Today's headlines about the new IPCC report on climate change are beyond scary: "The planet is on a fast path to destruction. The media must cover this like it’s the only story that matters." I left my career in tech to focus on climate change. Here's what I've learned so far...
Climate change poses one of the greatest threats humanity has ever faced. While it is nearly impossible to comprehend the magnitude of the challenge, the problem itself is quite straightforward: There’s too much CO2 in the atmosphere.
Most efforts to combat climate change, including today’s carbon markets, suffer from the same fatal flaw: They focus on what’s called avoidance—the prevention of future, additional greenhouse-gas emissions. They rarely deal with pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Getting to zero emissions is an important goal, but cutting emissions alone will not reverse climate change. To safeguard our future, we need to remove the more than one trillion tonnes of CO2 we’ve already added.
As futuristic as it sounds, there are many ways to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, including to regenerative agriculture, afforestation, biochar, marine permaculture, BECCS, mineral carbonation, direct-air capture, and more. drawdown.org has for more info on each.
A really good article that talks about a lot of these technologies and carbon removal in general is medium.com/@hhlim/we-need…
Some of these methods to remove CO2 out of the atmosphere are mature (like regenerative agriculture and afforestation) and should be invested in immediately and at full scale. But they won't scale to pull down enough CO2.
Other technologies like direct-air capture could scale to pull down enough CO2 but they are not cost-effective yet. I believe we can't wait for them to be cost-effective. We can't wait for any of these methods to be perfected. We need to invest 1000x current investments and now.
A balanced and well researched article on direct-air-capture: vox.com/energy-and-env… – what would this look like if (1) capturing and storing CO2 was valuable to the world as it should be and (2) if we invested a ton of money and effort into making the tech scale better?
We need to reduce emissions (currently the equivalent of 53 gigatonnes of CO2 every year) as much as possible. And we need to draw down and store enough CO2 to (1) offset what we can't avoid putting into the atmosphere and (2) pay down our debt of over one trillion tonnes of CO2.
That is a MASSIVE challenge. And I don't have much hope that governments will lead the way on tackling climate change to the degree we need unless there is a massive shift in demand from the people. So vote, protest, write your representatives, tell them this is your #1 issue.
That is about all the hope I can offer... I've put my fears on the shelf for now and am trying to put everything into my role @nori where we're building a market to bring together those that can remove CO2 with those who want to pay for it to be removed.
Besides voting, what else can you do? I'd start by looking at your own carbon footprint. I've reduced mine a lot over the last few years. I moved to Seattle in part because of climate change. This is outdated but worth a read: cliffmass.blogspot.com/2014/07/will-p…
Talk to others. Make this your top issue. I've paid to plant thousands of trees in the name of family members as gifts instead of stuff. I've had heated discussions with them too. If you want to talk more, I'm happy to meet up or have a phone call.
There are a lot of places you can put your money. I've given to earthjustice.org and ourchildrenstrust.org.
If you like what @nori is doing, check out our crowdfunding campaign: republic.co/nori . For accredited investors, go to nori.com/invest.
If you like what @nori is doing, check out our crowdfunding campaign: republic.co/nori . For accredited investors, go to nori.com/invest.
