Climate Solutions: The All-of-the-Above Path
Over the last four weeks, we’ve explored four paths for dealing with the climate crisis:
Your responses to these articles have been superb, often better than the articles themselves. If you read the articles but not the responses, I recommend that you should go back and check them out.
Some of you have interpreted my articles as satire, but I present them as plausible theses (though simplified, because you’ve heard it all before), presented in a light-hearted style. As with most of my Medium articles.
I really do think an Amy Klobuchar dictatorship would knock things into order. I really do think Suicide Should Be Painless. I really did think We Don’t Need Civil War, We Need to Split the Country—but the responses to that article changed my mind. On the other hand, magic as a climate change solution? That is pure satire. Space Windmills? Just a silly, amusing, and technologically ridiculous idea.
Now, what should we actually do about the climate change apocalypse?
First of all, let’s recognise that business-as-usual and paleo aren’t action strategies. Business-as-usual is just what we’re doing now, not mounting any extraordinary efforts to attack the climate emergency. And Paleo is just where we’re going to wind up if that is all we do. And probably where we’ll wind up anyway, no matter what we do.
I say we should go balls-to-the-wall on both the techno-optimist AND the degrowth strategies. It doesn’t need to be one or the other. Let’s push the technology as far and as fast as we can to help our situation as much as possible. But let’s also ramp down our population and our capitalist hyper-growth economies. These strategies do not conflict, and, in fact, they will act as force-multipliers one upon the other.
Medium author T. J. Brearton* recently made this case in more detail in this article.
TJ, and many others, also make the case for prepping personally by joining/building/supporting a community where you can develop independence and resiliency as a group. I fully endorse the idea, assuming you want to survive the coming apocalypse as long and as comfortably as possible. (Not everyone does. I don’t.) Great for extroverts, harder for introverts, but I’m sure you will find your life and experience in such a community to be healthy and rewarding even if the apocalypse is, miraculously, avoided.
Personally, I believe the apocalypse is coming no matter what we do because we’ve waited too long to work on it. In fact, it has already begun, and our governments still haven’t gotten really serious about it. But doing what we can with technology and degrowth can make the apocalypse a little less worser than it would otherwise be. Start finding or building your resilient community now!
Thus endeth my Climate Solutions series.
* TJ is also a writer of excellent suspense novels. Look him up on Amazon.
— Lannie Rose, April 2023
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
Not written by ChatGTP or other AI (though I am using Chattie as a research assistant more and more)
