A recurring theme has been the decline of journalism as it loses its monopoly of news and transitions to fashion, gossip and politics. Journalism has always been mostly about such ephemeral things, and now it is becoming solely about them. One of the things that most irks me about journalists is that they manufacture myths.

My coverage has evolved. Climate change is not the story of our time. Climate change is a subset of the story of our time, which is that we are coming of age on a finite planet and only just now recognizing that it is finite. . . how can we make a transition to a sort of stabilized and still prosperous relationship with the Earth and each other is the story of our time. . .

And it’s a story about conflict. It’s a story about the fact that there are a billion teenagers on planet earth right now. A hundred thirty years ago there were only a billion people altogether — grandparents, kids. . .

. . . climate change is like a symptom of the story of our time, meaning our energy choices right now come with a lot of emissions of greenhouse gases and if we don’t have a lot of new [choices] we’re going to have a lot of warming.

Fifty years ago this would have made some sense as the notion of a finite planet was all the rage at that time, though this sort of neo-Malthusian thinking is, obviously, far older.

A better candidate for the story of our times is the eternal clash between pessimists and the politics of limits, and optimists and the politics of growth. The clash is ancient but there are perhaps some new twists to it as those who had gone all in about climate change belatedly realize that they had been unrealistic, that they had failed to consider initial conditions and dynamics. It is already too late to hit the brakes and slow down, there is no "stabilized and still prosperous" safe place to hide from climate change or anything else. Retirement is not an option. This is just the next task, little different from those of the past, something like the worries a century ago that the cities of the world were drowning in horse dung.

I wonder what we will be obsessing about 100 years from now? The wheel will turn.