I recently had the great pleasure of attending this year's Breakthrough Dialogue at Cavallo Point, an event at which the Breakthrough Institute brought together kindred spirits of disparate views to hash out some of the many issues that that Institute takes an interest in. On the basis of this Economist special report I was invited to talk about nuclear power, but in the many fruitful interstices of the meeting found myself talking about geoengineering quite a lot, because this is the sort of crowd where that sort of discussion makes sense, and because I am working on a book on the subject.

There’s wicked, like the Wicked Witch. Wicked, as in evil.

There’s wicked, like “It’s WICKED hot!” Wicked, urban slang for ‘very’.

And then there are Wicked Problems; like the European financial crisis, or like the epidemic of obesity, or like climate change. Wicked, as in so huge, so complex, so tangled in conflicts over values and so profoundly the result of inherent human nature, that these problems might not be solvable at all, and the best we can hope to do is cope with them and minimize the harm they do.

Can we advocate greater effort to break cycles of poverty, alienation, and despair even as we acknowledge that our lives, including the lives of the very poor, have vastly improved with increased wealth, modern medicine, and better infrastructure? Can we acknowledge that the new environmental risks that our prosperity has created are serious and must be dealt with, while acknowledging that they are unlikely to result in the end of human civilization? In short, can we imagine a non-apocalyptic politics that is neither Cornucopian nor Panglossian?