Canada

I disagree.

I'm not a doomer because the problem is technically intractable (more on that later). Nor because I can't do enough to change our trajectory. Nor because we (society as a whole, including corporations and governments) can't do anything to change our trajectory.

Nope, I'm a doomer because dealing with this problem is a social problem with its foundations in evolution. It has not and never had been a technical problem. We have the technologies and have had many of them for 50 or even 100 years.

There was more than enough evidence by 1970 to support hypotheses going back to the 1800s; more than enough to justify global initiatives. Yet, by c. 1980, that evidence was being not just studiously ignored, but treated as nonsense. And that programme of dismissal didn't just continue, but grew ever more elaborate and normalized.

There were good ideas and technologies available in 1970 that, had they been acted upon and deployed would likely have greatly mitigated and possibly solved the problem. At the very least, we would have been on the right path 50 years ago instead of arguing about the best way to deal with what our inaction has turned into a crisis.

Now, at 67, I'm starting to think that the problem might be technically intractable for the simple reason that we've waited too long. But even if that is completely wrong, it's clear to me that it is not just socially intractable, but impossible.

While individual humans may have the necessary foresight and behaviour, collectively, as a species, we simply don't have what it takes to see and understand and act when there are compounding effects. Whether it's savings, debts, or ecological and environmental impact, our poor little brains cannot reliably deal with anything other than pure linearity as applied to small numbers and tightly constrained systems. Nor, it seems, are we capable of reliably deferring to those who have managed to acquire the necessary skills.

In the same ways that the very nature of a nonhuman species can lead to population collapse or extinction under changing circumstances, so are we doomed to play out a similar script. I just didn't anticipate that we'd hit the wall while there were still just 4 digits in our year or that we'd be at risk of succumbing to something so simple.