A friend wrote to me the other day and said that, fifty years from now, if someone wanted to know what these times felt like, one of the best records might be the pieces I have been writing. It was a generous thing to say. It was also unnerving.
There is a danger in becoming fluent in decline. You start out trying to describe what is happening. After a while, description develops habits. You get quick at spotting rot. You get good at recognizing bad faith. You learn the smell of institutional mildew. Before long, the record you are keeping begins to look like a prophecy.
These are hard times to record. The lies move faster than the corrections. Cruelty is sold as strength. Shallow people call their certainty courage. The machinery of democracy keeps making its familiar sounds, but underneath you can hear the grinding of parts that have gone too long without maintenance.
So yes, the tunnel is real. The mistake is deciding it has no end.
A faithful record has to guard against its own bias. Decline announces itself. Repair is usually distributed, technical and unspectacular. It happens in clinics, laboratories, substations, payment systems and election offices. It rarely owns the day. It changes the world anyway.
Clean energy is the clearest example. The fossil-fuel industry had no moral awakening, and no one should wait by the mailbox for its apology. The change is happening because solar panels got cheaper, batteries improved, heat pumps became ordinary, utilities started planning around storage, automakers invested real money in electric vehicles, and governments began treating clean power as industrial strategy rather than environmental decoration.
The International Energy Agency expects global energy investment to reach about $3.4 trillion in 2026, with roughly $2.2 trillion going to clean energy and related infrastructure, almost double the amount going to fossil fuels. Renewable power capacity is projected to increase by almost 4,600 gigawatts between 2025 and 2030, about twice the deployment of the previous five years.¹