Well, the predictable happened.

The world worked up its hopes that its primary institutions would do the responsible thing and stop the threat of destruction of our beloved civilization.

It failed.  Did we have to go to political science and history classes to see it coming?  The nature of the beast, shown to us repeatedly over the centuries, but we lived in 'hope' that the beast was something that it is not.

An illusion squashed by its own demonstration.  We are so disappointed our hope turned from illusion to its actual reality.

What other hopes and faith in our society's institutions hold us back from their obvious truths, that we don't want to face?

We have faith that science and business will somehow save us.  They both, together, got us into this mess.  And of course they will rescue us, after giving us our incredible lifestyle.  They rescued us from a history of poverty and oppression.  This gives us hope that they will do the same in the future.  There is profit to be made in saving civilization, through managing the Earth like a car engine.  It's only molecules and energy after all.  We just need to manipulate the chemical soup of the Earth to get what we want.  More profit for Wall Street, and protection of our lifestyle for us, through Wall Street.  What could be more perfect.  Win-win.

Now that we have had to face the utter failure of world governments ability to act, do we merely sit back and say 'it will just take time, and it will happen.'  Or do we have to face the truth.  It is inherently flawed.  Sure they can set targets in a year's time.  Do you think that millions of factories and cars pollution can accurately be measured to put only the right amount of pollution into the Earth?  Or can we become realistic enough to understand the nature of that beast.  Do we live in illusion, or just get realistic?

Science is inert.  It is just knowledge about how to manipulate molecules and energy, both in Nature, and for our own purposes.

Science gets into trouble when it naively gives its knowledge to business, hoping for good.

But what does business do with science?  It uses it for profit.  It uses it for production.  There is profit to be made replacing everything in our possession with green stuff.  That's a lot of sales, a lot of manufacturing.  A lot of digging up the Earth.  It's big business replacing everything we own with new stuff.  We've got a lot of smokestack factories in the cheap Third World to build, to save the West's lifestyle, let alone create it for 3 billion Asians.

Does this make any sense to anyone?  We have hope in business, science and government.  Hope can be realistic or naive.  Illusion or facing a gritty reality.  Facing reality before we are rudely awakened from our naive hope illusion, so that we are prepared for the consequences of this beast that can't be stopped. 

Debating these points can be fun.

Facing its reality is not.

It's not about 'hope.'  It's about what we put our hope in.  We hope our institutions will get us out of the mess they put us into.