Hey readers,
Last week, I published an article about degrowth, a radical idea to fight climate change by deliberately shrinking the economy in rich countries.
My critique focused on the fact that the policy agenda advanced by degrowthers wouldn’t actually do much to fight climate change. Universal health care, greater social equality, less planned obsolescence for our goods, greater leisure time — these are all worthwhile objectives! But as far as fighting climate change goes? Those ideas simply won’t cut it. Its radicalism isn’t where I part ways with degrowth — indeed, as I argued, the problem was that its core proposals weren’t radical enough.
It’s self-evident that radical problems require radical solutions. The question is: Which radical solutions will actually be effective?
This question is more urgent than ever. The latest IPCC report drives home that there’s a lot at stake here, and that if humanity does nothing to confront the climate crisis, we’re on a trajectory that will cost millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of lives.
There are solutions that we know will work and have been in the mix of mainstream climate discourse for a while now: think carbon taxes, investing in additional R&D for green energy, paying to accelerate the switch to solar, regulation of pollutants. But we should be laying the groundwork for some larger bets too.
Here are some radical ideas that might actually move the needle on climate change. A policy agenda pushing for these may or may not be politically plausible, but every bit of progress we make has the potential to really reduce the risks for humanity. End animal meat
People like eating meat, and factory farming has delivered it at a cheap price — but at an astronomical cost to the environment and animals. Today, about one-seventh of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions come from animal agriculture.
Meeting the world’s protein demand by growing and killing animals by the tens of billions is simply not sustainable. That’s why meatless meat seems so promising — with enough R&D, hopefully it can get good (and affordable) enough to replace animal agriculture and meet the world’s demand for protein without factory farming. Modest government investment in R&D could go a long way for this nascent industry.
But consumers don’t need to wait for that future. Even before meatless meat is perfected, consumers can do their part by cutting back. This is one of the few domains where individual action really matters — if enough people eat less, less animal meat will be produced.
And you don’t have to go fully vegetarian or vegan to see big results — eating meat one day a week instead of seven will make a difference.
Invest in carbon capture and storage
It’s a weird divide. Many of the most radical changes in history have been fundamentally technological — electricity, industrialization, birth control, the internet. One hopes the same will hold true of carbon capture and storage.
Most serious proposals to use carbon capture to address climate change are proposals to dedicate a significant portion of our wealth, as a society, to scrubbing the air itself of the evidence of our presence. A large-scale deployment of genuine carbon capture, powered by green energy, would be a radical investment in stopping climate change.
Right now, there are some carbon capture technologies that work — assuming that their energy-intensive requirements can be met with renewable energy sources — but the tech is still in its infancy. Hopefully more efficient methods will be discovered as we really invest in making this happen.
Keep exploring solar geoengineering
The idea behind solar geoengineering is both simple and outlandish: spray chemicals into the sky to reflect sunlight back to space and counteract the effects of global warming.
Doing it right will require caution, tons of research, and a plan to address unexpected effects. Until recently, solar geoengineering was somewhat unmentionable in climate discussions, with much speculation about the downside risks — say, improved conditions in one part of the world offset by worse conditions in another.
It is admittedly risky, but given where we are in the climate fight, the downside risk of not looking into possible solutions has also grown. A 2019 paper in Nature Climate Change found that the risks are much smaller if solar geoengineering is done on a smaller scale, and that even on a small scale it could cut warming by half, which would buy us time for other solutions to work.
Humanity can't wait
These ideas are by no means the only ones worth considering — they’re just what the word limit in this newsletter could accommodate!
Off the top of my head, there are other big ideas worth pursuing. I’m enthusiastic about plans to buy every coal plant in the US and replace it with renewables — which would actually save money — and have wondered if rich countries could pay for the same thing in the rest of the world. We should do more research into proposals to refreeze the poles and seed the oceans. There’s an upcoming Vox piece from our climate team on the outsized impact of refrigerants and methane, and how addressing those could take a big chunk out of the problem.
Some of the ideas out there are moonshots; others are much farther along and just need an extra shove. The point is that we are out of time in the climate fight, and need to examine all the ideas out there — and scale up the ones we find to be effective.
And there are also ideas that aren’t so radical, that we’ve known about for a long time now, like the ones mentioned above: carbon taxes, subsidies for developing clean energy, strict rules on pollutants. The important thing is that we judge ideas by whether they work — which will point us toward solutions, some boring, perhaps a few quite radical.
—Kelsey Piper, @kelseytuoc
The devastating new UN report on climate change, explained Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images “There’s no going back” — and there’s no room for wishful thinking, top climate scientists say. Read more.
The fight over cage-free eggs and bacon in California, explained Scott Olson/Getty Images An impending California law will get farm animals out of cages. Big Meat is pushing back hard. Read more.
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