Wednesday, December 30, 2009

A rather important question goes unasked

This morning the substitute host on Information Radio interviewed a futurist by the name of Richard Worzel on how we can expect the world to look in 2020. The interview was not uninteresting, with Worzel making predictions about such things as how we can expect the economy to do (for what it's worth, he seems to think it will remain poor to very poor for a few years, take off midway through the decade, and then be booming with a possible commodities bubble and/or inflation), demographics (expect a lot more grey hair than today) and technological advances (more and better robots being the most striking). But he was utterly silent on the issue of climate change, or indeed environmental issues in general, and how these issues might be mitigated (or not). There was also no mention of peak oil. Furthermore, the interviewer failed to raise these issues with him either. I'm sure that if he'd asked, Worzel would have said something, so why did he not ask? I find it hard to believe that he simply forgot; perhaps he (or CBC management) thought it would be bad form to raise such a depressing issue during the holidays?

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