Yesterday’s Washington Post contained a column by a leading cyberpunk futurist about how right he has been about everything and how he’s so much sexier about it than Al Gore. Just marvel at the man’s foresight and brilliance:

We’re gonna glam, spend and consume our way into planetary survival. My own favorite sci-fi planetary-saving scheme for naming, numbering and linking to the Internet every piece of junk we create so that it can be corralled and briskly recycled, creating a cradle-to-cradle postindustrial order and averting planetary doom, may sound pretty shocking and alien. But I wrote that book while in residency at a famous design school. I received an honorary doctorate there and the book was published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It gets great reviews, designers love it. It’s not even science fiction — it’s a cybergreen manifesto.

How could anyone fail to listen to him? After all, he saw it all coming:

Back in 1998, the Mexican state of Chiapas caught fire and the smoke from its rainless “rain forests” stretched all the way to Chicago. In Austin, my home town, the sky was the color of a dead television channel. Living under that hideous gout of smoke, I realized that the much-anticipated greenhouse effect was as real as dirt. Most people didn’t grasp that at the time. That’s okay by me: If everybody got it about issues of that sort, I wouldn’t get paid for being a futurist. As it happened, though, five years earlier I’d written a science-fiction novel about climate change. So I was fully briefed.

Such a shame that carbon dioxide is invisible and that the aerosols he saw in the sky do not form part of the greenhouse effect. Still, why let a few facts stand in the way when the man’s brilliance and famous education are so self-evident, eh?