Agreed. I shared this not to promote Blair’s viewpoint, of course, but to demonstrate how climate denial talking points are shifting away from “it’s not happening” to “it’s happening, but we can’t stop it.”

To be fair, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, especially when we look at it from a game-theoretic perspective. But the alternative isn’t implementing techno-fixes like carbon capture, it’s the collapse of the biosphere (and the resulting decline and collapse of industrial civilization). Elites like Blair continually stop one step short of acknowledging this (likely because they figure their wealth will insulate them, and/or they’ll be dead before it gets that bad).

Choose your adventure! A: Poison the rain, soil, and groundwater with endocrine-disrupting/fertility-lowering/cancer-causing toxins for generations to come. BUT! You don’t have to preheat your pan. Worth it?

Eh, corporations are people at the top, people in the middle, and people on the bottom. Someone had the idea, someone OK’d it, and someone carried it out. Incorporating just frees up a little responsibility/liability.

Yeah, Kim Stanley Robinson likely did his homework on which parts of the world were most likely to experience the first heat wave with mass casualties.

I see this less as a reference to value, and more as a reference to scarcity. The two are linked, of course, but for most of recent history we’ve been thinking of water as a free/abundant public resource that (literally) falls out of the sky. Now that water rights, water futures, and pipelines are in the picture, we’re starting to treat water more as a private commodity. And yes, the implications of that are very scary.

Thank you for sharing and summarizing! A few more takeaways relating to climate change:

• Emissions growth (0.8%) is lower than GDP growth (3.2%) for 2025, which could be seen as evidence of decoupling. Growth in electricity demand (4.3%) outpaced GDP.
• Renewables made up nearly 40% of new energy production, but coal, oil and natural gas use has continued to increase to record highs.
• Total & per-capita emissions are decreasing in the US & EU, but increasing in China and India.