NPR: 6 Scholars on Climate Solutions

NPR released this article recently:
6 scholars explain what a real climate solution is

As you may suspect, it isn’t nearly as extreme as what I’ve said previously, and that is probably because none of those scholars are climatologists. The context is that as of now, it is probably too late to save human beings from extinction, but there’s a lag of up to 30 years between now and when the consequences of our failure manifest, putting “the end” at around 2050, where it has been since the first planetary simulations were performed in the early 1970’s. Certainly, you should read the article for yourself, but here are my 2 cents on it:

  1. We need to stop burning fossil fuels. This is obvious, but their solution in this article is renewable energy and storage technology. This is absolutely correct — they’re just lacking the urgency that I would have emphasized. Right now, renewable energy is a growing percentage of total energy used, but the total amount of fossil fuels used continues to increase (it did decrease very slightly because of COVID, but headed right back up).
  2. If a solution entails burning more fossil fuels, it isn’t really a solution. They cite the fossil fuel industry trying to shift to more natural gas. Shifting to a fuel that results in less CO2 release is better, but only by a tiny bit — not enough to matter.
  3. Beware of vaporware. A lot of people want to tell you about “new” technologies that will solve the problem, but none of those solutions are available now and none of them are scalable to the point that they can make a difference. A couple of things I just became aware of that are potential exceptions are Aptera Motors (a vehicle that is more energy efficient than walking) and Red Flow Batteries (a resource-efficient method of storing renewable energy for structures, with cheap storage being the way to allow renewables to continuously power structures and thus stop using fossil fuels).
  4. If the solution results in the same or more carbon produced, as is the case with companies purchasing “carbon offsets”, then it isn’t a solution. This just moves the source of the carbon to a different place on Earth; it all ends up in the same atmosphere. A product can probably qualify if, over its lifetime, it essentially produces “negative” carbon even though producing it in the first place did produce carbon. While electric vehicles are an order of magnitude more resource-efficient than combustion vehicles, they still don’t qualify as a solution (the above Aptera being an exception because it is literally more efficient than walking).
  5. If a solution sounds easy, well it either isn’t easy or it is a lie. If it were easy, we would have already done it.
  6. Solutions must be coordinated by government; corporations are not structured in a way that allows them to take care of the problem in a timely fashion if at all. It’s up to corporations and individuals to comply with those mandates — like they did with COVID (yes, I’m being sarcastic).
  7. There’s no one single solution to climate change. The article doesn’t mention this, but climate engineering must be one of those solutions if we want to avoid our own extinction.

All-in-all, pretty good work from NPR’s scholars even though they didn’t really suggest any clear solutions and lacked the appropriate urgency.