of climate change, peak oil, overpopulation, soil depletion, and nuclear contamination - ecosystemic abuses on a global scale that impact centuries of life on this planet. That is, the life we depend on and are part of, plant and animal.

  So, yes, we may have a crappy Supreme Court and lose long validated rights. We will continue to fight needless wars. But it won't matter while the substrate of life on Earth is changed faster and more permanently than life can adapt to it. In fact, life may not be able to adapt to nuclear contamination at all. Even the immortal corporations will not be able to squeeze profits from the sterile husk of a once living planet.

 It's hard to be hopeful in the face of these problems. It's hard to see how a political system can be leveraged to allocate resources toward mitigating these problems. Politics tends to run bill-to-bill, election-to-election, just as corporations see quarter-to-quarter. These institutions need to recognize that their edifices rest on a foundation of sufficient clean air, water, food, and shelter, and that their currently accepted operations and business plans are eroding these foundations, not only for themselves, but for the institutions they depend on to externalize their risks.

What is needed  is consciousness raising, and to stop denying that all these global perilous crises are now in progress. These issues need a voice, and that voice needs to be heard so as to redirect fear based politics at phenomena truly worth fearing.

 There must be a coordinated international effort, since there is only one borderless earth, sea and atmosphere. Any remediative action is beyond the legislative power of any single government, and solutions ranging from energy conservation, new sustainable energy sources, and some sort of carbon sequestering may only be the first of many coordinated international changes needed. This means that the politics to accomplish this must also be coordinated on an international level, and they must conceive and put into effect paradigm breaking actions, such as found in wartime, depressions, or other extraordinary times.