HEINBERG. Richard Heinberg (climate change activist and author of 13 books, most recently “ Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy”, co-authored with David Fridley , 2016) on the worsening Biosphere disaster effectively largely ignored by Business As Usual (BAU) Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the US Presidential race (2016): “But here’s the real deal: a few generations ago we started using fossil fuels for energy; the result was an explosion of production and consumption, which (as a byproduct) enabled enormous and rapid increase in human population. Burning all that coal, oil, and natural gas made a few people very rich and enabled a lot more people to enjoy middle-class lifestyles. But it also polluted air, water, and soil, and released so much carbon dioxide that the planet’s climate is now going haywire. Due to large-scale industrial agriculture, topsoil is disappearing at a rate of 25 billion tons a year; at the same time, expanded population and land use is driving thousands, maybe millions of species of plants and animals to extinction… Could “we the people” handle a bit more of the truth? One would certainly like to think so. As it is, the US and the rest of the world appear to be sleepwalking into history’s greatest shitstorm (a somewhat more geeky and less scatological way to describe it would be as the mother of all Dragon Kings ). Regardless how we address the challenges of climate change, resource depletion, overpopulation, debt deflation, species extinctions, ocean death, and on and on, we’re in for one hell of a century. It’s simply too late for a soft landing (Richard Heinberg, “You can’t handle the truth”, Countercurrents, 2 August 2016: http://www.countercurrents.org/2016/08/02/you-cant-handle-the-truth/ ).