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 – I have a confession to make: I am here today to ask for your help. In particular, I seek your creativity, your life experiences, your understanding of human beings, etc. to help answer a question about climate change and the future. Before we get to the question, I want to give you a little backstory, so you understand where I am coming from.

Let’s say we want to divide up humanity into groups when it comes to climate change. I would say there are six big categories of people:

  1. Climate deniers – These are people who actively, sometimes loudly, claim that there is no such thing as human-caused climate change. They are actively trying to stop any efforts toward diminishing fossil fuel use or implementing clean energy solutions. Their main tools involve things like spreading climate disinformation, trolling climate discussions, promoting conspiracy theories, and so on.
  2. Climate blind – This group of people may have heard the term “climate change” or “global warming”, but they don’t really know or care about much beyond that. They are not thinking about the future of humanity or climate change solutions. They are disengaged and uninterested when it comes to climate change. The spectrum can range from total ignorance to lack of bandwidth to “I don’t really care, do u?”
  3. Climate aware – This category includes people who know about the climate change problems humanity faces along with a range of possible solutions. This group of people believes that it is worthwhile to implement solutions as quickly as possible, and preferably more quickly than is happening now.
  4. Climate workers – This group has taken the next step beyond awareness and have made a career in the arena of climate change, sustainability, etc. It could be anything from a person working in a solar panel factory to a climate startup founder to a climate lobbyist to someone working on sustainability in a corporation.
  5. Climate activists – These are people who are so frustrated with the lack of progress on climate change that they are willing to loudly protest. They have started blocking roads with their bodies, interrupting events, marching in the streets, etc. Extinction Rebellion in the UK is perhaps the best known group of activists, and there are several others like 350.org and Sunrise.
  6. Climate doomers – This category of people believe that humanity has already gone too far when it comes to climate change, and there is no way for humanity to solve the problem. A major climate catastrophe is inevitable – it is only a question of degree, and the assumption among many doomers is that civilization as we know it will collapse due to a climate apocalypse. Ultimately, many climate doomers believe that humanity (or humanity’s leaders and elites) are too greedy, too corrupt, too lazy or too stupid to ever solve the climate problem, and even if humanity does change, it is now too late to avoid a disaster of epic proportions.

Where do I fall on this scale?

Personally, I am at Level 3 on this scale. I am climate aware. I believe that humanity can improve the odds of surviving the approaching climate catastrophe if we would take significant action now. And then I go one step further – I write about climate change. For example, I wrote The Doomsday Book, and about a third of the book is about the doomsday scenarios within the climate change arena.

Photo courtesy of Marshall Brain

I also write articles here on TechWire. Why do I write these articles about climate change and climate solutions? Because I sit here and think, “Is there anything at all that I, Marshall Brain, as one individual, might be able to do to help move the needle on climate change and help humanity get to solutions faster?” The answer for me has become, “I can write articles to raise awareness.” Nothing can change until at least 25% to 50% of us understand how bad the climate problem is, and how badly we need to implement big changes quickly.

The articles I write, hopefully, reach an audience and help more of humanity to become more aware of the urgency of the climate change problem, along with potential solutions. In other words, what I am hoping for goes something like this.

  • There are lots of people, even people here on Techwire, who have never contemplated climate change much, and who have never thought about climate change solutions.
  • So I write an article on something like banning beef cattle globally  in order to raise awareness of this possibility.
  • People who read the article learn something by reading it. They become more climate aware.

Think about it this way: How many people in America have even heard of or thought about the idea of banning beef cattle? How many people know that there are a billion+ cattle on Earth burping/farting out methane every day, and that this methane has a big impact on global heating? I do not have poll numbers in hand, but my guess would be maybe one percent? Five percent tops?

So how are we going to improve this number? There are lots of ways. The way I have chosen to get us closer to banning beef cattle globally is to write about the idea in order to make more people aware of it.

Thousands of people get exposed to the “banning beef cattle” idea here on TechWire. Maybe some of us share the article to places like our social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, whatever). Maybe we email the article to someone we know. Maybe we post the article to a web site or blog. Maybe we talk to our friends because the idea is fresh in our minds today. And so on. Thousands more hear about the idea. And in this way, we make a little bit of progress.

However, I have come to the conclusion that we, humanity, are not moving nearly fast enough. We need to do something to speed things up.

What do climate doomers think about my approach?

Let’s say we were to post an article about banning beef cattle to a place like r/collapse  on Reddit. If you are not familiar with Reddit, it is a huge, very popular, Top 20 website that has sub-reddits on every topic imaginable. The r/collapse sub-reddit is focused on the (theorized) approaching collapse of civilization. Not everyone on r/collapse is a climate doomer, but many people are. I happen to be a fan of r/collapse because here it is possible to see the most pessimistic opinions possible about climate change and climate solutions. In addition, there are people who would like to see change happen, but feel it is unlikely. On /r/collapse, any post that talks about possible solutions to climate change will be greeted with a barrage of comments like these:

  • “Civilization. Is. Over. Prepare for a mass extinction event and the destruction of humanity.”
  • “Nothing we can do now will prevent what is coming.”
  • “We could not even get half the population to wear masks or get vaccinated. No way they will let you ban beef.”
  • “You are a fool if you think our corrupt overlords in the fossil fuel industry will ever stop pumping oil. Banning beef is therefore irrelevant.”
  • “When you say, ‘unless society takes action’, you are wasting your time. Society will never take action.”

In general, the folks on r/collapse think that people like me are wasting our time. We are shouting into the void. There is no change coming in any significant way.

But it is this type of comment that affects me the most:

“You will never get any movement on this idea. Humanity will NEVER ban beef cattle, or do anything else of any significance, to avert or diminish the climate catastrophe that is approaching planet Earth like a freight train. Anyone with half a brain can see what is coming. But the fossil fuel industry is so greedy it will never stop, and it has bribed every politician, and it thwarts every effort toward change.”

And really, I can completely understand the frustration.

The problem is that humanity needed to take significant, concrete, meaningful, concerted, real action 50 years ago. Given that we did not do that, humanity would need to take MASSIVE action now. And, in the minds of climate doomers, this will never happen. Are they wrong? So far, the human response to climate change has been pretty pathetic:

  • Fossil fuel emissions are at an all-time high, rather than declining.
  • Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are at an all-time high and rising, rather than declining.
  • Ocean acidity is at an all-time high, with no end in sight.
  • Earth’s average surface temperatures are trending higher and higher rather than declining.
  • Heatwaves are getting worse and worse.
  • Glaciers and ice sheets are melting more and more rapidly. The Arctic circle is heating 4 times faster than the rest of the planet because so much ice has melted.
  • The world’s rainforests are being burned and cut down at an ever-increasing pace.

All of these things are happening, and it feels like nothing of any real significance is being done to stop these trends or change course.

Here is my question to you

Let’s assume that any significant action humanity can take will help soften the climate catastrophe that is coming.

The question I want to ask you for help on is this. We need for humanity to move fast with big climate change solutions. How can we speed up the process?

Let me give you five examples of big climate change actions that would actually have a real effect:

  1. Humanity can ban beef cattle worldwide and eliminate the billion+ beef cattle roaming planet Earth in a couple of years. This would have a real and immediate effect on global heating. See this article for details.
  2. Humanity can put a $1.50 fee on every gallon of gasoline burned in a car engine, and put similar fees at every other place in the economy where fossil fuels get burned: airplanes, trains, cargo ships, cruise ships, power plants, farm equipment and everything else. Then we should use the massive amount of money generated by the fees to extract the carbon dioxide released by fossil fuels back out of the atmosphere as shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxjNhLZCae0.
  3. This could get humanity to net zero carbon emissions very quickly in relative terms. See this article for details.
  4. Humanity must prevent the Amazon Rainforest from collapsing and restore the damage that humans have done by planting billions of trees. Banning beef cattle will be a huge help in this regard. And then we should turn the Amazon rainforest (and other critical rainforests around the globe) into globally protected parks. We should eliminate human activity in the rainforests, replant the areas humans have destroyed so they can recover, and do everything possible to prevent the disaster that will occur if the rainforests collapse. See this article for details.
  5. Similarly, humanity should invest billions of dollars to prevent the Thwaites doomsday glacier and other ice sheets from collapsing. If the Thwaites glacier collapses, it is irreversible. It will cause trillions of dollars in damage and create millions upon millions of climate refugees trying to escape inundated coastal cities. See this article for details along with #7 in this article.
  6. Humanity should invest billions of dollars to rapidly accelerate the installation of clean energy sources (solar, wind, geothermal, etc.) along with energy storage technologies. In World War II the nations of planet Earth ridiculously ramped up the production of guns, bullets, bombs, airplanes, warships, tanks, etc. Example: Humanity produced 231,000 war planes in 1944 alone, solely for the purpose of blowing each other up. We should invest in that same kind of intense global effort around clean energy. Humanity should completely eliminate all fossil fuel power plants very quickly.

There are many, many other ideas like these – this list is here simply to show some possibilities and whet your appetite.

Here is the traditional path forward: we take these ideas, we write thousands of articles about them, we have millions of conversations about them, and take them through the awareness process of eventually turning them into “mainstream ideas” with “significant public support”. This is the process we used to:

  • Ban indoor smoking
  • Legalize marijuana
  • Build support for gay marriage

But this process is slow – it generally takes decades for this process to work if history is any guide. The problem we face: We absolutely do not have decades when it comes to the climate catastrophe that is approaching.

Therefore, we can legitimately sit here and ask ourselves, “is there a way to significantly speed up the awareness process and the actual implementation process on significant climate change ideas like these?” It is a fascinating question.

I am asking you yourself, and everyone reading this article, this question today – how do we speed up the awareness process? How does the human species start implementing climate solutions this year, not decades from now? Maybe this article sparks something in your mind, or sparks a conversation with a friend, and maybe your thinking yields some good ideas. If so, can you write the ideas down and send them? This article has a place for comments at the end. You can email me. If you are seeing this article on social media, start up a conversation in the comments.

We must do something to speed up the awareness and action processes. Humanity must take significant, bold steps to avert a huge climate catastrophe. I hope that this article can inspire some new ideas that help humanity move faster on climate change. Let’s generate a comprehensive, multi-prong plan for significant action, using ideas like those above as a starting point for inspiration. I am happy to listen to anything you’ve got.

Sources

  1. https://apnews.com/article/wildfires-science-fires-american-petroleum-institute-014d4825f21084a80eb71414dbe63b9e
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion
  3. https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/
  4. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-50-most-visited-websites-in-the-world/
  5. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/14/americans-support-marijuana-legalization/
  6. https://wraltechwire.com/2022/06/03/doomsday-climate-change-and-cattle-the-case-for-banning-beef-worldwide/
  7. https://wraltechwire.com/2022/07/01/doomsday-how-one-new-law-could-quickly-eliminate-humanitys-carbon-dioxide-problem/
  8. https://wraltechwire.com/2022/04/08/doomsday-shrinking-rain-forests-and-us-why-we-must-turn-the-tide/
  9. https://wraltechwire.com/2022/04/01/slap-yourself-and-pay-attention-the-doomsday-glacier-is-a-global-risk/
  10. https://wraltechwire.com/2022/05/27/geoengineering-could-be-key-to-combating-climate-change-check-out-these-ideas/
  11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_aircraft_production
  12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxjNhLZCae0 – Carbon Capture Technology Explained