I can't help it...

Thirty-eighth Earth Day and I can't shake the gloom.

This year it's all about Americans celebrating their optimism and can-do attitudes. Everybody wants the Earth to survive, its lifeforms to thrive, to feel in-the-moment alive.

This is a difficult entry for me to submit. I want to play my part. I want to support life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I want to expand abundantly for everyone the blessings we were born into.

I want to be a part of the solution.

But the weight of the evidence lays against it.

If only each of us would do a little...
Today the President (yes, I've made my peace with the outgoing W, and no longer refer to him as pResident or Shrub or worse) laid out his plans to boost automobile fuel efficiency to today's Chinese standards by 2015, and to 35 mpg by 2020. Nobody is pretending to break the addiction, only to nudge it a little in the right direction, at least to pay lip service to love for life as we know it.

People are still looking up at their star-studded ceilings full of recessed fixtures and waiting for their investment in hundred year old heat-lamp technology to burn out. It is with half anticipation and half dread that they anticipate replacing their light bulbs with compact fluorescents. Who wants to lay out something like $50 for lights, even if CFLs do last 10 times longer, and then have to climb up a precarious ladder to reach overhead and make the changes? Plus we just can't stand throwing away a perfectly good incadescent bulb that still lights, and we HATE waiting in the dark until they're cool enough to touch.

Facts are that the carbon cycle plays a zero-sum game. Conservative science that all of us worldwide can agree with says we can afford at most another 400 MT emitted. James Hansen hints that due to scientific reticence to acknowledge the sum of feedbacks evident from paleoclimate science such a figure may be overstated.

The oil that we might still access amounts to more than that, if you assume that some of the craziness to extract petroleum from oil sands will occur as the post-peak supply dwindles. Of course there is also 300 MT in the natural gas we almost certainly will burn and unbelievable amounts, over 3800 MT, in the coal that the US and China are likely to turn toward. Triggering runaway climate change seems almost to take the aire of inevitability.