My recent post on making more room for right-wing ideas in climate discussion is, on reflection, mostly just an embarrassing petulant rant. The most valid point is made well enough by David Mitchell's video - I'm annoyed by claims that capitalism is obviously responsible for climate change. In some parallel, fully non-capitalist utopia, would red plenty have been any less oil-soaked or coal-choked than our current world? Nah.

(For a pretty-much perfect 5 minute cartoon encapsulation of the "it wuz capitalism wot dun it" case, see this from `Age of Stupid', appearing to argue that slavery was abolished by the arrival of oil. A little fast and loose with cause, effect and actual dates there, I think...)

I still hope for a future where people have the freedom to be profligate - within constraints. And, for myself, I'd like that to be within some social contract that's done away with obscene wealth disparity. But... well, here's a slide from a talk by Duncan Clark, taken from his and Mike Berners Lee's book: he’s fitted a curve to total CO2 emissions since 1850 to give a rough picture of where we’ve come to now. Yup, the rate of change has been increasing right up to the present, pretty much. The dropoff in the first graph is then "CO2 cuts required for a 75% chance of not exceeding 2 degrees, with peak today." The second is for a 50% chance, leaving the peak until 2020. And remember what that average means for extremes: watch the video of actual northern hemisphere temp anomalies. That's from an average 0.7 degrees increase.

Which is why that previous post feels like a tantrum. I struggle to get my head around the reality of climate change. I seem to have defaulted to an unconstructive mild nihilism, though I tell myself it's realist: while at the individual and organisational level there may be a lot of things happening, I see little evidence of our collective ability to do anything matching the scale of the problem. My brain keeps on going: bacteria in petridish dying in its own waste; in our case, individuals may be able to see what's happening, but collectively, we're just as dumb.

But... there's a Kennedy quote up at P3 right now: "the problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics, whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need people who can dream of things that never were and ask, why not?"

A fantastic phrase: `horizons limited by the obvious realities'. Looking at Duncan Clark's graph or any of the information in the latest IPCC scientific report, the physical realities are obvious enough (to most people, at any rate). The political realities seem all too obvious as well.

No-one knows what human society will look like in a hundred years. Christ - this time a hundred years ago, the First World War was still in the future. But. Hmm. Well, I'll lapse into tea-towel slogan cliche if I carry on. Suffice to say, while I still think it's OK to thrash out half-baked ideas on the tinterweb, it's best not to stop at haven't-even-mixed-the-ingredients-yet-and-just-thrown-them-at-the-oven. Whatever I think about the chances of human beings getting themselves some future worth having, whatever dreams we fight for now... see, no, tea-towel slogan territory again. I'll go.