Climate Strike!

The latest attempt to increase awareness around climate change is the Climate Strike protests that popped up around the world 🌍 last week.

Most reasonable people agree 👍 climate change is happening and that the ever increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the air is problematic – you personally may be only dumping a few tons a year into the air but there are millions who live in cities that are dumping trillions of tons into the atmosphere. 🌆

What to do about it? On paper 📄 the trendy green technologies of the day are often brought out – solar panels, wind turbines, LED light bulbs 💡 and of course electric cars 🚙 . But when you look at the math – land use, cost and technology limitations – the math is hard to make work. Most of the technologies proposed are just swaps of fossil and more energy intensive technologies for slightly less energy intensive ways of doing things. ⚡

You have those who advocate behavioral changes – eat less meat 🍖 and dairy 🐮, recycle ♻ more, use public transport 🚍. Maybe buy more products made from hemp 🌿, buy trendy green things and skip the straws and the plastic water 💦 bottles. Those things certainly feel good if you are interested in the saving the earth 🌎. But they aren’t systematic changes.

You have governments like New York State promising they’ll work for ambitious climate goals. 🗽 They make long lists of promises and laws 📑 but their promises don’t always add up to their actions as they dig deeper into the next generation of fossil technologies ⛽ ignoring the consequences of their own actions.

What’s the solution? I don’t know for sure but I think sin taxes on fossil fuels can help. 💰 Oil, coal and natural gas are underpriced, they are too cheap to burn, distorting the value of the energy ⚡ services they provide. I like most people don’t want to pay more for electricity or gas for my big jacked up truck 🚚 but I know if it hurt in my pocket more I’d be a lot more responsible with my use of energy.

But of course, the politicians don’t want to implement unpopular policies, because they want to be reelected and loved by their constituents. And if they get voted ❎ out of office, their replacement will just roll back 🔙 their unpopular policies.