The Solution
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Script
This video is titled “The Solution” and is part of the expansion pack accompanying the original video “How It All Ends.”
[BOARD, OUTLINE] In this video I’ll share three different categories of solutions for combating anthropogenic global climate change. First, technical solutions: what, physically, will address climate change. Second, policy solutions: what do we as a society do to implement the technical solutions. And finally, personal solutions: what do you—the viewer—do differently tomorrow than you did today?
You may have already watched “The Mechanics of Global Climate Change” and “Scare Tactics,” in which case, you probably see that the technical solution is screamingly simple. If the problem is that we are emitting too much CO2, then the solution is: stop doing that! If you have a headache from banging your head against the wall, the simplest solution is to stop banging your head.
I hope it’s clear what the answer is to these objections that I often hear: “If man has changed the climate, then what is it SUPPOSED to be now? What’s the right climate? Until we have a clue what the norm is, how do we know how much we need to adjust what we’re doing? What if taking actions makes it worse? Or we overshoot and cause an ice age?”
It’s not like there’s a giant thermostat hidden somewhere whose dial we get to turn, if we could only decide what setting it’s supposed to be at. We’re not talking climate engineering—no giant space mirrors. This is a common objection, so I want to be clear: “taking action” on climate change means stopping the disturbance we are currently causing. It means stopping rocking the boat.
A slightly less charitable but certainly more vivid analogy would be: stop thrashing like a monkey at the controls of a nuclear power plant! That’s the action we’re talking about—stopping the thrashing. Now, we’re not “the bad guy” for being the thrashing monkey. We didn’t realize we were in a control room. We were just doing our thing. We’re only now starting to see that there are some buttons and levers that maybe we’ve been bumping.
So now that we know better, the wise thing to do is to get a bit more cautious and little less careless in our dancing around. To realize that there may be consequences we hadn’t thought of, and won’t like, if we continue doing things the way we have. It’s gonna take some will power, because you’ve gotta admit, continuing doing things like we always have is certainly the most convenient thing in the short run. Which is maybe part of why there’s still so much resistance despite the very clear statements from the very qualified AAAS and NAS.
Because the hitch is: we really like doing the things that emit all that CO2—at least in the industrialized countries, it’s the carbon-emitting activities that largely make our lives so darn comfortable. And by activities, I don’t just mean going muddin’ on the weekend in your lifted pickup. I essentially mean the modern lifestyle, because a huge chunk of our electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, which—as you’ll recall—is the exact opposite of the process that put that carbon in the ground in the first place over the last 300 million years.
[BOARD, OUTLINE] So on a conceptual level, the technical solution is simple: stop moving so much bloody carbon from the ground into the air. But, as you might expect, the implementation involves some complexity, which comes from several factors.
The first is the simply huge energy requirements created by our large population using current technology to maintain such a high standard of living.
The second is: oil and coal (made mostly of carbon) are a very easy source of energy. It’s pretty much just lying around, chock full of energy. We just dig it up, and—since the huge amounts of energy are stored in a very stable form—we can safely haul it to wherever you need the energy.
Once we’re there, to extract the energy, we let the carbon combine with oxygen from the atmosphere, releasing heat—that is, we burn it—and we use the heat to do something useful for us, like spin a turbine, or push a piston. At the end of that we’re left with the waste product of the reaction—CO2. But it’s not poisonous, and it’s never been a problem, so we just vent it into the air, and let it drift away. In fact the Competitive Enterprise Institute helpfully ran ads just last year reminding us that CO2 is necessary for all plant life. “Carbon Dioxide,” went the tag line. “They call it pollution. We call it life.” So we dump the waste product into the air, and it feeds the plants. No big deal.
Well, it didn’t used to be a big deal. But we’ve been doing this so much, that the waste bin we’ve been using—the atmosphere—is starting to “fill up.” See this bag? It’s a five pound sack of coal—almost pure carbon, dug up from the ground where it’s been stored for some hundreds of millions of years. What’s the significance of the 5 pound sack? This is the amount of carbon that you put in the air with every gallon of gasoline you burn. If you’re in a Hummer, that’ll get you maybe 12 miles, and if you’re in a Prius, that’ll get you 4 times as far. Of course, the Hummer will totally stomp the Prius flat in the shopping mall parking lot, but we’re not talking about that.
So the problem is not that we’re running out of this stuff. We will in a little bit, but not yet. The problem is that the waste basket is starting to back up. Not in the sense that we can’t fit any more CO2 in, but in the sense that it’s now making a difference in the way the atmosphere—and therefore the weather patterns—behaves.
[BOARD, OUTLINE] So, although the technical solution is simple—reduce carbon emissions—the challenge is how do we do that without reducing the activities that we like so much?
There are three basic strategies in our category of technical solutions: get the energy from a process that doesn’t put CO2 into the atmosphere, reduce energy demand, and do things that actually take carbon back out of the atmosphere.
First, lets look at changing where we get our energy. We currently get almost all of our energy from fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas. That’s where the whole problem is, because each of those is made mostly of carbon. So the first strategy is to find different sources for our energy. This is what’s meant when you hear the term “renewable energies” or “alternative energies.” Basically, those both refer to anything that’s not a fossil fuel, because we want to get our energy from non-carbon-based sources. Get it from your sun, or your wind, or uranium. [Snicker] This can be fun and exciting stuff—cars that “run on water,” cool stuff like that!
Hydroelectric power—zero carbon emissions. Wind farms—zero carbon. Nuclear power—zero carbon. (There’s the little problem of what to do with the waste, but that now pales in comparison to the problem of global climate destabilization.) Electric cars—neck snapping acceleration (so I’ve read) and zero carbon if the electricity comes from renewables. These are mature technologies. They just need a leg up.
We can use biodiesel and ethanol, both of which come from plants we grow. Use them in their own production, and they’re zero carbon! Think of them as stored solar energy. Really, the energy is from the same source as fossil fuels, just fresher. They’re composed of carbon taken from the air and stitched together with energy from the sun. They still turn back into CO2 when you burn them, so technically they emit CO2. But the carbon they emit was already in the air a couple of years before, whereas the carbon that fossil fuels emit was last in the air hundreds of millions of years ago. So yes, biodiesel and ethanol emit carbon when you burn them, but just a year before that, they took that exact same amount of carbon out of the air, so the net carbon emissions of biodiesel and ethanol are zero. It’s a really slick trick.
Hydrogen fuel cells are a totally cool technology that’s just getting started. The core part is often just a membrane. Put hydrogen from your tank on one side of the membrane, and oxygen from the air on the other side, and presto—the thing produces electricity with no moving parts! And guess what the waste product is? What might you get when you combine hydrogen—H—with oxygen—O. H2O! Water! So when you run your hydrogen fuel cell car, not only is there no noise, but the only thing coming out your tailpipe is water! It’s actually more pure than what comes out your tap! You could drink it! Just pipe it right through the window into your cupholder! Don’t try that with your gasoline car.
Of course there are drawbacks to each those energy sources. That’s why they’re called “alternatives” instead of “perfects.” But before someone tries to kill your buzz about the cool stuff ahead—like pointing out that wind turbines kill birds, and biodiesel isn’t really carbon-neutral because we still use fossil fuels in its production—remember that we’re quickly seeing that the alternative to renewable energies—that is, business as usual, moving carbon from underground into the atmosphere—is likely to have a much, much worse downside than all of these “renewable energies” combined. So delaying action because the alternatives aren’t perfect, is just a case of not thinking things through.
[BOARD, OUTLINE] Now as we look at the second strategy in our technical solutions, remember, the problem is too much CO2, and the basic solution is to reduce and eventually stop the process of moving carbon in large amounts from the ground to the air.
“Great. Back to the Dark Ages,” you say.
Actually, no. That’s only if you’re not creative. We just need to change our thinking. For the last 15 years, this next point from Hal Harvey has stuck in my mind, because it changed how I think about problems:
[SCREEN] “More than a decade ago, Amory Lovins and John Holdren and a few others asked this question in the energy field: what do people want? [Their] response was that people do not want barrels of oil or kilowatt-hours of electricity or cubic meters of gas; instead they want heat, light, drivepower, mobility. That simple insight more than doubled the number of potential solutions to the energy crisis by allowing for demand-side answers. That insight, borne of a simple question, created an energy revolution.” [Hal Harvey, May 22, 1992 Commencement Address, Energy Resources Group, UC Berkeley.]
[BOARD, OUTLINE] So the second technical strategy is to reduce carbon emissions by reducing energy demand. There are huge gains to be made quite easily here: compact fluorescent light bulbs, better fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, weatherizing buildings, Energy Star appliances. These are all on the shelf right now.
Oh, we’ll have to work at it, but a lot of it has the potential to end up paying for itself through the savings in energy purchased! Basically, it’s just being smarter—more efficient—with the energy we use.
For example, you probably didn’t realize that for every dollar’s worth of electricity you buy for your light bulb, you immediately throw out 80 cents, because it turns directly into heat, instead of light. If you think government taxes are bad, this heat tax is even worse, because it’s 80%, and no one even provides any services with it.
You just throw that money, literally, out the window. In fact if you’re not in a cold climate, it’s worse than just throwing it out the window. You’d do well to just throw it out the window. That would be smarter than what you’re doing right now. Because when the heat from that 80% “tax” you pay on your light bulbs doesn’t go out the window, it stays in your house and warms it up. So if it’s a nice day out, you then turn on your AC, spending even more money. All because you were using what William McDonough calls “fairly efficient heaters which happen to give off some light.” In terms of the thermodynamics, using one of these is like walking into your dark kitchen at night and turning on your electric burners to see by. These things are ridiculous!
So, thinking like Hal Harvey, can we get the same function, without throwing away all that energy? You bet! Compact fluorescent bulbs are more expensive to buy, but end up saving you money by using less electricity for the same light, and they’re getting better all the time.
How about that old saw: drive less. Or get a car with a higher gas mileage. If your manhood can’t stand small cars, drive a biodiesel. A cool trick—the mileage doesn’t really matter since it’s close to carbon neutral. In fact, if you plant some grass on the roof and bury the clippings, you could be carbon negative! You don’t even have to stop your weekend muddin’—just do it in a diesel truck! I told my students they should buy me a diesel Hummer 3, and by running biodiesel in it, I’d be better for climate change than the math teacher’s Prius. Since then I’ve learned Hummers don’t come in diesels. And no one’s started a collection yet. But a guy can dream!
There’s tons of innovations going on right now in all sorts of products to bring you the same functionality, but at greatly improved energy efficiency. It’s pretty slick—save the planet while saving money.
[BOARD, OUTLINE] The third basic technical strategy for reducing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere really has nothing to do with emissions. It is simply to actively pull carbon out of the air, and put it somewhere else. This is often called carbon sequestration [on board]—just like when a jury in a high profile trial gets sequestered—put away. Except the carbon doesn’t get a book deal afterwards.
When my students see for themselves that the problem is too much CO2 in the atmosphere—”I see-oh-too much CO2” as one student put it—invariably they start asking if there is something we can put into the air to neutralize it somehow. They want things that we can do to get the CO2 out of the air. Well there’s no way to neutralize it as such, but there are some ideas about complicated systems that you can attach to your coal-fired power plant, to try to capture the CO2 coming out and inject it back underground somehow. Perhaps those will be part of the solution.
But I tell my students that we already have a mature technology that will capture CO2 from the air and turn it into a solid form, which we can then dispose of. This device is already available, and it’s remarkably durable and low-maintenance, almost to the point of being self-repairing in a limited sense. In fact one of the most ingenious parts of it is it’s also pretty close to being self-assembling, so once you have the basic kit, you can just do a simple installation and go away, while it does the rest! Because of this, it starts out small so it’s easy to transport, and as it captures the CO2, it stores it on-site in handy packages that are then easy to haul away.
You’d think these would be really expensive, but amazingly, they’re so cheap that if one does break, you don’t even try to fix it, you just install a new one. You don’t have to hook them up to the electrical grid—they’re solar powered, so you can even put them in remote places. Their emissions are benign, even helpful. (Maybe the CEI could do an ad about that.) And, they’re not an eyesore! In fact, many people actually like to look at them and hang around in their shade. And the waste that they produce—the solid form of the carbon—actually can be useful as a building material.
Have you guessed what the device is? A tree. And all you need to get one of your own is this little packet of instructions on how to make one out of air and water, stitched together by solar energy. Install it in the ground, and it almost immediately starts to assemble itself, pulling CO2 out of the air, stripping off the carbon to reassemble into wood, leaves, and fruit, and spitting out the waste oxygen for us to breathe. A pretty cool trick, and these will definitely be part of the solution.
[BOARD, OUTLINE] Those are just some of the technical solutions. But how do we make those happen? That’s where policies come in. Because the problem is so big, the only way we can make enough happen on a large enough scale soon enough is by national policies.
Some policies are pretty straightforward, like providing significant funding for research into renewable energy technologies , and tax breaks for using such technologies. This is necessary as a government policy because renewables cannot compete economically yet with fossil fuels, because all of our infrastructure is set up for fossil fuels. So we need an institutional push to help renewable energy sources mature enough that they can compete with the relatively and easy and available fossil fuels. That is exactly why we have governments, to fill in where the free market can’t accomplish what needs to happen. The free market won’t make renewables competitive until the fossil fuels become scarce, which looks like it probably won’t happen until well after the climate undergoes some irreversible (at least on our time scale) changes.
Other obvious policies include higher fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, and subsidies for creating the infrastructure for the manufacture, distribution, and storage of hydrogen and biofuels.
A policy called cap-and-trade is already in place in much of the rest of the world, and although its implementation certainly has some wrinkles to be worked out, it’s pretty clever. Done well, it can accomplish the goal of making sure that total emissions (which—after all—is the bottom line we care about) remain below a specified level, yet individual emitters are allowed flexibility to make changes and adapt. It also links financial economy with carbon emissions, so that companies who do better at reducing their emissions are financially rewarded at the expense of companies that do poorly. I’m no economist, but it sure seems to harness some of the best dynamics of markets in order to accomplish a greater good that no single company—or the market itself—could ever afford to pursue on its own.
But again, as with the science, there are people way more qualified than you or me to figure out what would be the most effective policies to accomplish our objective of reducing carbon emissions as quickly as possible.
[BOARD, OUTLINE] So what do you personally do about this? Well, that depends on several things, mostly how motivated you are, balanced by the other demands your life places on you. If an issue seems small to you, then you maybe do something about it occasionally. But if your house is about to get bulldozed, then you drop absolutely everything to go all out to fight it. It’s up to you to make that evaluation.
“But just tell me how much needs to get done? How much is enough?” Yeah, who wants to do more than they have to, right? So let’s figure out exactly how much needs to get done, and then just do that. Give us the goal—what’s it going to take to fix this?
The problem is, we don’t know. Remember, there are no certainties in this game, only probabilities. And we won’t know where a tipping point actually is until we cross it. But the most recent climate science seems to indicate that it is probably already too late to avoid significant climate change. Sorry. However, the speed and extent of our actions will affect how quickly that change comes, and how severe it will be. So we can’t afford to be fatalistic, because that would only make it worse.
[At grid] As a general rule, the greater the action we take—that is, the more demanding the government policies and the greater the personal sacrifices—the more we decrease the probability of this down here, and increase the probability of this up here. So how much strikes the right balance? That’s the next discussion we need to have, and it’ll be messy, because it will involve all sorts of values—like how risk averse you are, how much weight you place on the welfare of others, etc.
I just hope that this time, with this discussion, we’ll listen to the scientists a little more, and guys like the Heritage Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute a little less. As you recall, the Heritage Foundation was the one who argued against the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 because the resulting drastic economic harm could result in gas costing as much as $1.91 a gallon by 2010. And CEI was the one with the “Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.” I’m getting the feeling these guys don’t have the best interests of the whole at heart.
What you personally do, depends on how motivated your research makes you. I’ve got my opinions, but I hope I’ve made it clear through this whole thing that I think you should form your own, with conscientious, self-critical effort. And I want to avoid a repeat of President Carter’s famous sweater speech, where he asked for more sacrifice than people were willing to make, and thus his call to action was dismissed, with the net effect of his cause losing ground instead of gaining it.
So how about I suggest a range of personal actions, from less demanding to more-demanding. And once you’ve mulled it over and decided how much the threat of global climate change balances against the other demands in your life, you can pick something from the menu.
With all of these personal actions, the goal is nothing less than to change our culture, so that a policy maker can’t turn around without a constituent asking “What are we—you—going to do about global climate change?” Because the only way to really buy ticket A is with policy changes.
That’s because the actions required to address this global problem are too big to be borne by the few. The demands must be spread out amongst everybody, so that we can make significant changes in our total carbon emissions without asking such great sacrifices from individuals that people will refuse to support the effort. In today’s media-saturated world, policy makers will not get too far out ahead of their constituents—they will only make changes when they sense that enough people demand them. And the bigger the change, the greater the clamor must be. So we must enlist our fellow citizens in demanding policy changes. Here are some ways you might help accomplish that:
First, the easiest: Forward the video “How It All Ends” to everyone you know. A few clicks, and you get back to your life.
Next up: Forward the video to everyone you know, and then follow up, asking them what they thought, and listening sincerely to their answers. Make this part of your thinking, part of your daily mindset, part of your conversations and concerns. Talk to your friends, and family, and coworkers about this—not on a crusade, but gently, as it comes up. “Do anything interesting this weekend?” “Well, you know, I watched this interesting video that got me thinking. . .” You don’t need to become an evangelist to have an effect. If we have enough people who just sort of go about with this in their daily lives, then that can change the culture. Because in today’s interconnected world, one vote is not just one vote—it can be ten thousand.
Next up: Write to your lawmakers. It’s way easier than you think. Handwritten letters are actually best, because then the staff member who reads it knows someone actually put time into it, rather doing a cut-and-paste as part of a funded campaign. Those are more likely to get passed up the food chain in the legislative office
Next up: This one is actually the overarching idea of all of the actions, but I’m putting it farther down the list of difficulty because it has the word “everything” in it, so it might come across as pretty demanding. It seems clear to me that this is the action that will give the “biggest bang for your buck” because it multiplies itself.
[BOARD, CHECKLIST] You do:
everything you can to
increase public demand for
significant and immediate policy action to
combat global climate change. (Here’s the part where you get creative [pointing to top line].)
Next up: You make changes in your own lifestyle, from small to substantial. Anything from changing your lightbulbs to compact fluorescents, to weatherizing your home, buying Energy Star-endorsed appliances, driving less, driving an economy car or hybrid, driving a biodiesel vehicle, asking your power company if they offer renewables and if not, why not? There are a ton of suggestions out there. Go find ones you can get excited about, and then talk them up to your friends and family.
And my last suggestion is a special one, a radical one for those of you who like to spend time online, or like writing letters to the editor, or just feel really agitated about this—like a firehose that can’t be turned off—and need some direction to point your energy to feel like you’re doing something useful. I’m calling for some Information Warriors. If you’re interested, you’ve got your own video, titled “Your Mission.”
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen a comment along the lines of this one.
[SCREEN] “First, he is confusing my ‘not understanding’ with my ‘not giving a crap’. If we extinct our own species, then we deserve to be gone.”
Apathy is a personal choice, and an individual liberty. As long as it doesn’t impinge on my liberties. But this is sort of militant apathy—”Nothing matters to me. And it doesn’t matter to you, either, bub” is not tolerable. “Fine!” I think. “If you think humanity is a failed experiment, then you’re welcome to check out. But don’t take me—and my kids—with you!” He doesn’t have to care. But he does need to get the hell out of the way of those of us who do care, those of us who want to save our bacon. This guy may never be convinced, but he doesn’t have to.
What’s necessary is for the rest of us to make a great enough effort that the militant apathetics and the unreachable denialists become irrelevant. We’re just going to drag them along as dead weight and save them along with the rest of us. If you’ve been watching this whole time, hopefully you realize this isn’t hyperbole—I’m not talking the end of the species. I’m talking the end of our standard of living. It’s not likely, but it’s increasingly feasible. Why take the chance? We just need to overwhelm these people with enough people who are awake and rational, so that we can implement sufficient solutions in time.
As you decide how much time and money you want to put into this, I would remind you of my anecdote about driving the tractor I shared at the end of “Scare Tactics.” The old saying “A stitch in time saves nine” pretty much sums it up: the more you invest now, the less that will be required later. And in a complex system, sometimes a small difference in what we do now can have a huge difference in what’s demanded later. The guys who know best know how the physical world works have already warned us:
[SCREEN] “The longer we wait to tackle climate change, the harder and more expensive the task will be. (AAAS Board statement)”
”. . .delayed action will increase the risk of adverse environmental effects and will likely incur a greater cost.” (NAS, Joint Science Academies’ Statement)
I would also remind you of the disturbing trend that, over the past 30 years of studying the climate, as the science has gotten better, the picture it paints of climate change has only gotten more severe, and more imminent.
One strategy in deciding what’s worth your time to do, is what I like to think of as choosing your future regrets. We each want to act so that we don’t have any regrets, but there are no guarantees about that. So think about what possible regrets your actions today may be setting you up for in the future. Years down the road, assuming you end up in a regret-able situation, would you rather look back and wish you had worked harder to combat climate change, or that you hadn’t worked so hard? Which is the more likely regret for you to have? Which is the more tragic regret? You can probably guess my opinion. But you ask the question for yourself.
I continually do that exercise, and the more I learn about climate change, the harder I work. It kind of sucks. But I’ve got two little kids, and I’m not at liberty to quit just because it’s hard. In a way, now that I’ve been exposed to the knowledge, I’m infected with possible future regrets. And the only way to inoculate myself—to prevent the possibility of ending up in the lower right corner of the grid, knowing that I could have done more to prevent it, but just didn’t find the time, or couldn’t be bothered—is to invest a reasonable amount of effort now. Because strangely, the effort itself is what prevents the future regret, not the success. Because even if we do end up hosed, I can feel okay about myself, knowing that I did everything that could reasonably be expected, and that history (or myself, or my daughters) won’t judge me too harshly, because even though I may have failed, I made a conscientious effort.
I don’t know. Sometimes I guess ignorance IS bliss. Until the carbon hits the fan, that is. Which—it looks like more and more—is going to happen during my lifetime. And so I am obliged to do all I can to soften the blow. And hope that my assessment turns out to be completely wrong.
And now, of course, I’ve removed the “ignorance is bliss” option for you, by telling you all this. I probably should have warned you before, but it selfishly serves my purpose to infect as many people as possible, so that they accomplish my goals by working to prevent their own future regrets. You’re welcome.
The situation is quite likely urgent—we may be near a tipping point. In a complex system, the only way to identify a tipping point is from the other side. (Oops, there it went.) The only thing we know for certain is that the longer we wait, the more likely we are to pass one.
If we continue operating according to our Saber Tooth Tiger Reflex—where we need to see the danger big, violent, and immediate before we act—we may be doomed, because at that point in a complex system, probably no action would be sufficient. As I mentioned, current climate research seems to indicate that at this point, it may already be too late to avoid significant changes. We can probably still affect how quickly it will happen and how bad it will be. But the longer we wait, the less likely that becomes. And right now, we are choosing ticket B by default.
If that gives you a panicky feeling like it does me, I can suggest moving your choice on the menu of personal action down a couple notches. It helps with the butterflies a bit to know you’re doing all you can.
Which reminds me of how that professor of mine summed up the importance of the issue. Do you remember it? Paper or plastic? Doesn’t matter. Save the whales? Doesn’t matter. Save social security? Doesn’t matter. Sometimes the Chicken Little turns out to be the Paul Revere. Isn’t it worth your time to figure it out, and then decide where this fits in all the other demands in your life, what level of effort you can spare?
As I film this, it’s been only 4 days since I started posting the videos in this project. Happily, I’ve already had a number of people contact me asking if I wanted to work with them on making a website or something around these videos.
No. My wife needs her husband back, my daughters need their daddy back, my students need their teacher back, and I need to get some sleep finally. I can’t take on new project. But YOU can. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. As the knowledge spreads, so does the realization and the motivation, like a virus, or a meme, which is what I’m really talking about.
You have my explicit permission to take these videos and the ideas and phrases and images and words in them, and use them as your own. So build that website around them—even see if you can make some money off them. And you don’t need to contact me for permission or a contract—just do it! Contact me if you want higher resolution versions, or if you want to spread some of your massive profits around. (I have spent a ridiculous amount of money on energy drinks during the last few months—don’t tell my wife.)
But no need to contact me to collaborate—they’re yours now. I give them to you. Mash ‘em up, transcribe them and make a hyperlink index, read them at a poetry slam, expand on them, for goodness sake condense them—tighten them up. Re-post them on other video sharing services. Burn DVDs and sell them at your band’s gigs, pass them out on the street corner—I don’t care! As far as I’m concerned, claim the ideas are your own, record yourself making the arguments, get famous doing so, and make lots of money—I’ve got no ownership here. I just want the ideas to infect as many people as possible, so that we get a shift in the culture that allows our policymakers to enact significant enough action that we can substantially reduce the likelihood of abrupt climate change. And for Pete’s sake, the least you could do is come up with a better tag line than what just came out of my mouth.
In fact, that’s my fantasy, to see this project, these videos, spin completely out of my control. I don’t want to spearhead anything—I’m just trying to kick some pebbles down the slope—you guys are the avalanche.
I’ve worked really hard for this video project to be self-contained, so that it can self-replicate as many times as it needs to without me. Because what we need is a change in culture, and I can’t do that. But a virus—a meme—can. So I’ve designed and released the “virus.” Now it’s your job, as it’s host, to do whatever you can to spread it. I know in today’s terrorism-dominated mentality, speaking of a virus isn’t generally a positive thing. But ideas can be viral too. Let’s use that power. How about you host this one, multiply it, and infect a bunch others.
If you spread the idea of risk management, the understanding of the threat of abrupt climate change and how it works, the motivation to do something about it—that can be orders of magnitude more powerful than simply following the traditional “10 Simple Things You Can Do To Be More Green.” Those are useful, but I’m afraid in this case, they’re not sufficient. I’ve been watching this for a while, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the biggest bang for your buck, the greatest payoff for your investment—and in fact the only thing that will get us into column A—is in spreading the concern. “Many hands make light work,” and all. A number of my friends have complained that that seems like a cop-out—asking other people to change before making big changes yourself—but I’ve been studying it for a while, and I’m convinced.
Think of it this way. If you get 10 people on board, and they each get ten, and each of those gets ten, and each of those gets ten, and each of those gets ten, in just 5 steps, that’s over a hundred thousand people who’ve had their thinking shifted. Because of you. That’s how we shift the culture. That’s how we get policies changed. That’s how we make significant action happen.
In both the natural world, and the computer world, viruses are strong and successful in part because they are decentralized. Still, more gets done if everyone is pulling in the same direction. So I’ll make a suggestion here that might be helpful. How about if you want to find other people or projects interested in working on this kind of thinking about climate change, on this kind of approach in bringing about substantial action by changing the culture, you could use the keyword “Manpollo” or “Manpollo Project,” simply because it’s unique.
As of this taping, the only Google hits on the word are from my previous videos on global climate change. So it’ll be a useful, decentralized way to find other people of similar interests—you just talk about the Manpollo Project, and do your Googling on it to find others. In fact, it’ll be a really cool trick, because it won’t require any organization—so it’s robust, and zero maintenance. And yet there won’t be any confusion, because no one else is using the word, because I just made it up. Cool! So you can easily find each other by using the keyword, and I can go back to my life for a bit without playing traffic control. Of course, I would like to hear what’s going on out there. I’ve invested a huge amount of personal sacrifice in these videos and a few warm fuzzies would help make that worth it, since my ultimate goal of “saving the world” is a little hard to measure, and doesn’t really provide much concrete feedback of a job well done.
So I’m passing the torch. I’m deputizing you. I’m lighting your fire. Cuz, as you may have inferred from the increasing size of the bags under my eyes, this freaking project has consumed me, and it’s time that I go back to being a husband, and a father, and a teacher. And not some sleepless zombie, or corporate shill for the energy drink industry. . .
Tag lines
“If you think abrupt climate change is a monster, you should try this stuff!” [Monster]
“Red Bull gives you wings. And hallucinations.”
“Que Sobe Sobe—no! You grab life by the tail. And hope it doesn’t come off in your hand while life scurries away under a rock?”
“Unless you drink this stuff, abrupt climate change is going to open up a can of it on you.” [Whoop Ass]
“NOS—For when you can’t afford to nos not sleep!”
“Can you believe the size of this? Pretty soon you’ll just open one of these and then climb in.”
“Wired X344—brings out the wonderingmind42 in you!”
I’m just waiting for the endorsement contracts to roll in.
The internet functions like a non-linear “complex” system. What if this turned out to be the tipping point for public perception and political will on climate change in the US? How would it feel to be part of history?
Here’s where you influence which future you’ll have. You can’t predict it for certain, but you can change the probabilities.
Throughout its history, America has led the world in so many ways. Yet on this, we’ve been asleep. But now we wake. And there’s work to do.
It’s time for the best in us to come out.
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