"Someone will think of something"

There's this persistent feeling throughout industrial nations that used to justify doing practically nothing at all to respond to the rushing train of climate change and disappearing supplies of cheap energy.  That feeling boils down to: Someone with think of something.... Something to prevent the worst climate effects from destroying our civilization.  Something to replace the cheap energy.  Something to let us keep living as we are, and if change has to happen, then someone else will have to do it.

In other words, we've created an illusion for ourselves: the illusion that some kind of magic will happen and we in the industrial nations will be able to keep on growing forever with no real consequences.

You may wonder: why would we even want such a strange, unnatural existence?  Why would we want to grow like bacteria in a petri dish, as if growth for its own sake was a mandate for a happy life?  Part of the answer rests in recognizing that over the last few hundred years, years of scientific and technical progress made possible by cheap energy whose use had not yet begun to impose serious constraints, we lost almost all of our connections to the rest of the natural world.  Even our farmers become more like industrial engineers, injecting synthetic pesticides, fertilizers and herbicides into a deteriorating soil while planting vast amounts of acreage using large fossil fuel powered machines.  In the cities, clean water was delivered to every household and sewage flushed away to go who knew where.  And who cared, as long as the water was safe, the toilets flushed, the lights worked, and the heat came on in winter?  It was an environment where almost everyone could easily conclude: More of this has got to be better.

And now that we are finally bumping up against some limits that will not yield, most humans in the industrial nations either: deny reality and insist nothing out of the ordinary is happening, or else take comfort in the belief that "someone will think of something".