Over the past year, hope has been a bit hard for me to find. One climate report after another came out, like the slow tolling of a Doomsday bell, ringing out across the world, only to be swallowed by the howling chaos of rising authoritarianism in the United States, and around the world. Things are not good, and try though I might, I can’t find any clear signs that they’re going to get better any time soon. It feels like we’re headed for a confrontation between a global civilization falling off a cliff, while a tiny handful of people claim the billions of parachutes they control belong to them, and them alone.

The one sliver of hope I can see for humanity is the fact that we have all the tools we need to make planet-wide progress on both adapting to the warming climate, and ending our contribution to the problem. In the coming year, I’m planning to spend a lot more time adding my voice to the many who have already made the case for that claim. We, and most of the rest of multicellular life on this planet, are headed for extinction right now, but we don’t have to suffer through that horror. We could build a better world, we’re just not doing it nearly fast enough.

Case in point: Georgetown, Texas; population somewhere over 70,600, and the largest city in the U.S. to be run on 100% renewable energy. The Republican mayor of the town is enthusiastic about the change, not just because it’s the right thing to do for the future of our species, but also because it’s the smart thing to do from the oft-touted “fiscal conservative” perspective: [Read more…]