The hope to keep things as they were has been over for years.

The hope to control how bad things will get will never be lost, as we can always put in the work to make things less bad than they would otherwise be. No matter how atrocious climate events get, they can always get worse — that’s what we need to endeavor to prevent.

For clean energy, there’s an enormous amount of progress that is going to unfold over the next 10 and 20 years. It should be truly transformative, not just in an ecological sense but also in an economic sense. It’ll be a generation too late to prevent the greatest damage to our environment, but it’ll be just on time to prevent things from being even worse.

At some point the focus for greatest impact is going to need to shift to ways we can accelerate the removal of carbon from the atmosphere or other methods of counteracting the heating effects. This isn’t one we can solve by simply planting a fuckton of trees. It’ll be a huge and expensive effort, whatever the solution is. A difficult one, too: going too far too quickly will give us the opposite problem of too much global cooling…