Getting Started

Welcome to my blog! I am very pleased that you found it. If this is your first time, let me tell you what I’m trying to do here.

This blog is here to help you understand the consequences of, but more importantly —solutions to, climate change. It is here to help you adapt to a changing world, make yourself and your family more resilient, and advocate for policies that will slow, mitigate, and hopefully reverse the impacts of a changing climate.

I should be clear that climate change is a crisis.

Not only is it directly causing serious problems, it is exacerbating other crises. Think of Earth like a person with several maladies; climate change is like an autoimmune disease that makes the other diseases more dangerous.

If there is one reason for optimism, it is our adaptability. As a species, humans are capable of dealing with monumental problems. We are not perfect, not by a long shot, but we are flexible, creative, intelligent, and perseverant.

This blog will offer both a weekly roundup of climate-related news, as well as weekly posts on a number of climate topics. Among these will be tips for making your life and home more resilient, ways to get involved, what kind of solutions we should be implementing, and a high level look at the various technologies and policies being developed to combat climate change. I will also illustrate projects and stories of hope, and provide monthly book recommendations.

My hope is that this blog is empowering.

It can be overwhelming to think about climate, and sometimes it can feel like a vague, long-term problem. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. Climate change is here, we see it almost every week now, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. It’s our job, I believe, to prevent the worst from happening, and to make your society more durable in the face of this danger.

Above all, I want to present you with workable solutions you can put into place that will help you contribute to a cleaner, lower-carbon future. We often ask, “what can I do?” when it comes to these huge problems, and the truth is, we can actually do quite a bit. No, we can’t solve these problems on our own, but we can prepare ourselves for what is to come, and we can work for a better future.

You will find that I have a few core beliefs when it comes to this issue. I will likely repeat these ad nauseum on these pages.

1. Policy matters more than personal choices. We are often told that our environmental progress depends on our personal choices. We are told to use less, buy the right things, recycle, etc. All of those are good things to do, and collectively they make a big difference. But human behavior is driven by policy. We need policy changes to make things really happen. Pushing the responsibility onto individuals absolves policymakers, businesses, and leaders from their own responsibility.
2. There is no stopping climate change, only mitigating it. The truth is climate change is already here. Some think we felt the first effects in 2003, when a heat wave killed over 80,000 people in Europe. Some think it happened a little later. But no matter who you are, there is no denying that the changes are already upon us. Science has shown that the effects are here, and they’re ugly. Unfortunately, this means the best we can do is slow it down and try to adapt.
3. No matter what we do, things will get worse in the near-term. This one is kind of bleak, but it’s also true. Certain changes to our atmosphere are already baked in. There is a time delay between when we emit a greenhouse gas, and when it starts to impact our climate. Even if we stopped emitting tomorrow, things would get worse for a little while. And we aren’t stopping tomorrow. The global economy is humming along, and carbon emissions continue to increase. Aside from this, there are also “tipping points” in nature, which we risk passing at our own peril. There are too many to name here, but we may already have passed some of them. That doesn’t mean we should just sit on our hands and do nothing. The longer we wait, the worse things will be.
4. Technology is the easy part. We often hear people say that we need to “develop” solutions to climate change. They often say this when defending natural gas or some other “bridge” technology. This is nonsense. We already have about half the tech needed to be carbon neutral, and the other half is in some stage of development. We could cap our emissions and begin reducing them with the solutions we have in hand. The challenge isn’t developing new technology, the challenge is getting politicians to implement them. America has known about this problem for decades, and yet there has never been a single piece of meaningful federal climate legislation. Entrenched (and wealthy) political interests who are invested in the status quo are by far the most difficult obstacle.
5. The solutions to climate change must address the related problems. Climate change is interrelated with a various other problems: biodiversity loss, the rise of authoritarianism, overfishing and deforestation, as well as poverty, ignorance, and inequality. We cannot just focus myopically on climate without looking at these other issues. There is little benefit to solving climate change if it means abandoning democracy. There is no value in making rich nations resilient while poor nations suffer. The problems overlap, and often feed one another. The solutions must recognize this.
6. Perseverance is our greatest asset. We are quite literally in a struggle for the future of our planet. We will likely be fighting against climate change for the rest of the century, and we will have a lot of restoration to do when we finally get there. Reaching carbon neutrality is only the first part of the fight. There will already be much too much carbon in the atmosphere, and we will need to begin removing it. Even if we do everything we have to, perfectly, to reach carbon neutral, we will still spend the second half of this century drawing down carbon, restoring the natural world, and building on the human progress we’ve made. To get there, we must persevere through countless setbacks, disasters, and obstacles.

So please join me on this journey.