For 250 years now, our economy has mostly been about one thing figuring out more ways to burn fossil fuel. That’s what what’s who we are. If an alien landed in the us, they’d doughtless send work back to headquarters that they’d discovered a race of flesh colored devices for combusting coal and gas and oil. The year 2009 us such an interesting moment because after 20 years of thinking and taking and worrying about global warming, the world is finally edging closer to actually doing something about it. In December, the world’s leaders meet to negotiate a new climate treaty. Since doing something about the climate can only be defined as wearing ourselves off that coal, gas and oil, any effective treaty will in essense reboot civilization. If fall goes well, 2009 will be the watershed year the year the planet begins to turn its back on one way of doing business and starts to finally embrace a new way.

Does this sound like overstatement? It almost certainly is, at least in the sense that we won’t notice huge shifts immediately. The built infrastructure can’t change overnight, but if the political system manages to actually stick a real price on carbon, then our sense of the future will alter. Anyone building a new house of factory will suddenly have to imagine a world very different from the past or present a future where the design will need to make sense for the world 40 years hence.