Blade Runner opens up with street scenes in old LA where at ground level smog and constant drizzle create a hellish vision of a future where those on the literal bottom of society live in an environmental purgatory. When Deckard take flight to visit the offices of the CEO of the android factory he is lifted above this constant cloud into a sunlit aerie of penthouse offices and apartments above huge pyramidal arcologies. This striking contrast was director Ridley Scott’s 1980 vision of a not too distant future. Today in 2007 that future is now:
- The NYTimes has an extensive feature on the vast and permanent smog and pollution in China including this horrifying slide show.
- Only 1 in 500 Chinese has access to clean drinking water
- Greece has lost 50 people to forest fires and declared a national emergency
- Flooding in the midwestern has claimed more than 50 lives with no end in site
- The deaths of miners and rescue workers in Utah due to dangerous mining practices driven by greed and high prices for coal eclipses the story of over 200 miners dying in China at the same time

This is just a sampling of the weather and environmental disasters in place, right now worldwide, yet we still argue about causes and blame. Those arguments are fueled by the vast denial matrix created and funded by energy cartels who, because they are the most advanced practitioners of scenario planning, know the horrifying truth about what we’ve done to this planet already.
Is there a positive story to counter this? Not yet. Barring some amazing breakthrough in cheap, clean and scalable energy production, this feedback loop will accelerate.