All things rise and fall, come into being and pass away. Including our own society which has tried to maintain the illusion that we can go up on an escalator of progress forever - nearly. Sure the sun will get hot and then go out, but until then… but it is our own efforts that at some point will not succeed, however, hard we try. And we realize it’s our own projects that have created the mess. We should rest easy with such hard-won knowledge because it is inevitable and fighting. It is exhausting.
The better philosophers know this. Its OK. Some of us get to live in the beginning of a cycle, more in the middle, but these are not us, and then, downhill. Drilling, pumping refining, selling and transporting and then burning in machines creates more CO2. And that CO2 is killing us. No escape.
For economists, since everything that goes up must come down, why does economics only have theories of the upside of the curve?
This post reminds me of the great relief I felt after reading William Vollmann's Carbon Ideologies.
Also a good question for the economists to answer.