Most of my life I was either neutral or optimistic but now I am very pessimistic of the future. Not just for Americans but for all creatures. My first bout of pessimism was the decision to have kids or not after studying the rate we are consuming the world’s food supply in the oceans and on land. At that time we had three billion people with scary projections for the future. We are still on that track with over eight billion people.

                Few of the mainstay fish species then are being caught in great quantities. Today we are eating species that were once fish bait. We have gene-edited many crops to increase production. That helps, but we have increased the use of fertilizers which have created dead zones in our rivers, lakes, and seas.

                After more than two centuries people are finally realizing what carbon dioxide and methane do to the climate. We have been too dependent on fossil fuels. To live in a modern society it is very difficult to wean ourselves off them. The greed of fossil fuel companies has created a type of brainwashing causing us to disbelieve what we are told and can see.

                A group of politicians here are still trying to deny climate change and the need to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. The World’s climate is tolerable today because millions of years ago the plants and animals were buried taking enough carbon with them to lower the atmospheric carbon dioxide. Now we are putting that carbon back into the air.

                For most of my life only two countries had nuclear weapons. Now, several countries have them and some of those are very unstable. Iran, Pakistan, India, and North Korea top the list of countries with leaders who think they could survive after destroying their enemies. Each of these has enough to affect the world’s climate and kill billions like the past super volcanoes and the asteroid. We would freeze instead of roasting!

                The future isn’t very optimistic.