In the midst of serious news about North Korean missiles and constitutional revision, as well as a steady diet of BLT (bright, light and trite) stories and corporate propaganda that clog our intellectual arteries, it's easy to lose track of what developments are critical to life itself.
No, it's not the statements of Kim Jong Un or the tweets of U.S. President Donald Trump. Rather, as a seminar in Kyoto last week reminded everyone, it's global climate change due to man-made greenhouse gas emissions and how human populations deal with it.
The occasion was the 20th anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol, that much-praised, much-maligned document that forced developed nations (but not China or India) to cut their greenhouse gases by a fixed amount. Whatever arguments there are (and there are plenty) about whether the Kyoto Protocol did any good, it forced people to think seriously about environmental issues and act. Including those in the home of the Kyoto Protocol itself.