The year we’ve left behind was dominated by a couple of large changes of mind: Global warming was finally accepted as real, leaving those in denial sputtering, and the war in Iraq was understood for the irretrievable catastrophe that it is.

That it took such titanic struggles, in both cases, to have the obvious accepted as obvious is hardly a good sign; but here we are, theoretically trying to move ahead.

And the question that will dominate from here on, in both cases, is: What’s the next step?

With regard to the environment, the next step is to get our stories together, the economic one and the environmental one, so that economic growth is not blindly pursued on the one hand while environmental measures are seen as something apart.

For example, the first test of whether the Harper government is serious, with its brand new environment minister, is whether it cuts the tax incentives to oil companies for oil sands development.

The relentless evidence may have made the obvious indeed obvious, but that’s still a long way from getting us to change our ways.

In fact, at the highest level — that of the American presidency — admission of global warming has been accompanied by more of the same: measures of obfuscation and delay, lest good friends of the administration in the dirty industries object.

In Canada, where the Harper government tries to imitate the Bush government in all things, its attempt to do the same has happily blown up in its face. Whether its credibility is permanently gone remains to be seen.

The scientific consensus is that we have some 10 years to turn climate change around before the consequences become truly catastrophic. That means getting very serious right now, in the middle of summer-in-winter.

Still, the old presumption — economic development no matter what — continues without question.

Here’s another example. There’s talk of a new refinery, by American interests, at the Strait of Canso in rural Nova Scotia (and yet another in Saint John, N.B. by the Irvings).

Ironically, the American one is apparently partly motivated by the wish to get out of hurricane alley where Katrina hit, arguably a phenomenon of global warming.

The idea of economic development always creates excitement in these “underdeveloped” parts, but no thought is given anywhere in the system that the real need is to build no more refineries, and to drive less instead, which would constitute true progress.

Instead of starting the necessary work of organizing our ways of doing things to discourage, rather than to encourage, energy waste, the plans for new highways, far-flung suburbs, more oil sands, and so on, continue without respite, negating whatever progress is made towards conservation and energy alternatives.

We’re still wallowing in resistance, then, incapable of looking the issue in the eye — because, quite simply, it challenges too deeply our way of life.

How likely is it that we will, in the coming year, get motivated to in fact meet the challenge?

Perhaps it’s more likely than you and I think. Last year at this time, my column was a depressing lament about the environment being politically taboo.

I wrote: “As during the 2004 American election campaign, when the U.S. south was being hammered by hurricane after massive hurricane and nobody ever uttered the words ‘climate change,’ here we seem to have the same speech impediment.”

In the run-up to the federal election, “we’ve had four national debates in which the words ‘environment’ and ‘Kyoto’ got tossed out once or twice at random, but that’s it. It’s not just the leaders and their parties — the journalistic machinery that prepared the questions didn’t see this as a politically worthy subject.”

In 2006, bingo! It’s off the taboo list. So now I’m genuinely surprised.

Can we resolve for 2007, slated to be the hottest year ever, to finally get the message once and for all?

As for the calamity in Iraq, with Afghanistan seemingly in its train, what constitutes the next step is beyond anyone’s comprehension.

Nevertheless, the whole calamitous mess belongs to the same large order of ideas as the environmental question: the mismanagement of the world.

One figure arrests my attention: It could cost the U.S. in the order of $1 trillion before it’s out of Iraq.

Just imagine what that kind of resource could have done if directed towards improving the world, rather than ruining it.