Still looking for reasons to believe

SANTA ROSA — I’m an optimist by nature, but lately I’ve been having a hard time.

Like most Americans, I’m none too pleased with our political leadership. We have an amoral and narcissistic president who says he doesn’t even believe in one of the most important issues of our time, climate change. For someone like me, a believer in real news and real science, these aren’t exactly uplifting times.

I can’t even get excited about our growing economy, because I figure it’s all a house of cards. Short-term gains, I suspect, that’ll backfire on us soon enough. It did last time we gave big tax breaks to the rich and deregulated their behavior.

The world these days can be downright depressing.

Still, I search for reasons to believe.

The “blue wave” that came over the nation a couple of weeks earlier cheered me up a little. The voters put some balance back in place on Capitol Hill, so President Trump will have a harder time acting with impunity. If ever there was a president worth investigating, it’s this one, and that’s exactly what a Democratic-majority House will soon be doing.

I’ve noticed that some Trump apologists are now suggesting that Robert Mueller doesn’t have anything on the president, which is why the investigation is being dragged out so long, but I don’t believe that for a second.

I expect a damning report to come out next year, for two reasons. One is that we already know, based on the indictments and convictions so far, Mueller’s findings are going to hit very close to home for Trump. The other is Trump himself, with his obstructionist tweets and habitual lying. Imagine what Mueller would do to Trump if only he could cross-examine him under oath, when perjury becomes a real crime.

Then there’s climate change, another depressing issue. America is one of the world’s biggest polluters and yet, under this president, we’re unwilling to even admit the severity of the problem, much less take action to reverse it.

But what if we were to invent a device that would pull carbons out of the air and convert it back to usable energy? Yes, yes, I know, that’s pretty much what trees do, but we don’t have time to grow another Amazon Rainforest, so we need to use science to accelerate the process of removing carbon dioxide from the air, to reverse global warming.

So I googled the question and found out that we’ve got people working on exactly that.

According to an article in The Atlantic magazine, a team of scientists say they could be ready to start sucking carbon dioxide out of the air on a massive scale as early as 2021. And — get this — they say they can then convert it back into usable gasoline and jet fuel, so we wouldn’t have to dramatically convert our energy consumption habits to make it work.

If this process can actually work on a large enough scale it might just reverse global warming. And if there is money to be made from this technology, maybe even Trump would get on board.

But Trump may be a moot point by then. He could be out of office in 2021.

Suddenly, I’m an optimist again.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

[email protected]