First, let me say that I agree with you completely about nuclear power. I could drone on for hours about the risks of nuclear, and how a shoddy job has been done, but fossil fuels already kill eight million people every year, far more than all the nuclear disasters put together multiplied by ten, and the consequences of the climate disaster will be far greater in loss of life and property.
But unlike you, I see little cause for "hope" in the sense you mean. I've watched this play out over the last fifty years, and we as a species have done almost nothing.
A great change is certain.
We were committed to shooting the moon two generations ago and nothing has changed and it's too late. Probably abound the Obama Administration was our very last chance and he completely squandered that one, though probably one man could have done nothing.
We are a species are living hugely, incredibly beyond our means in every possible way and our consumption of resources and our generation of waste continues to increase exponentially.
We will emit something like 35-40 billion tonnes of CO2 this year. Simply to be steady state - which commits us to temperatures around +2ºC higher than baseline - we'd have to reduce that to 3 billion tonnes in the next twenty years (actually, eighteen years now).
And +2º would be disastrous. It means water levels meters higher than now. It means, within a tiny amount of time historically, the loss of New York, Miami, Mumbai, the Netherlands, London, Paris, and changes to the growing season everywhere, mostly for the worse, because it takes thousands of years for crops to adapt to a certain climate.
But it seems very hard to believe that we'll reduce our CO2 output by 90% by 2040. "Think of the jobs" will always prevail. The rich will take pride in being the last men standing.
No one really wants to give up their private cars, their meat, their right to have as many children as they want, their vacations, their disposable plastic shit, their huge concrete highways....
...at least without careful education as to exactly what is going on, legislation for fairness, and particularly tremendous sacrifices from the rich and powerful, who are consuming many orders of magnitude more than your average citizen.
People, humanity at large, need to understand the magnitude of what has already happened, and the enormity of what is to come unless we fight it by any means necessary. Optimism is our enemy because that leads our attention away from "Any means necesssary".
Only when we humans come together in extremely large groups and tear down our leaders, punish them to the full extent of the law for their wanton corruption and betrayal of their own populace for their corrupt greed for money and power, and then install leaders who will actually try to save our world, and who know what the terrible legal consequence is for betraying our hope for the future by destroying our ecosystem, and so will do everything in their power to stay completely honest, and hope, and rational and try to preserve what remains of our biosphere for future generations - only then will we have a chance to mitigate catastrophe.
As you can see, to come up with any actual hope, I need to write some glorious but hard-to-believe socialist SF story line. I am reduced to prayer, which is always dodgy as I am an unbeliever.
Five years ago, a friend say, "In 2050, rich people will still be buying gasoline powered cars". I tried to scoff but the words stuck in my throat. Five years later I see no reason to doubt this statement.
