In the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of its wonders, is an endless form of ruin, […] that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us heirs of their long undoing ( Invisible Cities,Italo Calvino).

 

This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.

 

[...] there are people who believe they are flying, but it is already an achievement if they can get off the ground flapping their batlike overcoats.

Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts: I must say, between ourselves, that I have strong doubts whether the new kingdom will have many gifts for us in its luggage.  

 

The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

 

from Columbia Business School: ******elections have consequences. According to an analysis by the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era, the Trump administration's environmental policies resulted “in more than 22,000 extra deaths in 2019 alone,” largely from worsened local air pollution. In terms of the total damage done to the climate, the Rhodium Group estimated in 2020 that “in the absence of new federal policy, Trump's rollbacks will increase US emissions by 1.8 gigatons cumulatively through 2035.”

******Even under another Trump presidency, the reframing of climate as an economic issue will help to ensure that many of today's positive trends continue apace. Texas farmers are not going to turn off their wind turbines; roofers are not going to unlearn how to install solar panels; and contractors will not suddenly go back to recommending gas furnaces over heat pumps that are 3-5 times more efficient.

****** The question is not if the world moves off fossil fuels, but how fast. The renewables revolution is inevitable.Fundamental market forces are at play. Attempts by Trump to stand in its way would amount to little more than another wall that never gets built.