No. of Recommendations: 3
Despite what you've been told, the planet is not going to burn and we're not going to die from climate change in a year. Or 10. Or 100 years. Let's establish that. The Earth's climate changes all the time - at points in the past it has been both warmer and colder than it is today - and the planet's ecosystems adapt as they need.
I was never told any of that, as I followed reputable science, including the ones posting on the old fool. It was always going to be gradual change, and we could predict some things with high, medium, or low confidence. No one knew how desertification might work, we had some greening from extra carbon, and as the frost broke in the north, we might get some arable land.
Now. How should *we* adapt? That's the question at hand. We should be looking at *the best and cleanest ways* to generate electricity as a matter of principle. That means building more nuclear power plants, more hydroelectric plants, geothermal plants. Also in that vein some carbon fuels are still both necessary and useful: natural gas burns cleanly and the United States has abundant supplies of it. Internal combustion engines are vastly more efficient and cleaner today that in years past and need to be with us for the foreseeable future, and that means extracting oil in responsible ways, which we know how to do.
The resistance to nuclear energy is one of the things that helped me realize that we are going to perform the great experiment by not doing enough, allowing the earth to overheat and see what happens. We don't have the population accustomed to mass transit, won't build nuclear, EVs are only a partial solution. It looked like even if we did everything, including getting China off coal, that we still went too far. China's recent push on nuclear isn't enough.
Electric vehicles are not the panacea the public has been led to believe they are - every Prius on the road today thanks to the invasive mining required to make its batteries can a BIGGER carbon footprint that gas cars do. And unless the electricity used to charge the batteries is itself comes from a clean source, then the benefits aren't there. Battery technology needs to advance past the point where we pay money to the worst climate offender on the planet - China - to create a product that doesn't move the needle the way everyone thinks it does.
I never thought it was a panacea, and that the net effect was mild unless we had nuclear or hydroelectric. Cow methane is big and we don't know how to deal with that. Everyone wants their hamburger and steak, including me. We've got pockets of frozen methane thawing out. We have a big cloud of natural gas escaping from the ground over parts of the US, etc., etc., etc...
And finally, if we REALLY want to fight climate change and alter the balance of CO2 in the atmosphere, there's one proven way to do it. It's very, very simple: Plant trees. Anyone scoffing at that needs to go back to high school biology and understand what trees do for the planet and for the atmosphere.
No one is scoffing, but it's not a panacea either. In the life cycle of a tree, all the carbon it takes out of the air returns when it dies and rots, or burns, etc. And we produce much more than we can sequester in trees. It looks like we may have drier times and more wildfires too. So it looks like we are going to perform the great experiment and find out what happens when we keep pumping green house gases into the air. YMMV.
