Environment & Energy

Despite humans’ tendencies to forget the past, there’s too much evidence about the way things used to be for the powers-that-be to pretend that things used to be different.

Just off-shore are going to be trillions of dollars of ruined infrastructure under salt water. There are going to be a lot of desert communities abandoned for lack of water. There are also going to be a lot of former ski resorts that went belly-up for lack of adequate snowfall.

Folks in Medieval and early-modern Europe and elsewhere may have had ruins, guesswork, and scattered recollections of former civilizations. Future scholars and researchers will have trillions of bytes of damning evidence available on-line.

I think there will be people who’ll care—and people who’ll still be angry.

I don’t think that the old “That’s the price of progress” BS will carry that much weight.