... of us surviving the next fifty years? Although you could have said that about the previous fifty, or the one before that.
The difference with climate change as against nuclear annihilation is that you see it coming, it's not an all-or-nothing crisis like 9/11 or Pearl Harbour or Hiroshima. It's just that for a while from time to time, places at latitudes of 50 degrees... hit 50 degrees.
(Latitude is not always a reliable indicator and London ~ like Harbin in China ~ should hit minus 40 in winter were it not for the ocean nearby. What is worrying about the weather around Oregon is that it is adjacent to a cold ocean current).
But it all started here in a side-street of London. Trevithick was a mining engineer, and steam-engines were developed to drain Cornish tin-mines of water. This was a circular logic, because it assisted the extraction of hydrocarbons like coal that in turn powered the high-pressure steam-engines fitted to carriages and (more practically) to trains. It also ushered in manufacture, which was previously confined to the water-wheels of Lancashire and Derbyshire.
Around a hundred years later, Benz repeated Trevithick's experiment of a horseless carriage, but used a petrol-engine instead. His wife took it for a spin and introduced a second hydrocarbon economy about the time the Wright Brothers took flight. Again, what made the extraction of oil economical was the fact engines now ran on oil.
Fast forward a further hundred years and you finally get practical embodiments of electrical power for transport, effectively enabled by computer. And again, computers running on precisely the form of energy whose widespread use they in turn promote.
And these things happen in a lifetime. Could I have known when I started working as a young man in London that half a lifetime hence, most of its inhabitants would be walking its streets like zombies transfixed by a screen in their hands and too purblind to notice Trevithick?
And thus the 1800s were powered by coal, the 1900s powered by oil, and the 2000s by electricity whose origin we get to choose.
Or not, as the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare himself suggested here on the stage. We strut our stuff and imagine we are masters of the universe, whereas the universe masters us by sprinkling coal here and oil there which we lap up like kittens.
So what the fuck am I doing here, developing a practical means of electrical carriage?
