I just followed this Unfollow fellow.

I find this compelling, unlike my previous encounters w him. I mostly agree with it.

I don't know how to talk about my pessimism. I pretty much lost hope for the "experts adequately taking care of things" scenario when Trump was elected. https://twitter.com/RoyScranton/status/1263532474899984384

The "civilization muddles through" scenarios have always depended on the United States, and the likelihood that the US will attain enough competence to spearhead timely decarbonization, always small, became nil in November 2016. We lost 20 years that day, years we don't have.

I don't see a path that maintains anything resembling the combination of democracy, civil liberty, growth economics, spreading prosperity that we were advertised into buying a half century ago.

Something is going to crack.

I saw it that way pre-pandemic, pre-collapse of retail, pre-collapse of travel and entertainment. Already things looked like a crack-up was coming. Before we discovered the extent of our bizarre addiction to the inessential.

I think the crack-up has started.

Amazingly, Obama glued everything together after the near crack-up of 2008. He gets no credit for it. He saved the world, maintained the system.

But I don't think, even if there's an uncontested Biden victory, that something similar can be achieved now.

So it didn't even take climate disruption to knock us on our backsides. How we are to cope with climate now that we've been reduced from a society to an internet is hard to imagine.