It seems that once a year I end up writing a post about climate change and personal responsibility. It’s a repeating thread based on a long running frustration that I have with this notion that we humans are somehow incapable of affecting change.

We act as though the government that we all consider broke, the government that has, thus far, refused to address the problem of our time in any meaningful way, is suddenly going to fix it. It doesn’t and so things get worse. Year after year the climate reports keep coming and they always report that the situation is more dire than previously thought. Our response is to throw our hands up in the air. We gnash our teeth and rend our garments in despair (some anyway) but we keep on keeping on. We keep driving. Keep buying. Keep heating and cooling to our comfort. Keep flying. Keep doing everything and anything. As if we need the government to force us to behave better.

We say to ourselves that it’s really industry that is the problem as if global capitalism operates in a vacuum and for no reason. Somehow we conveniently forget that capitalism operates to feed our manufactured desires (and of course, for their profit).

In the absence of meaningful action for 20 years taken by government, industry or citizens, we now find ourselves here and now. And we still insist that we are powerless to make changes. I think we can and should do better.

So, here we are, February 2021. A new president, a Congress controlled by Democrats and we will see if any progress is made. It’s clear that Biden wants to push hard to not only undo the backward steps by the previous administration and go even further than Obama did. That’s great. But we can see that, as expected, there will be obstructions and the interests of energy producers, particularly those based on coal, will fight back. So, we can expect, as usual, a few steps forward but it won’t be enough. And when power swings back the other way progress will again stop and possibly push back the other way.

All that said, when I look around at the U.S. in 2021 I see a lot of confusion about basic truth and reality. In a world of delusion, when half the population seems guided by conspiracy theories, it’s increasingly difficult to have much hope in rational, science-based thinking and decision making be it in personal life or any level of government.

Ugh.