Stories yesterday in the Guardian and the Independent about how carbon emissions are rising quickly again after the Great Recession, and how they will flip us into feedback loops in the Arctic within 20 years. These stories hunt in packs, and then it all goes quiet for a while. That makes it easy to forget about what is happening, but of course doesn’t make it stop happening. And what is happening now seems to be that as oil is getting more difficult we are burning the dirtier fuels faster to keep everything going, so that even as energy production drops in years to come the pollution will go on intensifying; and that the feedback loops, added to this, will take the planet into unthinkable levels of atmospheric CO2 later this century.

At the same time there are stories in the press like this one reviewing Aerotropolis – The Way We’ll Live Next, which speculates that cities of the future will be integrated breathlessly around airports. People blithely, as if it could go on for ever, write whole “non-fiction” books about things that will crumble before they are real, because before long there won’t be enough fuel for this to work – and these books are reviewed credulously in the most reputable media organs. Such unawareness among such educated people about the basics of the forthcoming energy predicament (or is it already happening? – the Archdruid insists we’re double-counting) continues to astound me – but I guess they’re only having fun. And who knows, maybe they will be right about what happens for a rich elite, while everybody else starves at the gates…

Sometimes I wonder what I was doing having children – I would never wish not to have done so, but when I think what they will see by the time they are my age, at mid-century, I flinch.