I always figured knowledge+wisdom+action=epitome of hope. What else is real hope, if not that?

I do think this hope thing is often counterproductive — people use it to avoid facing harsh reality. “We don’t need to worry too much about climate change; some new technology will save us.” “We don’t need to worry about the decades-long degradation of the American republic; vote for Obama and he’ll make it all better.” Etc.

But wisdom includes a smidgen of hope, and action, IME, requires it.

I really hate to burst someone’s bubble or harsh the Obamabuzz we’ve got going. I also really hate the false hope about Iraq that Bush gave our troops. He told our troops that their lives had meaning and that they were fighting for our freedom. From Vietnam I’ve seen what happens when false hope sours. So I’m not gonna give false hope. If people really want the truth they need to do a little research and crunch some numbers. I’ve done that and have reached my conclusions. You reach yours.

There are other alternatives to hope besides despair and passivity.

I prefer knowledge and wisdom and action.

Problem is, I think I would also score pretty high on the Dangerous World Scale, or at least the parts about medium-term dangers. I try to counter this with some degree of hope. I read something by Chomsky a few months ago in which he noted that you never know when a revolution is about to happen, and when you look back at history, rapid change has happened at the most unexpected moments. And of course, the alternative to hope — despair — isn’t going to solve anything.

It seems like part of the RWA agenda, especially the Republican one you outline, thrives in an environment of despair and powerlessness. So we have been told for a generation now that the government can’t get anything done, and whenever Republicans have been in power, they have done their utmost to hobble the government and make this true. Now we live in a country where bridges aren’t maintained and levees fall apart, and many in this country can’t imagine or remember a time when it could be any other way — despair and powerlessness.

Your own predictions of a grim future seem to buy into this despair and powerlessness. This doesn’t make you a RWA, but it does seem to mean that you accept as inevitable a present and future where RWA ideology will thrive. Does that make you a realist, or does that mean you have swallowed a whole lot of what the Republicans have been feeding us over the last 35 years?

I think things can work out without losing 3 billion people. I personally can’t imagine a future with anything close to the kind of lifestyle that we enjoy today without the massive implementation of nuclear power. As scary as that might be, the numbers between nuclear and fossil fuels have never changed. It has always been the choice between the POSSIBILITY of more Three Mile Islands vs the GUARANTEE of poisoned air and global warming. When comparing the numbers, fossil fuels have always been worse, but visions of three-headed babies and mushroom clouds , IMO, examples of left-wing RWA tactics, scared America into making the worse choice.

So we switch to hydrogen and nuclear and develop the hell out of solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and tidal power. We encourage mixed use dense urban development, make it cool and affordable, and create a massive public train systems that runs free of charge. We continue to use Green Revolution practices to feed the world’s poorest, but create more incentives for innovation in the Organic revolution. When green monoculture species succumb to disease, we draw from the biodiversity sustained in the Organic revolution to quickly replace them. We cross our fingers and hope that we will always be one step ahead of massive starvation in this dance. We figure out effective ways to reverse desertification, and if we can’t find anything easy, we move ahead with the difficult and expensive processes that we already know about today. We plant a lot of trees.

I don’t know Tripp, but I’m hopeful, and I think that things are on the brink of changing for the better.