Member-only story
Climate Solutions: Answers Are Everywhere
Only the resolve is hard to locate
There is a tug-of-war between natural climate solutions and the techno-wizardry that got us into this. It needn’t be that way, but we’ll need to exchange a paradigm. We began this miniseries describing the underlying realities of the historic moment — climate chaos, peak everything, a gathering storm. Earth has crossed multiple planetary boundaries. This will either be the century of “Too-Little-Too-Late” for humans or the moment when we pivoted and radically transformed ourselves — i.e., The Great Change.
Please forgive me if I draw the sprawling, multidimensional polycrisis focus down to just one issue. It is not an attempt to simplify or a failure to grasp quantum entanglement. It is only because climate is the most existential threat we face, and because solving that may solve most of the others. That said, to solve for climate, one has to alter the entire course of civilization.
Looking at climate, but also system change more generally, we’ve proposed some rules for the game:
- First, do no harm.
- Favor passive systems that once set in motion no longer require human action
- Favor resilience, recognizing that we are in uncharted territory and there will be shocks.