...responsibility to state what might have been done to have saved what we have already lost, and what might be done to avoid losing that which has not yet been lost.
...and much has been lost, although much also remains. I remind you that we bourgeois brats are still here to announce our pedestrian concerns, and thus we remain, for better or worse.
I didn't deliberately remain childless; I have two sons. I had them when I believed in the future.
Now of course, I feel guilty about the world my generation is turning over to them but hopefully they will remain through a fair portion of this century with some ideas to save what might be saved of their world
From my perspective, it has never been sufficient to accept fear and ignorance and say, "that is how the world is."
Since I have set two human beings into the future, I am less inclined than ever to shut my mouth and say, for instance, "isn't renewable energy great!" and "it will fuel the world by 2050" or "by 2100" or some other time I deign to name when I conveniently will be dead.
We live in an awful generation, a generation that has the myopia, the hubris, the irresponsibility, that future generations will do what we have refused to do ourselves. We've pissed away a future that does not belong to us.
This, in case you missed it, was the point I believe the editor at Nature was making.
In the case of so called "renewable energy" we have destroyed huge swathes of China, for instance, mining unsustainable amounts of material - toxic materials, in order to tell ourselves a lie, a very big lie, that so called "renewable energy" was in fact, "renewable." It's not. And I don't care who doesn't like it when I say that; it is true, it is experimentally - in a tragic way - being demonstrated, and there is little time left and few resources left to conduct such a mindless experiment again and again and again or ever vaster scales, hoping that some day it will work. This "renewable energy" fantasy was insipid and unworkable, and should, if one reflects, been obviously been so, since humanity abandoned so called renewable energy near the beginning of the 19th century because up until that time, most people lived short, miserable lives of dire poverty.
The renewable energy schemes are not working. We blew past 400 ppm faster than we blew through 390 ppm, and that was faster than we blew through 380 ppm, all the while we were throwing the equivalent of the gross national product of more than 90% of the countries in the world at these failed schemes.
Maybe you don't have occasion to look a representative of the future in the eye and state those facts, but I must do so every time I sit down to a family dinner. And that is why I bother, in spite of all the whining here and elsewhere about how I fail to bow before the wind and solar god on my knees and prostrate myself in worship.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
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