The problem lies not in our stars but in ourselves not in our prowess but in our vulnerability.
That comforting knowledge should temper the rush for fragile, expensive, energy-draining engineered inventions (artificial trees and orbiting sunscreens), remembering Sevareid’s Law (“the chief cause of problems is solutions”), but my point here is not to debate what kinds of solutions are best but that we know these solutions already exist. Kathleen Draper and I, in Burn: Igniting a New Carbon Drawdown Economy to End the Climate Crisis, pegged the potential for all-natural climate solutions at greater than 50 GtCO2e per year for the better part of a century. With a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead because of its greenhouse atmosphere, Venus should know. Any visiting Venusian would see this for what it is - collective insanity. It is considered standard, unremarkable, expected, that one political group or an individual politician would use whatever means available to obtain or hold office in a forthcoming election cycle and the particulars of what get destroyed along the way are of no significance - just collateral damage. Getting to zero by whatever date is a dicey proposition at the moment, as we watch mainstream media regard the filibuster of essential but insufficient climate legislation by 52 Senators as just normal political gamesmanship. The other half would need to come from engineered solutions, assuming our man-made additions can be brought to zero. That seems like a bunch but it is only approximately half of what will be needed to hold the line below 2 degrees of catastrophic warming, if that is even still possible. In Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation, Paul Hawken puts the potential of the natural climate solutions (all forms of accelerated photosynthesis - tree-planting, soil recarbonization, ocean regeneration, etc.) at 1.6 trillion tons CO2e drawdown by 2050.
Can we design our way out of the climate catastrophe? We know the technical solutions.
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