when the powerful are deaf

There has been panic buying, encouraged by government ministers, of petrol – ahead of a strike that did not happen. The police closed petrol stations as motorists backed up on to the highway. What are we to make of this?
At the same time I heard a radio interview (‘Material World’) with a scientist, saying that there was no dialogue between scientists and politicians, and appealing to social scientists to get involved and to help. Now there’s a challenge.
Ann Glover, the European’s Chief Scientific Adviser, was saying that Europe needs three planets to supply the resources we are using. The US needs five planets. As she says, this is unsustainable. We know what to do but we are not doing it. We need people to react and that’s not happening. No sense of urgency at the moment, despite the evidence.
She was taking about geo-engineering, which is the last gasp hope that science will come up with an answer, throwing particles in the upper atmosphere and vacuuming out the excess CO2 to prevent global warming. Prevention is better than cure -what about ego-engineering?
Meanwhile a government minister has been encouraging us to fill our gerry cans and the prime minister said to top up our fuel tanks as the sensible thing to do. And yesterday we bought more than twice as much petrol than we could possibly need, causing an acute shortage- and giving a short-term gain to government revenues.
How come that no-one thought to speak to an alternative – that we might use less fuel, reduce our demand at this time, so that if there is a need to conserve stocks, we are able to do that.
Now that would be intelligent leadership. How might social scientists help us to think differently, and provide the conditions where politics would listen to science?