Many of you probably clicked this link out of skepticism. I don’t blame you. But let me pose a few questions. How do you make something completely vanish on its own? Say there’s something you don’t like, how do you make it just go away all together in a few short years with nobody noticing? When was the last time you saw someone riding a horse around town? Why is the coal industry collapsing? What happened to pay phones? When did you last make a collect call? Do you remember how to write in cursive? Do you do long division in your head or on paper? Do you have a set of encyclopedias in your home? A road map in your glove box? When did you last drop off a roll of film to be developed? Planning on faxing any documents today? Obsolescence.
If you want something to go away, make it obsolete. It will go away all on its own at a shocking rate. So, what does this have to do with global warming? For starters, I already mentioned coal. Unfortunately, the thing that’s killing it is low oil and gas prices. Not really a solution. People like to talk about a gas tax or a carbon tax. I think those are good ideas to pay for fixing damage. What they won’t do is stop demand. It’s an artificial tax and any place that doesn’t put it there will still want cheap fossil fuel energy. We need to stop demand and not just here in the US. We need to stop demand world wide so that underdeveloped countries can skip over the need for fossil fuel all together.
Luckily, we already have a better energy source. The sun isn’t just cheap energy, it’s free and it’s world wide. Same goes for wind, hydro, tidal, etc… The problem these sources face is storage and distribution. We fix that with R&D. Who’s got the money for that? The DoD that’s who. They already acknowledge the national security threat that climate change poses. It’s time for them to start working on the solution. A lot of people seem to think that technology is just going to show up and solve climate change for us somehow. Well, this is how that happens. JEB! said that someone in a garage was working on a solution to climate change right now. Show me the garage where we split the atom or broke the Enigma Machine? Where is the garage that beat NASA to the moon? How many garages did they string together to build the Large Hadron Collider? To paraphrase our likely next president (she was talking about encryption), what we need is a new, “Manhattan Project,” of sorts with a target goal of making fossil fuels completely obsolete in all forms around the world.
This is when the bought and paid for Republican senators will complain about, “Government picking winners and losers.” I have answers for that too but I’m not sure they will fly because they aren’t very nice. First, hopefully we will just get a wave election and it won’t matter. Second, we get the MIC lobby on our side to counter the fossil fuel lobby. Third, we keep up with hitting Exxon on what they knew, good job to the AG’s. Fourth, we have been subsidizing the high holy shit out of fossil fuels for years. It only seems fair that we balance the scales. That’s my public response to their argument. Minus the language of course. Finally, yes. Simply yes, we are picking a winner and it’s the one that doesn’t poison the air and water #Exxonknew.
So, that’s my global warming solution. Of course we still have to clean up the damages but I think it’s the only thing that could actually stop the progress of warming in time to help us. Setting target numbers we never reach in summits that big chunks of the world don’t go to isn’t a solution. We need something that actually cures the disease, not promises to be less sick. Obsolescence is that cure. It actually makes things go away all on their own at an alarming rate and the vast majority of people don’t miss them because they are happy to be using the new thing.