After thinking it over, I decided to continue into the Year 2020. I've long wanted to live into this year of perfect vision. Long meaning as far back as 45 years ago:
As an assistant professor of engineering, I then teamed with the resident futurist at the University of Hawaii, James Dator, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, on “Earth 2020: Visions for Our Children’s Children,” where in the summer of ‘74 we brought to Hawaii noted lecturers of national stature in topics related to Planet Earth, the environment and space, and weekly filled a two thousand seat auditorium. We also conducted a workshop for forty or so secondary and university faculty. 
Having been thusly enlightened with this course, many of them went on to become principals, a university president, a provost, and elected public officials. Professor Dator later gained fame as Secretary General, then President, of the World Futures Study Federation. Identical summer workshops were held at San Jose State University and San Diego State University, with the advanced planning final report prepared by faculty from all three workshops. There was also a lot of cross-fertilization with the leaders of Project Cyclops. The information and curricula we generated became the standard instructional tools for a large number of teachers in Hawaii and California in the growing field of environmental consciousness. Remember, this was more than a third of a century ago.
Jim and I are close colleagues and we first worked together nearly 40 years ago on a NASA educational project called "Earth 2020: Visions for Our Children's Children." I came up with Earth 2020 and the wife of the director the Ames Research Center contributed the theme. Anyway, in 1974 I was a new Assistant Professor of Engineering on the Manoa Campus of the University of Hawaii, while Jim was already a respected Futurist and lead for this course.
That above article followed an interview I had with Henry Curtis, still Executive Director of Life of the Land, where Jim pounced on my attitude regarding Global Warming and Peak Oil, where he emphatically stated that both are real and serious, and that I was encouraging false hope by suggesting solutions. You can read all the below by clicking on Curtis' Ililani posting on this subject. He even used my photo from this masthead. Specifically, my response to Jim's critique was:
I could provide counterpoints to much of Jim's concerns, for he must have uncharacteristically missed some of my purposeful shadings, but, we've (specifically, Jim
and Pat) been going in tiny and large circles
around these issues for decades, and, while he,
and many other colleagues, too, seem to feel that
our primary task should be to educate the public
to better accommodate and appreciate these
coming lifestyle paradigm shifts from almost
certain doomsday of some sorts, the fact of the
matter is that the USA has prevailed as the only
supreme power on Planet Earth, and will continue
to stumble along as #1 for the next century at
least, while much of the populated world more
and more will most probably suffer. While I'm
not exactly holding my breath for any
monumental breakthroughs to occur in my
lifetime--perhaps our country can eventually get our
act together, the equivalent of an Andromeda
strain might wipe out 80% of of us, maybe fusion
will actually work, or the Blue Revolution will serve
to minimize the transition agony while we over
time drop to a more sustainable world population of
a billion or two. If smarter people than me, Sagan
and Drake, for example, can fashion their dreams
and lifetime careers on the possibility of useful
incoming signals from extraterrestrials--as I too, by
the way, dabbled in at NASA's Ames Research Center
--I would rate some of these above delirious transpirations as less fanciful. It's really unfair to call
my efforts at finding solutions an exercise in
spreading false hopes. At least I'm trying as best I
can, And, yes, I remain hopeful.
This, further, is too cruel for me to even repeat, but...WHAT HAPPENED TO PEAK OIL? Sure, that article is from Forbes, but the business-financial world is not always wrong. Mind you, I continue to pontificate on the value of sustainability, but much in life has to do with timing, and humanity has been gifted by the ingenuity of technological advancements.
Granted, all the while continuing to emit too much carbon dioxide, but the feared economic crunch hasn't happened yet. However, the IEA last year reported in their World Energy Outlook that PEAK OIL IS HERE, and that there will be an OIL CRUNCH by 2023. So here we will go again. What's particularly scary about this warning is that the IEA has historically been pro-industry and anti-renewable energy.
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