Magical Thinking Won't Save the Planet

Perhaps, as never before, we look to the future to deal with the problems of the present. We anticipate future successes, then price them into the challenges of today. Take the recent Paris climate summit, a commitment to reducing global warning to â??well below 2Câ?. As Richard Martin writes in the MIT Technology Review, this figure relies on emerging technologies that are barely proven. Indeed, â??barring a major technological advance that is not currently foreseeable, those targets are unreachableâ?. Even so, we have already anticipated them in cheering the 2C figure. We have placed our faith in something called progress, in the untestable belief that things will always get better.