For anyone trying to comment coherently on environmental issues these days, the dilemma is an excess of information. The media is so full of so many tempting subjects that commentary is nearly immobilized. Like a salmon trying to choose an individual target in a teeming school of herring, the sheer plentitude of choices is overwhelming and incapacitating.

A decade ago the situation was very different. An occasional mention of an endangered species warranted attention. Now, as animals and plants go extinct at 100 per day — 25 percent are expected to be extinct by 2050 — each endangered species passes as a blur in a cloud of other pressing items. The real plight of British Columbia's spotted owl, now sustained by a dubious captivity project, is reduced by the sheer weight of so many other species in crisis. The worst clear-cuts of bad logging practices pale beside BC's pine beetle devastation. Conservation strategies for wild salmon stocks, significant as they are, seem diminished beside the damaging effects of rising river temperatures and changing ocean ecologies. The issues of importance that warrant attention are now more expansive and strategic than detailed and specific. Like worried investors, our first impulse is not to look at the price of our stocks but at the headlines.

Climate change has moved to the front and centre of concern because it has become the key to everything environmental. If we don't reduce our global carbon dioxide emissions, then the changes wrought by rising temperatures will devastate species everywhere, reduce even further our depleted ocean fish stocks, increase droughts and floods, disrupt our agriculture, spread new diseases and pests, melt ice cover to flood our coastlines, displace people and instigate political conflict.

Details are important but they are becoming secondary to the larger trends shaping our planet's environment. Will China, now the world's largest discharger of carbon dioxide, curtail its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions? Will the United States shed the neo-conservative mentality of the Bush administration and join the international community in a serious effort to address climate change? Will Canada move beyond such indecisive and patently silly measures as so-called "intensity" and "aspirational" CO2 targets. (The former is lowering emissions per unit of production, a measure which would allow total greenhouse gases to increase if production were to rise faster than emission reductions; and the latter is a euphemism for no regulations, just the hope that emissions will be brought down by the pervasive goodwill coursing through the caring soul of competitive capitalism.) Alberta, now emitting 35 percent of Canada's greenhouse gases due to the messy production of oil at its tar sands, is huffing with indignation that anyone should criticize its mania for using the planet's atmosphere as a public sewer.

But some signs are encouraging. The sobering prospect of impending ecological chaos, like the promise of execution at dawn, is now starting to "wonderfully focus the mind". Some politicians have decided to lead by following mounting public concern. The CEOs of Canada's business elite have declared climate change "the most pressing and daunting issue" today, and are urging government intervention with clear emission targets and energy taxes. Young people are showing a preference for "green" jobs and careers. Quebec has established Canada's first carbon tax, a direct levy on CO2 emissions that many economists consider to be fair, necessary and inevitable. BC's government has proposed definite caps and deadlines on such emissions. The city of Campbell River signed the province"s Climate Action Charter, vowing to be carbon neutral by 2012.

These are positive signs. But most people have not yet internalized the magnitude of the climate change challenge nor imagined the staggering implications if it is not addressed. They hope for an easy technological cure that will be fast, painless and cheap, a solution to maintain their habits without necessitating sacrifice.

"Hope springs eternal...." Billions of dollars have been spent on nuclear fusion, the holy grail of clean energy — despite decades of diligent research, its promise has never materialized. Biofuel from food crops, a desperate fix for an energy addiction, will succeed by starving disadvantaged people, destabilizing poor countries and causing widespread political turmoil. Hydrogen, the touted "fuel of the future", seems to be sputtering ingloriously, primarily because it is too inefficient to produce. Our civilization is so complex and so dependent on fossil fuels that single fixes seem impossibly elusive.

So, a flush of premature optimism greeted two recent developments that may deliver a modicum of relief to our energy needs. One is the discovery that salt water can be burned after certain radio frequencies separate its elemental components, freeing the hydrogen and oxygen from the sodium chloride. If the process is efficient enough — still undetermined — this could be a source of hydrogen for fuel cells.

The other development — more a hopeful rumour than a fact — is US Patent No. 7,033,406 filed by an Austin, Texas, company called EEStor. Its researchers may have produced a capacitor-type "battery" that would quickly receive and save large electrical charges, eliminating the technical problem that has stymied prospects for the electric car.

But these two developments are mostly hype and expectation, the typical fuels that power unsupported optimism. Most realists see the future as more work than luck. Given the pressing time constraints, the wise and disciplined use of our present systems seems a safer option than gambling on future miracles.

We live on a planet that is still incredibly rich, diverse and promising. If we are to continue catching enough fish from the teeming plentitude that surrounds us, we will need all our intelligence to be both mindful and respectful of its complexity.