Global warming has been receiving an incredible amount of press coverage here the last year. That's encouraging, I suppose. It gets much more in some countries like the Netherlands that are already directly feeling the negative impacts... Like most things in business and in politics, problems tend to get ignored until they become an immediate crisis. Which always struck me as ironic given how often businessfolk and politicians talk about being "proactive" (confession: "proactive is" enemy #1 on my Vocabulary Enemies List).

It's a tough call. Serious reform would probably force the global economy to scale back, at least for a time, but environmental degradation will gradually devastate the global economy, too. Which one is preferable: do WE pay, or do we just hope _really hard_ for a technological miracle that prevents our grandchildren from paying with interest? "Consume with abandon? miracle happens here? great-grandchildren will know what a tree is."

One problem with current society is our over-reliance on technology to solve problems without being willing to make any personal sacrifices to achieve a goal. We see it everywhere: shock and awe bombing campaigns, plastic surgery, pill popping, increased fuel efficiency that offsets driving ever larger cars, etc. To go off on a tangent for a moment, this is a problem with all living creatures, not just humanity. Humanity simply has more more means at our disposal...there is a tendency to use up every available resource unless checked by some external force...extrapolating loosely from population biology, we'll keep going until we reach the limits of our ecosystem...technology just keeps expanding the limits and carrying capacity. Eventually, we'll hit a wall, and the population will contract at that point (mass starvation, pandemic, ecological disasters, things like that - we examples on smaller scales in both human populations and natural ecosystems). That's what populations do (not just humans). Let's hope global culture can evolve to a point where legitimate self-sacrifice and self-control is rewarded. Otherwise, I start to wonder if we will keep repeating the following pattern over and over: decline, collapse, primitive existence for a while, the environment will recover, society will rebuild, population will expand beyond carrying capacity, decline, collapse, repeat ad nauseum. (I'm thinking _Canticle for Leibowitz_)

Yeah, it bothers me, but I've come to terms with it (see: Gen X escapism, reasons for). I'm not a social idealist in that I do not expect the majority of people to sacrifice without _some_ reward....I'd just tweak the underlying system of rewards and penalties to achieve social good. Hopefully, we'll all learn to scale back our consumption-oriented lifestyles a bit and find some workable alternate forms of energy.

Which brings me to a neat idea for a story, well, neat if one likes dark post-apocalyptic stories of environmental disaster. Have you heard about that mega seed bank in the Arctic? It's planned for a place that'll still be above sea level and still cold even if the ice caps completely melted...I can see writing a dark, post-apocalyptic story about the struggles of a few people to track down the legendary place where many, many seeds are kept in order to feed the starving remnants of some distant subsistent society that has only distant memories of the past advanced culture (i.e., the coming Dark Ages, with the sort of knowledge the average person in that period had of Rome or Greece). That'd be cool, if somewhat heavy handed. Upside is that I'd been seen as a visionary when society collapses, not that I'd really care, being be too busy gathering my forces to make sure I come out on top of the new feudal system. After all, the best way to be seen as a visionary is to implement one's vision.