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Hedges calls attention to the algorithms of Facebook, Google and Twitter, and how they steer traffic away from anti-war and progressive websites, while Miller speaks of the frightening historical precedent of the homogenization of the press. "I think what we have seen over the decades since the mid-'70s, and I'm going to make a provocative comparison here, is something analogous to what the Nazis called gleichschaltung, which means streamlining," Miller says. "When they came to power, they made it their business to make sure that not only all media outlets but all industries, all sectors of the culture, would be streamlined, which meant getting rid of anyone who was not fully on board with the Nazi program."

Today, the company is announcing a new milestone: Since 2015, it has installed a worldwide total of a gigawatt-hour of energy storage–technology that is critical for using renewable energy at scale. For comparison, that’s nearly half of the entire amount of energy storage installed globally last year.

The cost of battery storage keeps falling; between 2010 and 2016, the price across the industry fell 73%, from $1,000 a kilowatt-hour to $273 a kilowatt-hour. By 2020, it may drop to $145 a kilowatt-hour, and by 2025, to $69.5 a kilowatt-hour.

The growth is only a fraction of what’s needed to transform energy. In 2015, when Elon Musk talked about the company’s new energy division, he estimated that it would take 2 billion Powerpacks to fulfill the world’s energy needs. “Even at 300%, we’ll need to grow it this way for decades, frankly, to really solve the problem,” says Straubel. “And not just us, but other companies need to get involved, too.”

The vast majority of young people in places like the Middle East and North Africa face a bleak socioeconomic future. Youth unemployment in the region hovers around 30 percent, which is expected to skyrocket as economies struggle to create enough jobs to keep pace with a massive demographic youth bulge. In 2000, the World Bank estimated that the region would need to create about 100 million new jobs to keep pace, and it’s nowhere near to closing the gap.

The effect of this socioeconomic crisis is about more than just employment and livelihoods for young people; it represents a fundamental breakdown of the social contract in the region. For decades, governments in the Middle East and North Africa promised socioeconomic support — free education, subsidies and public-sector employment — in exchange for limits on political participation and civic activity.

According to a 2016 study by the nonprofit Greater New Orleans, this fledgling water workforce will grow by more than 20 percent over the next 10 years, creating more than 13,600 snazzy new titles like conservation technician, civil engineer and environmental scientist that pay an average of $69,277, well above the national average salary. “Louisiana is one of the first to turn the issue of climate change from an environmental one to an existential and economic one … through the cutting-edge jobs of the future,” claims Greater New Orleans’ executive vice president and chief operating officer Robin Barnes. Which is the city’s way of putting up a NOW HIRING billboard.

Meanwhile, troubled coastal cities around the world are taking note, says Bren Haase, head of planning for the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. With a playbook in place, Louisiana already boasts a 50-year, $50 billion plan to rebuild the state’s coasts, one that’s grounded in decades of data and science; it’s also being translated into several languages, including Vietnamese, Spanish and French, for other countries to reference. Flush with billions of dollars from the settlement in the catastrophic BP oil spill, the Coastal Master Plan could hold key clues for other places facing a similar fate in the future, says Haase, including flood-risk areas like New York, London, Singapore and Kiribati. Moreover, Louisiana’s coastal restoration sector is fueling high-tech projects like artificial oyster reef creation, advanced hydrologic modeling and geosynthetics, which will help shore up the state’s defenses against behemoth hurricanes and oil spills.

He’s a man with a history but without a sense of history, a man for whom anything is imaginable and everything is mutable, including the past.  In this, too, he's symptomatic of the nation he now “leads.”  Who among us even remembers the set of Washington officials who, only a decade and a half ago, had such glorious dreams about establishing a global Pax Americana and who led us so unerringly into an unending hell in the Greater Middle East?  Who remembers that those officials of the George W. Bush administration had another dream as well -- of a Pax Republicana, a one-party imperial state that would stretch across the American South deep into the Midwest, Southwest, and parts of the West, kneecapping the Democratic Party for an eternity and leaving that artifact of a two-party past confined to the country’s coastal areas.  Their dream -- and it couldn’t have been more immodest -- was to rule the world and its great remaining superpower for... well... more or less ever.