To Be Or Not To Be

That Is The Climate Question

Endangered Coho Salmon Buck. Photo by Martha Ture

2024 was the hottest year on record. “Today I can officially report that we have just endured a decade of deadly heat. The top ten hottest years on record have happened in the last ten years, including 2024,” said Secretary-General António Guterres in his message for the New Year.

“This is climate breakdown — in real time. We must exit this road to ruin — and we have no time to lose,” he gravely emphasized.

Now that we have come to this cliff, clearly we can't look to government to set public policy. We do not have a representative government, we have a marketocracy, in which ignorant people elect corporate representatives whose goal is the destruction of nation-states. We need to seek climate help from environmental billionaires like Tom Steyer, Bill Gates, George Soros, and their cohort. We need to focus on the technology that can reduce GHGs and look for ways to foster the domino effects.

Bill Gates says 2024 was a big step for climate tech like green steel, and now is the time for venture capitalists (VCs) to snag 'garage' innovators. In a foreword to a new report by Gates’ company Breakthrough Energy, he urged Vcs to "prime the pump" on climate startups.

"We noticed a subtle, but important, perspective shift from both the investors and corporations we engage with," Gates wrote in an intro to the report, which the firm published in October with the tagline "climate tech has arrived."

Growth in renewable energy generation continues to outstrip predictions, largely driven now by economics instead of government subsidies.

Education and shifts to bicycles, and looking to cities for necessary social changes are key to green transitions. Transformation researchers like Ilona M. Otto of the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change in Graz, Austria, believe societies can introduce social changes that would help bring about a rapid green transition.

"We are talking about parts of society where rapid change is possible," said Otto. "Where we do have some degree of agency, and we can intervene in the system and push it in a desired direction."

When everyday choices around eating meat, using clean energy and driving electric vehicles are picked up by small committed groups, they can set new norms and behavior standards across societies, she said.

In California, the largest river restoration project in American history has completed all of the work to remove the dams, a massive infrastructure project. Work will continue for several years restoring the 2,200 acres of formerly submerged lands, and after 100 years of ecological collapse, steelhead and salmon are returning to the Klamath River. If you’d like see something so beautiful it brought tears of joy to my eyes, see here.

However, overall global emissions keep rising, rather than starting on the steep downward trend that is required to avoid dangerous climate change.

The current mortal conflict in which we find ourselves is between policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and policies that increase greenhouse gas emissions. The arithmetic is not daunting and has been done repeatedly by the UN and others. But the question is not whether we succeed or fail. The question is which side are you on? Do you drown yourself in toxic despair, in la-la-la I don’t hear you, or do you decide to spend your finite time alive with efforts to restore the earth?

Hint: Toxic thoughts are such bummers.