Scientific American 2006

The first surprise I had, when reading this text, was that it was written in 2006, the era of the Bush administration.  The tone and content of the piece appeared to reflect the timing of the writing.  It was straight-forward and still fairly optimistic.  Given the content of the other articles on climate change that we have been reading, specifically MacKay's book, it seems like this had a bit more optimism about the future.

The reading starts out by pinpointing the obvious: the Bush administration was more focused on the economy than the environment.  During that time, nearly nothing positive happened in terms of the environment, mostly because they were highly optimistic that technology would improve.  What I found slightly ironic was that, in the reading itself, after criticizing the Bush administration for its overly optimistic push for future technology, the article went on to push for similar goals.  The article seemed to hint throughout that the future was not as dim as climate scientists might suggest and that technology would indeed present positive environmental solutions.

After stating another obvious point, that carbon is bad, the reading pointed out that we cannot wait any longer to deal with this problem.  They presented the "wedge method" for dealing with the carbon problem.  It seemed to be to be overly ambiguous and did not have a good basis in scientific fact.  However, the solutions presented, including a population decrease, halting deforestation, improving agriculture methods and setting an emission cap, did seem viable.

The reading then presented some potential changes that need to be made in the energy sector, including changes to transportation, the wastefulness of current energy consumption, coal, nuclear power and renewable energy sources.  Like I stated earlier, the reading did seem to depend a lot on future technology developments and even ended with a discussion on future technology changes that would greatly benefit the energy system. 

Six years later, we are still digging ourselves into a climate mess, and energy usage has not decreased as the article had hoped.  Instead of focusing more on renewable energy sources, we are sticking with what we know best - carbon-based fuel sources.  I think it is safe to say that the healthy optimism presented in the article has been turned into hopeless despair not six years later.  We have encountered a more liberal Obama administration, seen a rise in environmental awareness, and yet still persist in degrading the environment to a very taxing point.