Intro to repairing 50% of greenhouse gas damage in 10 years

Beyond disaster prevention to rolling back damage

For decades we have all been hearing news about the environment, most of it bad news. There have been some notable successes with saving species from extinction, reversing the ozone layer damage, cleaning up pollution so we no longer have rivers that burn, and amazing and creative technical and knowledge-based solutions for all kinds of easier-on-nature ways of growing food, lighting our lives, and running our machines.

Still, despite the billions of hours of work and millions and millions of humans of good will, we have been stuck in a cycle that is leading us toward total disaster. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, https://www.ipcc.ch, we only have until about 2030 to stop the over-emission of greenhouse gases like C02 (carbon dioxide). If we don’t put stop the runaway train by then, the Arctic will have melted too much and will start releasing billions of tons of methane from the permafrost. Methane is 25x more potent at warming the atmosphere than C02 is and if we reach that tipping point, the climate will change irreversibly. Weather patterns will be destroyed, agriculture will become impossible, millions of species will die, and humans will almost certainly go extinct.

This series is about what it could look like if we as a species decide we want to keep living, and how the actual fixes are much easier and less painful than you ever imagined!

Many human civilizations have faced famine and extinction due to climate variations like drought https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows92/irows92.htm, but this is the first time we are all affected at the same time.

This is one of the biggest challenges humanity has ever faced. Similar to the invention of nuclear warfare and the subsequent Cold War, our survival hangs by a thread. Also similar to the Cold War, we humans in general have good intentions and want things to be better, but are being held hostage by those with too much power and too much greed. Such a big and complex problem also makes it hard to pick which action to do first for most effectiveness.

Further complicating things is that many of us are stuck in the denial phase of grief. It’s too difficult for us to accept the possibility of this disaster, so we stick our fingers in our ears, refuse to look at the evidence, grasp for reasons why human-caused climate change is made up or not as bad as the science says, and even get defiant and become more wasteful as if daring the world to prove us wrong. It can be hard to face a problem, but no matter how scary, you will find it easier to look a problem in the eye rather than let it gather over your head like an unseen horror movie monster. And there is good news! We still have a few (very few) years left to prevent utter disaster!

This article is a conversation about what motivated action on climate change could look like, assuming that:

Getting things done requires working with human nature, which requires wisdom about what humans can and cannot do, i.e., the limitations of willpower, sacrifice, and the fact that across the world humans have vastly different opportunities, needs, lifestyles, and abilities.
Let’s also assume that you will never get everyone or every country on board but that we can accomplish the main goals as long as we have enough people and countries working together.
Let’s further assume that concrete, time-limited projects are way easier to get people excited about than vague, misty “need to happen” agendas. The Space Race had the entire world watching breathlessly for years, working feverishly to be the winners. If we have some firm numbers and goals for fixing the planet, we can turn it into a competition and see who gets there faster.
We can still stop the disaster and improve things. But we have very little time to do so. We have to have specific actions to pressure our leaders to do, that go beyond ideas like for example giving people some money for buying electric cars rather than gasoline ones. The problem is much bigger and requires much more decisive action and we need to have a plan to point to and tell our leaders to follow, so they can just follow good practices rather than trying to reinvent the wheel everywhere.
Also, there’s a scenario in athletic activities that applies here, I think – if you aim towards a goal of “not failing,” you are focusing on the wrong thing and are likely to achieve what you are thinking about, i.e., failure. If you aim for “what you want” then you have a much better chance of getting it. Thus, our goal is not just carbon neutrality (balanced carbon in and carbon out). OUR GOAL IS TO FIX HALF OF THE ATMOSPHERIC DAMAGE SINCE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION BEGAN – BY 2030.