Vaulting ambition

Over the winter, my main goal at the gym has been to run 10 km in less than 50 minutes. Today I once again fell short of that goal but at least I was able to bring the total accumulated distance on the treadmill this year above 100 km. As I sit down to write what will be my 700th post here on Rawls & Me, I am thinking of insomnia on the west coast of Sweden, of lingering jetlag and that spring in New York with Patrick Stewart playing Macbeth: “vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself”.

Meanwhile in the real world, the plot of the detained Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai thickens, Thomas Friedman declares that it is now “code red” with regard to Trump in the White House and, in Italy, fascism is becoming normalized. It would be one thing if irrationality would be limited to such anti-democratic forces but watching Al Gore’s ”An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” I was reminded of the same strange mix of lying and delusion that we have come to associate with Trump. I do not know what is worse, if Gore actually thinks that “the world can easily be powered by renewables” or if he knows that it is not true and lies about it?

Maybe, as my long-time Australian co-author suggests in a recent article on geonengineering, it will be the developing world that finally cuts through all this hypocrisy and forces the rich countries to take real responsibility for climate change?