Reviving Hope

ALL IS NOT LOST. Its not all doom and gloom. In fact, there are reslistic reasons to be hopeful, hopeful that we the human species can surive our own stupidity, can change course, better our behavior, effectively fight and ultimately prevail against our own global warming caused climate change. Climate change fanatics, by which it meant people who seriously believe in climate change, are extremely worried about it, have begun to push the panic button, and are predicting nothing but gloon and doom- may just be wrong. This does not in any way alter the demonstrable fact that the people who are panicing about climate change most passionatley and oudly are the onew who are correct, the ones tellinig th eturh, and the ones dismissing it as a liberal hoax, nothing to worry about, are wrong, dead wrong. A stunning, amazing new book, "Not the End of the World; How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet", should be read by everyone, fanatics and deniers alike, and should be comforted and inspired by it. The author, Hannah Ritchie, has all the correct qualifications. She is young, thirty, teaches and researches at Oxford, is a polymath with special expertise in statistical data interpretation, and identifies her calling in life as a quest for understanding and addressing the most pressing problems confronting humanity, including and especially climate change. Ritchie makes several crucial points which are often lost in the shuffle amid all the bad news, veriviably accurate but bad news regarding the Earth's curent trajectory, environmentally. Ritchie dos not ceny the reality of the negativity; currently the planet is on a course to greatly exceed the warming limitations goals set forth by humanity, and cliamte change is, quite obviously, upon us now and getting worse fast. However, the trajectory is changing, has already changed. The curve is flattening out. Globally, per capita carbon emissions have been reduced, a trend whichs seems to be sticking. The rate at which we are spewing carbon into the atmonsphere is slowing down, as sustainable sources of energy rapidly come online and fossil fuels are bieng phased out. Coal is nearly priced out of existence, even now. The atmosphere, globally, and particularly in places like Los Angeles and European cities, is much cleaner than fifty years ago, and European cities are much cleaner than two hundred years ago. The hole in the ozone layer and acid rain, both of which were causes of great alarm in the nineteen eighties, have both been eliminated by enforced legislation. Even deforestation has been reversed. It peaked in the eighties, and is now on the decline, is being reversed with reforestation projects well underway in many countries. Global poverty and hunger, both still seriously problematic, have both been greatly reduced in recent decades by the agricultural revolution, in which crop yields per acre have been increased by orders of magnitude. The essential message of this brilliant, informed young lady is simple: we are in trouble, but not doomed. There is much that we can do, and we are already doing it. But to ensure success, we must continue to do the right things with ever greater speed and intensity, and, if the force is with us, we will create, for the first time in human history, a truly sustainable civilization.