Wow, a dozen or more famous people asked to weigh in and it is almost 100% doom and gloom. To grossly summarize:

• Carbon emissions will just keep getting worse, and not much will be done. About the most positive thing anyone can say is that pressure for change will increase and the “corporate and financial sectors” will get more serious about it. We are the corporate and financial sectors, and we are here to help!
• Political dysfunction and polarization in the US and EU. Republicans will retake the US Congress (and both sides will say they knew it all along).
• US vs. Russia, China vs. US, Iran vs. the US and/or Israel. Several commentators predict one more attempt to revive the Obama nuclear deal, which will fail, which will be followed by more uranium enrichment, which will be followed by a military strike by the US and/or Israel.
• Bees will continue to decline. Does this seem less important than the other things? Bees pollinate around a third of crops, and even if we find other ways to pollinate crops or grow crops that don’t need pollination, we can look forward to:

Given that heatwaves, droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events prevent people from engaging in agricultural work, and that bees and other pollinators affect 35% of the world’s agricultural land and support the production of 87 of the leading food crops, we will see an increase of global insecurity, even in developed economies. Unable to sustain the production of the food they need, many of the world’s poor will be pushed into extreme poverty, suffer malnutrition, and migrate.

Agnes Binagwaho, Project Syndicate

• Several point to mass migration as a big issue for 2022. Not a long term issue, but an issue that will come to a head in the next year.
• On the Covid front, most people think it will just become another disease that kills us some times but we will get used to that.
• Many commentators think inflation will tone down, and that the bigger risk is governments overreacting to it. Some predict a sharp decline in the US dollar (is this bad for the average Joe? hard to say), and there is already a real estate crash happening in China.
• A few are optimistic that social safety nets may improve here and there.
• On the technology front? “One hopes for more demonstrations of the power of recent biomedical and genetic research, amply validated by the rapid development of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines. There also may be new leaps in additive manufacturing and machine learning.” (Diane Coyle) There may be some progress on “green hydrogen and an overhaul of mobility and transportation systems”.

I’m not known for unbridled optimism, but let me think of a few positive things that could happen in 2022. Electric vehicles could finally emerge in the public consciousness in the US. We will all be surprised if that happens, and then one day later we will all have known it all along. The US could make some progress on the childcare crisis that is holding our country back (see this Fresh Air interview if you don’t believe me). Covid will be annoying and disruptive, but I am predicting it will be less annoying and disruptive on December 31, 2022 than on January 1.

In a way, a good year at this point will be one in which nothing really catastrophic happens and we have some breathing room to chip away at the many challenges already on our plates. We have to hope there will not be a major war, nuclear detonation, epic new plague, major food crisis, catastrophic meltdown of the internet or financial system. Hoping is about all us average citizens can do about the latter list, but if you are one of the movers and shakers out there with the power to help manage these risks, WHAT ARE YOU DOING???

I tried to talk myself into being optimistic just now, and failed, oh well.