How we resolve the climate crisis

Human intelligence has created the climate crisis, but it is also the solution

By Hank Green

I spend a lot of time on the internet; It became my second house in the 20 years when I communicated online sciences. And recently, I came across an image that stuck to me: a cartoon of a sad and crying land covered with cut trees that says: “No intelligent species would destroy their own environment.”

I think this cartoon and the ideas it represents are both bad and destructive. I do not want my son, who is eight, believes that humans are stupid and bad – both because it is a fairly great disappointment and because it is obviously false. But I often find myself quite alone to have this perspective, and I wonder if, perhaps, there are other people who feel the same thing as me.

Humans have not caused climate change by being stupid; They caused it by being extremely intelligent. We started burning coal to solve problems. We did it to cultivate more food, heat and light our homes, feed the refrigerators, to connect the world in a way that has enabled the last centuries of scientific progress. We are here precisely because of our intelligence – and yes, the greed and selfishness of people in the fossil fuels industry that have certainly slowed down our transition far from the fossil fuels.

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But we are problem solving machines, and we will also solve this problem.

Our intelligence is oriented towards survival. We want to provide a good life and our children. The results were amazing. In the United States, in 1895, a quarter of people died before the age of five. Today, it is less than 6% and we will continue to strive until it does not reach zero. Imagine that the Ben Franklin or Mark Twain tests would write on this level of progress. How could they keep the tears of their eyes if they saw what we have accomplished?

A large part of this achievement was based on energy and fossil fuels that we have burned to generate it, whether charcoal, natural gas or oil. We have learned that it harms the environment and people, and our credit, we are not always bad to solve this problem. Not long ago, London could be so clogged with the coal smoke that you had to clean it every day windows. When the rivers fight, the United States changes its policies. When the rain becomes acidic, the world changes its policies. When the damage is carried out locally, we tend to be good enough to clean things.

But with the climate change caused by carbon dioxide emissions, we are faced with a much more difficult problem. It is for two reasons. First, at the psychological level, the effects of greenhouse gases on the climate are often invisible to us. Time is always disorderly, and the climate works on such large and long scales that it is difficult to detect, communicate and respond to what is happening. And secondly, unlike the pollution of sulfur and nitrogen which caused acid rains, or the chlorofluorocarbons which threatened to wear a hole in the ozone layer, carbon dioxide is not an unexpected by-product; This is the objective of burning fossil fuels. If you burn the fossil fuels as clean as possible, all you get is carbon dioxide and water vapor. Responding to climate change means that we have to reduce the amount of CO₂ This burning fossil fuel creates. This forces us to completely reinvent the way we feed our planet.

Here is where I feel hope: we have already done this, and we know that it is possible. In the United Kingdom₂ The emissions are now at their lowest levels since 1879 after a passage from coal to renewable energies! It is possible; We can see it is done. And it is the responsibility of the greatest polluters, countries like the United States that have benefited from the combustion of fossil fuels, to make these changes.

And this is where I think we should absolutely feel a certain shame on our species. Humans are greedy. Humans are short -sighted. Humans will tell stories to make themselves believe that the things they already want to do (like delaying climate action) are the RIGHT things to do. It is our nature, and I think we could have done a better job to overcome it. I am frustrated by the time we spent arguing instead of acting. I am frustrated by the extent to which we will not accept any inconvenience or sacrifice in exchange for making the world more habitable for people in other places in the world, and even for our own children.

It should be recognized that this quantity of foresight is unique to humans. This requires a lot of intelligence, and, frankly, it is remarkable for me that we can do it. We are not like trees, which caused its own mass extinction when they have evolved on earth; We know that our actions today threaten up to a million species worldwide. It is both an indictment of our failure to act earlier, and a reason to believe that we can succeed if we devote ourselves to this fight.

I don’t want my son to grow up thinking that his species is sort of evil. I want him to think that humans are problems with problems, and that problem solving it always creates new ones. Whatever the strategies we take to correct global warming will also create more new problems. Renewable technologies such as solar panels and wind turbines, for example, use much more land than coal power plants, contributing to their own environmental impact. They are the best solution in many places at the moment, but perhaps in the future, we will replace them with better ways to generate energy, such as advanced geothermal energy, more nuclear fission or perhaps even nuclear fusion. The people of the future will be angry with us for the imperfect work we have done, just as we are a little crazy about everyone who tried to make the world better by burning a bunch of coal. And that’s good.

Humans are not bad. We solve problems and when we do, we create new problems. And I think that in the end, it is a fairly normal story for intelligent species. One day, if we get in touch with another species like ours, I bet they will have a lot of stories about the way they have done the same thing – and how they found their way.

This is an article of opinion and analysis, and the points of view expressed by the author or the authors are not necessarily those of American scientist.