Hope and Despair for the Future

There's hope from Robert Kennedy, Jr. who writes persuasively that the U.S. can become energy independent using green energy, particularly wind and solar--and prosper in the bargain.

There's despair from Mike Davis, who writes that even the most pessimistic projections for the climate crisis future by the UN panel assume large-scale switch to non-carbon, green energy systems, but that oil and coal interests are actively subverting all real efforts to make that switch--while getting very wealthy in the bargain, especially with oil at $140 a barrel.

The image from Davis that sticks with me is the skyscraper being completed in the capital of obscene oil wealth, Dubai, that will be twice the height of the Empire State Building. "Most of the Gulf city-states are building hallucinatory skylines -- and, among them, Dubai is the unquestionable superstar. In a little more than a decade, it has erected 500 skyscrapers, and currently leases one-quarter of all the high-rise cranes in the world." That wealth comes from the rest of us, and from our future generations. It feels apocalyptic to me.