"...After we reduce demand and greenhouse gas pollution through personal changes, governments and policy-makers will need to eliminate the remaining emissions from whatever polluting industries are left, in part by pricing carbon pollution. Here, new technologies rather than individual behaviour play the key role.
I've met inspiring people all over the world: CEOs using clean energy to make the world's first green steel near the Arctic circle, a medusa-scientist-CEO magically turning carbon dioxide pollution into stone, leaders transforming how we travel and eat. I met people restoring landscapes – saving forests – Amazon to Arctic, people turning ravaged peatlands back into resilient systems that one interviewee called 'fierce, stout, and excited to be alive'.
A regulatory mandate, prices on carbon dioxide and methane pollution, or both, will be required to meet the climate challenge. When the polluter pays nothing, climate solutions will always be more expensive than free.
Finally, because we delayed climate action so long, we'll need to hack the atmosphere, to remove or destroy greenhouse gases already in our air. I used to think that such talk distracted us from the real job of cutting emissions. It does, but the inaction of the 2010s convinced me that to maintain a safe and liveable climate, we need to develop technologies to remove carbon dioxide, methane and other gases directly from the air using everything from microbes and trees to factory arrays. And we'll need to do it at industrial scales, running the coal industry in reverse. I wish that weren't the cases – hacking the atmosphere is risky and expensive.
By doing all of these things – reducing personal consumption and emissions, systematically cleaning up energy-intensive industries such as steel, cement and aluminium production, and removing greenhouse gases from the air – we could restore the atmosphere in a lifetime.
The Endangered Species Act doesn't stop at saving plants and animals. It mandates their recovery
One super-potent gas, methane, could be brought down to acceptable levels in less time than that. Methane is cleansed from the air naturally only a decade or so after its release. Because of this shorter lifetime, if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, including agriculture, waste and fossil fuels – a big if – methane's concentration would return to preindustrial levels within only a decade or two. That's what I mean by 'restoring the atmosphere'. Restoring methane to preindustrial levels would save 0.5°C of warming and could happen in our lifetimes.
Restoring the atmosphere will save lives. Particulate pollution from coal and cars kills more than 100,000 Americans a year. One in five of all deaths globally is caused by burning fossil fuels – 10 million senseless deaths a year – when cleaner, safer fuels are already available.
By analogy, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 doesn't stop at saving plants and animals from extinction. It mandates their recovery. When we see grey whales breaching on their way to Alaska each spring, grizzly bears ambling across a Yellowstone meadow, bald eagles and peregrine falcons soaring on updrafts, we celebrate life and a planet restored. Our goal for the atmosphere should be the same.
At the end of our last day together, Fleischmann and I finally spy the Mamirauá research station – a two-storey houseboat roped to riverside trees. We spot a sloth, too, and drift in to track its progress. It isn't high in the cathedral forest, it's swimming – head up like a lifeguard – using the stroke you might expect of a sloth – a crawl. With caimans in sight, we're pulling for the sloth as it takes forever to reach river's edge – parroting the slow pace of climate action – and finally ascends the flooded várzea forest.
Fleischmann and I exhale when the sloth is safe, push up the channel, and rope our boat to the floating research station at river's edge. Climbing to the second-storey balcony, I peer into the forest canopy for the final time this trip. I celebrate the army of people rising to solve the climate crisis and, eventually, to see the atmosphere restored. I've dedicated the past decade of my career to this quixotic idea, and I share it in hope."
https://aeon.co/essays/we-can-still-get-out-of-the-climate-hellocene-and-into-the-clear?utm_source=Aeon Newsletter
I've met inspiring people all over the world: CEOs using clean energy to make the world's first green steel near the Arctic circle, a medusa-scientist-CEO magically turning carbon dioxide pollution into stone, leaders transforming how we travel and eat. I met people restoring landscapes – saving forests – Amazon to Arctic, people turning ravaged peatlands back into resilient systems that one interviewee called 'fierce, stout, and excited to be alive'.
A regulatory mandate, prices on carbon dioxide and methane pollution, or both, will be required to meet the climate challenge. When the polluter pays nothing, climate solutions will always be more expensive than free.
Finally, because we delayed climate action so long, we'll need to hack the atmosphere, to remove or destroy greenhouse gases already in our air. I used to think that such talk distracted us from the real job of cutting emissions. It does, but the inaction of the 2010s convinced me that to maintain a safe and liveable climate, we need to develop technologies to remove carbon dioxide, methane and other gases directly from the air using everything from microbes and trees to factory arrays. And we'll need to do it at industrial scales, running the coal industry in reverse. I wish that weren't the cases – hacking the atmosphere is risky and expensive.
By doing all of these things – reducing personal consumption and emissions, systematically cleaning up energy-intensive industries such as steel, cement and aluminium production, and removing greenhouse gases from the air – we could restore the atmosphere in a lifetime.
The Endangered Species Act doesn't stop at saving plants and animals. It mandates their recovery
One super-potent gas, methane, could be brought down to acceptable levels in less time than that. Methane is cleansed from the air naturally only a decade or so after its release. Because of this shorter lifetime, if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, including agriculture, waste and fossil fuels – a big if – methane's concentration would return to preindustrial levels within only a decade or two. That's what I mean by 'restoring the atmosphere'. Restoring methane to preindustrial levels would save 0.5°C of warming and could happen in our lifetimes.
Restoring the atmosphere will save lives. Particulate pollution from coal and cars kills more than 100,000 Americans a year. One in five of all deaths globally is caused by burning fossil fuels – 10 million senseless deaths a year – when cleaner, safer fuels are already available.
By analogy, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 doesn't stop at saving plants and animals from extinction. It mandates their recovery. When we see grey whales breaching on their way to Alaska each spring, grizzly bears ambling across a Yellowstone meadow, bald eagles and peregrine falcons soaring on updrafts, we celebrate life and a planet restored. Our goal for the atmosphere should be the same.
At the end of our last day together, Fleischmann and I finally spy the Mamirauá research station – a two-storey houseboat roped to riverside trees. We spot a sloth, too, and drift in to track its progress. It isn't high in the cathedral forest, it's swimming – head up like a lifeguard – using the stroke you might expect of a sloth – a crawl. With caimans in sight, we're pulling for the sloth as it takes forever to reach river's edge – parroting the slow pace of climate action – and finally ascends the flooded várzea forest.
Fleischmann and I exhale when the sloth is safe, push up the channel, and rope our boat to the floating research station at river's edge. Climbing to the second-storey balcony, I peer into the forest canopy for the final time this trip. I celebrate the army of people rising to solve the climate crisis and, eventually, to see the atmosphere restored. I've dedicated the past decade of my career to this quixotic idea, and I share it in hope."
https://aeon.co/essays/we-can-still-get-out-of-the-climate-hellocene-and-into-the-clear?utm_source=Aeon Newsletter
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