This is the best illustration I’ve seen about why it seems so impossible to adapt to global warming. The unsustainable technologies we rely on (that are making it worse) have an enormous amount of design inertia built into them. It’s truly daunting for anyone who remembers what went into it all, to consider rewinding back to horse-and-buggy levels of energy consumption, and then extrapolate back up the tech tree to twenty first century expectations…
The only way I can even begin to approach this theater, is to start from the premise that some humans will survive. And they’ll have learned their lessons, not in a shallow, “turn off the lights” kind of way, but at a deeper level of politics. (Should we listen to the people we stole this land from, about taking care of it now that we own it?)
