Excellent article which proves its main assertion in its first sentence ... only a stone age brain driven by romantic mumbo jumbo considers solar panels superior to fast nuclear reactors.

The Stone Age Brain? This is just an untested assertion surely?
Apparently the brain, as it is, recognises approximately 500 people by sight.
So perhaps the sustainable community should be built upon this number if the full experience of community is to be realised.
Decision making, according to a study by the British Council of Trade Unions, an entity committed to democracy in action, is best undertaken by a limit of seven people, beyond which factions develop based upon misunderstandings, something of that cognitive dissonance perhaps.
The Celtic culture should not be overlooked as a long-term counter to the "all roads lead to Rome model.
It's scholars studied for twenty years after all, enough to satisfy the brainiacs of today.
In short. a human scale culture not reliant upon city structures.
With poetry, science, technology, music, sustainability.
Remembering that in Australia the First Peoples were organised into 500 nations which still interacted hospitably to avoid inbreeding.
There may much more to be considered before we start to write off history and its brains as unreliable for the present flimsy construct only just described as civilisation in the past three centuries.Just remember that the ancient greek philosophers contended that the Celts taught them mathematics and perhaps the inherent contempt in this aricle will ebb away.

Let's use some critical thinking on this article.

You said: Cognitive dissonance is that uncomfortable feeling we have when we know we should invest in solar panels but the 46″ wide screen TV wins out; we know we should catch the bus but we take the car anyway. It’s that sense of discord that arises when emotion and reason don’t get along. And unfortunately, it’s alive and well, sabotaging the climate change debate.

Or: MOST people on this planet do not have these choices. Most of us are women and many of us are poor. These choices do not apply to us. Women do not certainly have or make these choices in general. I agree that the folks making choices in the climate change debate are barbaric but they certainly are not representative of the global community in any way.

You said: We’ve evolved to feel a single sense of self, but our minds consist of multiple voices. Our emotional brain has first go at making sense of our world, instantly telling us how to behave and what to believe, based on instincts reinforced by upbringing. Sometimes our rational brain is then called upon to endorse our intuitions, which then become beliefs. Problems that are unusually difficult or surprising will recruit our rational brain, but reasoning takes effort and we avoid it when we can.

Or: The patriarchy tells us by force from before birth what to believe and some of us don't and never have. Women had to be suppressed by persecution and imposed barriers to power in order for this to happen. We live in an imposed top down social construct that requires the will of the species to be supplicated to a leadership that is dominated by a one hormone ideology. Testosterone has rights above all things. Testosterone choices are different than choices made by equity. Maternal thinking would be completely different than what we live in today. A world built by infantilized males who have been led to believe they have the right to dominate the world is not ever going to be sustainable.

You said: Unfortunately our emotional brain is encouraging us to pursue perceived self-interest even if that means trashing the planet. This leaves our rational brain to try to justify our actions, even while the walls come tumbling down and the temperatures keep rising.

Or: I have never bought a big screen or really any tv for many years. I am working hard to get my landlord to put in solar. Many folks globally and historically have been making sustainable or sustainability positive choices for generations.

One thing I really have a problem with is that so many people do so much and there is no recognition or acknowledgement. It is always "we" are making these bad choices. Many choices are out of "our" hands. We don't have to keep keep starting at square one. The word sustainable would not have the meaning it does if so many of us had not been working toward it for some time.

You said: If we are to have any chance of a future we need to understand why our intuitions are so poor, and how we might temper them by engaging our ability to reason.

Or: I do think here you are speaking for men. Not that I don't believe men can be intuitive but that your definition of intuitive is so limited. My intuition has always told me that I need to be aware of social justice and look after those around me and my planet. I would not say that my intuition is poor. I would say our choices have been limited. Women have made very few of the poor choices. We have different priorities already. The way you use the words "our" and "we" is very poor here. Who are you speaking of? The leadership of this world has made very very bad choices and it is dominated by males (fewer than 10% of the world's leadership is female today and this is the most it has ever been. I believe women in 51% leadership would give us all different choices BECAUSE women are intuitive and we have different priorities.

You said: We haven’t evolved to be successful in the modern world. Civilization arose only 12,000 years ago; in evolutionary terms that’s just the blink of an eye. Ninety-nine per cent of human evolution occurred during the Stone Age, so our evolved instincts, personality traits, and even some of our cognitive “short-cuts” are much better suited to this Pleistocene world.
We’ve evolved to be materialistic, living in the present and rarely constrained by sustainability.

Or: "We" have evolved to this because of patriarchy. Find a way to bring real power to equity, to equal representation globally and you find a path to a new evolution. http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1608256937016&set=a.1607983370177.88122.1553986145&type=3&theater (My article "Instant Evolution, No Waiting")

You said: Evolution didn’t care about the future; it was simply driven by those who survived and left the most descendants. So our ancestors were the ones who were best at competing for food and status, securing mates and having babies. They were materialistic, living very much in the present and rarely constrained by sustainability. They ate a broad range of foods, and if resources became depleted they could expand their territories or move on, behavior that led to the extinction of many animals and to extensive migration.

A level of altruism did evolve, but it was circumscribed by benefits to kin, expectations of reciprocal reward, and an obsession with fairness. Altruism can often therefore be trumped by self-interest.
We might expect that intelligence and language would have been game-changers; they were, but not necessarily for the better. We learnt to tame nature and harvest its bounty, to build great cities, and to harness the laws of physics and chemistry. We may celebrate the Industrial Revolution as the beginning of modern civilization, but it also ushered in burgeoning overpopulation, resource exploitation, pollution and climate change.
So if we evolved to exploit nature, and to be blind to the consequences, what now? Our only chance is to wrest control away from our emotional brain, and construct a new reality where our rational brain can take control.
Our rational brain says wait for the bus; our emotional brain says, “taxi!”. Renee McGurk

Or: Evolution takes a devastating turn when patriarchy takes hold, because of it we have a potential nuclear devastation happening in Fukushima and the destruction and genocide of thousands of cultures and peoples that don't fit into the human male on top model. I don't think women would make the same choices. I believe a world leadership that is truly representative of the species is the key. It certainly looks quite bad that our population is not represented equally. Women have been forced to have many children and have no choices and continue to be. There are now examples of women reaching out and trying to help by taking up positions of leadership. Iceland. the Turkish women's guerilla army fighting patriarchy and the village in Kenya that has made the men leave and whose quality of life has gone up substantially. These are signs that we are seeking the right answers to the testosterone driven world and HIStoric view we have so far mistakenly endeavored upon. With universal equity we can accomplish twice as much. Until then the choices testosterone makes we all have to live with.

Rarely when one in this world is speaking of "we" are they speaking of or for the species. Often it is about the local or the cultural or the gender powerful group one is speaking about. "We" globally do not have a lot of choices. Most of "we" haven't got the where with all to have choices. Monsanto, the US and Haliburton, big tobacco, big oil, the rich and men in religious, monogamous, heterosexual dominant life make the choices. Male created and dominated global organizations which will not give up their privilege and entitlement easily. ERA has been in play for 60 years and women are still under 10% of global leadership and 12% of US and have the least disposable income and access to resources. Potentially any altruism is created by women feeding, cleaning up after the world and doing the majority of the labour and being oppressed for so long we have taught some of our sons to question testosterone. Perhaps with equity the world would make many more altruistic choices. Perhaps with level playing field our odds for survival would change. I feel really happy that all over the world women who are exposed to soap operas stop having more than one child because the role models on TV "choose to have a small family." Choice is also about opportunity. If a women knows she doesn't have to be a baby factory, as was imposed for millennia, we have a good chance of lowering the population. BECAUSE WOMEN ARE MAKING THE CHOICES! MAKING THE CHOICES OVER OUR OWN REPRODUCTIVE OPTIONS! If population growth was not profit driven it would not concern profiteers. We can not sustain unlimited population or economic growth.

You said: We need to design a new kind of democracy where many government decisions are made cooperatively, with multi-party representation and the input of experts. Such think tanks must have strategies in place to promote critical self-analysis and to “frame” policy to reflect the long-term reality. The cost of climate change mitigation can then be shown to be minute compared to the cost of inaction.
If we value a sustainable world, the GDP must be replaced by a measure of a country’s wealth, including resources, social capital and the cost of pollution. Costs should reflect the inclusive cradle-to-grave value of products and services, so that choices reflect out true long-term interests. Conspicuous consumption might be curbed further by offering workers the choice of more leisure rather than a salary increase, and by rewarding excellence with honours and privileges, rather than fat pay packets and obscene bonuses.

Education must produce adults who can think critically and understand what’s at stake and why our judgement is flawed. To counter self-interest, the government should use incentives and disincentives to guide public behaviour. We need to encourage altruism by instituting reciprocal, incremental improvements, and by showing leadership.
We are at the crossroads. Unless we recognize the less-adaptive aspects of human nature and devise ways of keeping them in check, the world we bequeath to our children will be a diminished one. We have the means to do this, but do we have the will? Evolution may have made us the most intelligent animal on Earth, but it makes no promise that we will be survivors.

Or: I am pretty sire that inequity is the less adaptive quality of our species. Without equity we will never achieve sustainability or even survival. Without the language of inclusion and the truth about what has happened we will never have any choices that are sustainable. If most people will never address the gender inequality truth, there will never be sustainability. If equity is not part of your dialogue then you are always promoting the patriarchy and you will never be a critical thinker. You must include what women would think in all of your information as if it differs from the male dynamic and is therefore essential to the conversation.

For example, the other day I was watching Law and Order and there was an issue of whether a person can be led by years of watching violent tv to become violent. In the dialogue they kept saying "we watched Bonanza, (violent programming).....etc." and we went out after and played cops and robbers and shot at each other with toy guns but we did not go out and shoot a real person with a real gun." Well that conversation is about what boys did when WE were kids. It is not about what "we" girls did after watching violent programming if we watched it at all. We wanted to sew clothing and make everyone comfortable like the women in the shows. But more than that "most" people would be lost in this statement at all because "most" people don't even know what "bonanza" was. Most people don't read English and most people do not have internet and most people haven't got the information yet that there is anything other than getting through the day without getting eaten by a lion. For the conversation to become inclusive "we" must identify who we mean. As we do that we will become aware of who most people really are. All children dream of peace. Most people prefer peace. Most people want our world to be clean and safe. Who are the people who don't care about these things? Who have been in the way of peace and sustainability? Who does it serve for shoppers to blindly consume everything on the planet? Who is running the place? Look around.

Gender bias in our global culture engages all of us in limiting ideas and language. Create equity in education and government and I believe the unbalanced stuff will change. Until then....until women, all gender identities and people of every background are included, until all work is equal work for equal pay and poverty does not exist nor does profit we will have what we have. These systems/symptoms come from the dominance of patriarchy and patriarchal religion. Warmongering is a male sport. Certainly women can become war mongers but it is not what we would have created for ourselves and our children.

this reminds me of the resource based economy that Jacque Fresco talks about with his Venus Project: http://www.thevenusproject.com/en/the-venus-project/resource-based-economy

I agree with these thoughts.
The below is from an essay: http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/05/we-are-here.html

Consider it this way. If humanity is seen as a person who is 100 years old, the first 99 years of her life would have been spent as gatherer and hunter. She would have only one year to adapt to the changes in family structure, living arrangements, child rearing and all the other pressures and stresses that the shift to agriculture brought. This same 100 year old person would have five or six days to adapt to the enormous changes brought about by the industrial revolution. And less than a day to adapt to the mass of information made available by electronics.

Each adaptation moves us further away from the original social and physical environment of our emergence. Is it bad or wrong? This is not the criteria. There is no fault. Each accommodation comes from necessity and is the best we know at the time. At the leading edge of human history is an accumulation that expands and deepens the knowledge of our travels. (From my essay written in 1998: http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2010/05/superman-plays-with-kryptonite-dice.html)

We are exactly where we have to be. It is the nature of the beast. Every life form, amoeba, oak tree, aphid, mouse, will make as many of their kind as the resources in the environment permit. And they will use those resources until they are no more and they either die out or relocate to more resources.

We are no different. We have population density because we can. Unlimited growth is written into the code of life. In the universe’s ironic wisdom, not only are we driven by this code, but also it feels good. And, oh my, we know it feels good. So we mate and we do what we can to be able to mate.

And as any life form will do, we will use all the resources available to us, both for propagation and for enduring in the present. Here enters the second prong of unlimited growth – population pressure. We are devouring our own life-sustaining environment as fast as we find ways to use it.

We must overcome the us against them that also exist for all lifeforms (even plants exude chemicals to deter competitors).

We must beware of our technology. We are "too smart for our own good." The unintended consequences of technology are often beyond our vision and technology is sexy and seductive.

Finally, we must beware of living in large groups. A fifth aspect of our humanness that threatens our existence is inequality. When humans groups grow beyond the gatherer/hunter size, a disparity evolves. The stronger, “richer”, sometimes smarter will hold higher assess to resources and reproduction. As groups grow in size, the disparity grows along with it.

Five natural aspects of life and being human have been named: population, resource consumption, tribalism, unintended consequences of our “genius” and inequality. We must in our genius figure out how to mitigate these or as I said earlier, we will continue to overshoot, battle for real and imagined resources and misuse our special tools of survival. It is truly a conundrum. These aspects support and celebrate life and as with any animal and with our particular human challenges they threaten overshoot and conflict in their very success.