What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change
My recommended long read for today - the grim realities we must face to come close to solving this problem include dramatically reducing transmission losses, replacing carbon based transport fuels, and finding capital to build low expense zero carbon sources. Decades ago several science fiction authors, including luminaries like Isaac Asimov and Larry Pournelle came to these same conclusions.
Some back then proposed much more nuclear energy of all stripes, some suggested electrified roads and rails. The new initiatives looked at solutions with today’s tech, but no solution by itself will be a silver bullet and the Google effort leaves us with depressing (but also challenging,) results.
As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach. So we’re issuing a call to action. There’s hope to avert disaster if our society takes a hard look at the true scale of the problem and uses that reckoning to shape its priorities.
Climate scientists have definitively shown that the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses a looming danger. Whether measured in dollars or human suffering, climate change threatens to take a terrible toll on civilization over the next century. To radically cut the emission of greenhouse gases, the obvious first target is the energy sector, the largest single source of global emissions.
More: What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change - IEEE Spectrum