Indeed, Hansen’s fairly uncritical view of the representatives of the present system is reflected in a lack of expressed criticality toward the totality of that very system. There is in Storms of My Grandchildren no critique of the environmentally destructive consequences of consumerism, as stressed in Hervé Kempf’s How the Rich are Destroying the Earth [5]; of economic growth, which James Gustave Speth denounces in his The Bridge at the End of the World [6]; or of capitalism and its myriad manifestations, all of which various Marxist and anarchist critics have long sought to abolish. It is probable that Hansen, who fashions himself an “objective scientist” who should refrain from disclosing “personal opinions,” feels that explicitly making such conclusions may prove to alienate his intended audience—the U.S. public—or, perhaps, affect book-sales or even result in his being publicly discredited and his concerns for the climate dismissed. It may also be the case that Hansen himself does not share these critical views on the present state of affairs; he did, after all, see grounds for enthusiasm in the presidential candidacy of John McCain. It should be said, though, that Hansen may well be doing a disservice to his readers in not making linkages between the profundity of the climate predicament and the necessity for a radical politics: the clear responsibility that capitalism and the State bear for the specter of climate catastrophe should be taken as representing the very limits of their continued existence, not as grounds to re-affirm such. Not to find currently prevailing power relations illegitimate in the extreme is simply absurd, and to see in the madness propagated by presently constituted power “our best hope” is in the view of the present author to consign the future of life on Earth to what Hansen calls “the Venus syndrome”: runaway catastrophic climate change that violently transitions the Earth’s climate to one similar to that of Venus, where life simply cannot exist.