Editor’s note: Marshall Brain – futurist, inventor, NCSU professor, writer and creator of “How Stuff Works” is a contributor to WRAL TechWire.  Brain takes a serious as well as entertaining look at a world of possibilities for Earth and the human race.  He’s also author of “The Doomsday Book: The Science Behind Humanity’s Greatest Threats.” 

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RALEIGH – Imagine that you are a young person who is growing up in our world today. You are a teenager in high school, or you are going to college, or you have just graduated. We are talking about young people ages 16 to 25. If you are in this age bracket, a natural reaction to the headlines that you see today would be either anxiety/depression or hopelessness. If you are a young person and you know that your whole planet is being destroyed and is collapsing all around you, how can you go on in any sense of normalcy?

These feelings of despair can be both A) absolutely unhealthy, and B) completely demotivating.

The problem is, there are simply too many terrible climate things that are happening right now, either in our immediate vicinity or in headlines from around the world. Things like:

  1. Severe heat events – hot enough to kill people, kill animals, and kill crops, like what is happening right now in India and the Midwest
  2. Crop failures – caused by this severe heating, as well as droughts, floods, and wars
  3. Increasingly bad wildfires – larger than ever before and more frequent
  4. Rainforest destruction – In April, more of the Amazon rainforest was destroyed than in any prior April
  5. Severe droughts – like the ones happening right now in the Western United States and Africa
  6. And so on…

Photo courtesy of Marshall Brain

See this previous article for details on how bad things are getting.

Recent polls capture these feelings of despair in today’s young people. Here are three articles out of many that demonstrate the problem:

  1. Climate anxiety: 75% of young people worldwide find the future ‘scary’
  2. For Gen Z, Climate Change Is a Heavy Emotional Burden
  3. 70% of Americans experiencing climate change anxiety and depression, survey finds

That second article from YaleEnvironment contains this startling quote:

“They feel betrayed, she says, by government inaction and dismayed when told they are overreacting to what they see as an existential threat. More than half of the 16- to 25-year-olds in the Lancet survey said they believe humanity is doomed. And close to 40 percent said that fears about the future have made them reluctant to have children of their own.”

Who can blame young people for these feelings? To any young person who is aware of what is happening in our world, the future looks awful. In addition, it appears that humanity is doing nothing important to stop the Earth’s destruction via climate change. Just look around. Most Americans still drive fossil fuel cars, fossil fuel companies are making unbelievable profits without any end in sight, farmers in Brazil are burning the rainforests to the ground, ocean acidification gets worse and worse, millions of Americans claim they don’t even believe in climate change, and so on. There is very little to be hopeful about.

There is a hit song from 1986 entitled, “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.” What would the modern equivalent in 2022 be? Perhaps, “The Future’s So Dark, I Might as Well Die”? The situation on Planet Earth can be just awful to any young person looking out at our world’s current climate situation.

Therefore, let’s imagine that we want to change things for the better. Imagine that we want to give today’s young people hope instead of despair. Imagine that we want to show young people that we are serious about their future and there is something for them to look forward to beyond planetary annihilation and the destruction of every coastal city and every beach on Earth.

Here are 10 examples of things that we should do immediately to give young people, and all of us really, hope for the future:

#10 We must loudly and passionately announce our plans for a bright future

Think back to the 1960s, when President Kennedy announced to all Americans that the United States would send astronauts to the moon. I urge you to watch these two videos of John F. Kennedy from that era:

Today we need our leaders both nationally and internationally to speak like this about our climate future. We need them to speak this eloquently, this passionately, and this clearly about where we, the human species, are going and why.

#9 We must create inspirational and effective organizations

When John F. Kennedy announced America’s plan to go to the moon, two amazing things happened:

  1. The United States created NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to oversee this vital mission.
  2. NASA received enough money so that it could hire and organize 400,000 smart and dedicated people – scientists, engineers, technicians, managers – to carry out NASA’s mission.

The coolest thing is that NASA accomplished the goal. Astronauts walked on the moon and came home safely.

We must do the same thing for climate change. We must create a national organization with gigantic funding and hundreds of thousands of people dedicated to solving the climate change problem.

#8 Our nation must devote a significant amount of money to stopping climate change

The military budget of the United States for 2023 will be $773 billion. Why not spend an equal amount of money solving climate change?

Let’s look at a few comparisons:

  • During World War II, the United States and the world faced a giant threat. The United States ramped up a point where we were spending a peak of 42% of the nation’s GDP per year on the war. Today that would mean trillions of dollars per year. The climate change threat that humanity is facing today is bigger than the threat during World War II.
  • The 2017 tax cut (officially the Tax Cut and Jobs Act or TCJA) reduced taxes primarily for corporations and the wealthy by $1.9 trillion. We could reinstate these taxes and use them + other funds to solve climate change.
  • The United States’ 20-year “war on terror” after 9/11 (which includes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) has cost $8 trillion.

In this context, spending a few trillion dollars to solve the planet-wide existential threat of climate change is completely reasonable and rational.

#7 Our nation must eliminate the obvious absurdity of gas stations

On tens of thousands of street corners in America is a gas station, which openly sells a liquid that is destroying our planet. These freely operating gas stations are a slap in the face of rationality. Three things should be happening at every gas station today in order to send the right message:

  1. Gas stations should be selling synthetic gasoline that is carbon neutral, not fossil fuel gasoline that is dumping more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
  2. But if a gas station is still selling fossil fuel gasoline, there should be a large and obvious tax on every gallon of gas. This tax pays the real cost of extracting the carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere.
  3. Every gas station should have “pumps” to recharge electric cars.

#6 We should be building gigantic carbon extraction facilities

There are a trillion tons of carbon dioxide that human beings have pushed into the atmosphere and oceans by burning fossil fuels. All of it needs to be extracted back out of the environment to solve climate change. Therefore, we should see massive research around carbon dioxide extraction going on as well as the construction and operation of giant carbon dioxide extraction facilities. These facilities should be starting up all over the planet right now. And we should also be planting lots of trees everywhere we can. Each facility that opens should receive massive media coverage.

#5 We should be saving the rainforests

In April there was a horrible, depressing, and unbelievable statistic about the Amazon rainforest: deforestation doubled to a new high. This is shocking to any rational person, because it puts the Amazon rainforest closer to collapse. Young people look at this kind of stupidity and rightfully see it as insanity.

The UN (or a new international body) should be taking over all of the planet’s rainforests, turning them into protected global parks, eliminating all destructive human activity in these forests, and then turning all of the roads and farm fields and development back into rainforest. These efforts, including the creation of these new protected global parks, should be trumpeted loudly in every media outlet possible. See this article for details on saving the rainforests.

#4 All of the profits that fossil fuel companies make should be taxed away

Last week, Shell announced a staggering Q1 quarterly profit of $9.1 billion. BP made a $6.2 billion profit in the same period. Same for all the fossil fuel megacorporations. These are quarterly profits, so multiply by four to estimate annual profits. All of the profit from these fossil fuel companies should be taxed away and used to fund climate change research and solutions.

#3 Every coal-fired power plant should be targeted for destruction

There are approximately 2 terawatts of electricity produced on planet Earth by 2,000 or so coal-fired power plants. These are the dirtiest, most polluting power plants possible and have a huge climate impact. Imagine if two of these plants were closed and blown up every day and replaced by clean power sources + energy storage technologies. In a few years, all the coal-fired power plants would be gone. Then do the same for natural gas power plants, and/or replace natural gas from fossil sources with carbon neutral synthetic gas.

Every day on every media outlet we should show the two coal fired power plants of the day being blown up. Give people who are worried about climate change something to cheer about every day.

#2 Ban Beef and do everything we need to do to decarbonize agriculture

Beef cattle represent one of the most destructive agricultural things human beings do. Beef cattle require huge amounts of water and huge amounts of grain (lots of it grown in destroyed parts of the Amazon rainforest). Beef cattle also emit methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas.

Ban beef cattle worldwide. It would be a significant and highly visible turning point for climate change. And here is the best part: lab-grown meat sources are ready to scale up and replace the beef supply from cattle. Research the best solutions and scale them up.

At the same time, remove all fossil fuel use from the agricultural supply chain, and remove other sources of greenhouse gases from agriculture.

#1 Start deploying safe and effective geoengineering technologies

Imagine if Antarctica and Greenland were in a permanent shadow year-round. It would not be a total solution, but it would certainly help cool these places down because there would be no more summertime insolation.

Now imagine if big parts of the Sahara Desert (3.5 million square miles) and other deserts were put into permanent shadows.

What if some of our equatorial oceans were put into permanent shadows?

The effect would be to cut down on the amount of sunlight hitting Earth and it would cool things down.

These kinds of ideas are called geoengineering ideas. It is relatively easy to imagine different ways to put parts of the Sahara Desert into permanent shade. For example, SpaceX has launched thousands of Starlink satellites into Earth orbit – use similar technology to deploy solutions. Someone in the audience will yell, “That’s impossible!” or “You haven’t considered the side effects!” The answer would be: it might be possible and there might be zero negative side effects after 50,000 smart, dedicated, and well-organized people spend $100 billion researching the problem extensively and deploying solutions.

Publicize these efforts as loudly as the Apollo missions were publicized around the world.

And this is just one of a hundred geoengineering ideas for combatting climate change. Research them all rapidly and in parallel, discarding the ones that do not work or that have negative side effects. Deploy the winners to achieve significant gains.

Conclusion

These are just 10 ideas, and they should whet your appetite for more. Let’s start talking loudly about everything humanity can and should be doing to solve climate change, and then let’s fund and research and deploy these solutions.

The climate change problem that humanity faces has a thousand facets. See  this article for a broader picture of everything we can be doing.

The point of this article is simple:

  • Humanity faces a gigantic existential threat from climate change
  • Any young person who realizes this then notes the current pathetic response – the paucity of action and the extreme lack of leadership
  • Young people can (and many do) then descend into depression and hopelessness
  • It is our responsibility to completely change the equation and the narrative, so that young people see that we are going to solve climate change completely and they have a bright future ahead.

If we accomplish this and solve the climate change problem quickly, then we will also save the planet from an enormous climate catastrophe. It will be a win for young people and all of humanity and for the planet as a whole.

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