Clearly neither Los Angeles burning out west, nor the unusually cold weather in the east that drove the inauguration ceremonies indoors, could persuade incoming President Trump that pulling out of the Paris Agreement was anything but a good idea.
He signed an executive order on inauguration day to initiate the withdrawal process. In the meantime, the US will start to ‘drill, baby, drill’ itself back to economic prosperity, or so Trump believes.
In the absence of US leadership, however, there is another force for good that could yet save mankind – engineering. There is very little engineered today that doesn’t take sustainability into account. Even the most demonised of machines, the internal combustion engine (ICE) car, is squeezed for efficiency and cleanliness. But ICE vehicles remain a massive problem in cities, for congestion reasons as well as the environmental ones.
According to the World Bank, around 4.4 billion people today live in cities and that is projected to double by 2050...