A Climate Crisis Action Wish List

One thing I’ve noticed on various comment threads about the climate crisis is that some people sort of throw up their hands and say ‘well, what can we really do about it?’

Image by Picography from Pixabay

These aren’t the outright deniers, but rather those that seem to be fairly new to acknowledging that there’s a problem. I think anyone who’s been paying attention to the climate crisis for awhile will react in a negative way to this, because of course we’re paying attention to the things that can be done.

Instead I’ve started responding to the hand throwers with a wishlist of solutions. It shows that yes, really, a lot can be done, and done fast, given that another block people seem to have is thinking we can’t respond quickly to the crisis. So here is my list, which I’ve divided into sections.

Greenhouse gas reduction

Production of CO₂ is the main contributing factor to the climate crisis so we absolutely need to address it. Methane–though less long-lived in the atmosphere–is an even more potent greenhouse gas.

1. Ban fracking completely. Fracking is a recent practice, that’s really about extracting everything that can be extracted from an oil or gas deposit. It’s pushed down fossil fuel prices because there’s more on the market. If we banned fracking, then fossil fuel prices will inflate again, making them less desirable and renewable alternatives cheaper. Fracking is also bad for contaminating groundwater, so that’s another reason not to do it.
2. Slap sanctions on any country clear cutting and burning forest for profit. In particular this means Brazil, which under its new far-right government has reversed environmental policy to allow (or at least turn a blind eye) to clearing forests to create low quality grazing land by burning. High tariffs on importing their goods could force them to rethink their policies. At the very least we would have the moral high ground.
3. Ban the imports of meat. The growing of animals for meat produces a lot of methane. Not all meats are equal in how much methane they produce but they are all worse than producing plant-based proteins. Banning imports would mean that meat is still available, and the meat consumed would directly impact the local economy so there would likely be more support for this than an outright ban on all meats. Imports also produce a lot of carbon pollution because they are transported, so this would eliminate that carbon cost. The risk here is that local production could increase, but that could be mitigated with further regulation, such as no new land given to grazing, no new battery farms, and implementing methods at the farm level to make production less carbon and methane intense.
4. Ban the installation of gas boilers and stove tops in new build houses. Gas boilers and stove tops are pretty ubiquitous in Britain, but electric alternatives are available. A changeover to electric doesn’t help much if the source of electricity is gas or coal, but switching to renewables for electricity generation is already a government goal.
5. Provide tax rebates and interest-free loans for removal of gas boilers and stove tops. Banning them in new builds is fairly easy compared to converting all existing gas appliances to electricity. We need to make this as easy and painless for homeowners as possible in order to encourage them to do so.
6. Ramp up installation of electric car charging stations across the UK. People generally like how electric cars handle, but the main sticking point is their range. Manufacturers will continue to improve the range of their electric cars, but it means adoption is painfully slow. We need to provide charging stations at every gas station in the country, as well as supermarket car parks (add 10% of the lot space per year). Let’s (and by us I mean the UK government) provide interest free loans to every homeowner and renter who wants to install one, or automatically roll it into the price of a car loan. Let’s provide funding to councils to install on-street charge points.
7. Ban the manufacture of non-electric or non-hydrogen cars, lorries, buses, and trains in 5 years. That’s time enough for manufacturers to change their design, engineering, supply lines, and tooling for their models, and to clear out their inventory.
8. Ban the import of the same immediately. This will help boost local car manufacturers to sell their petrol cars in the short term, providing capital to switch to electric production. Non-British dealerships could partner with British manufacturers to help move stock, deal only in used vehicles, or sell their own electric vehicles. After 5 years, every new vehicle will be electric or hydrogen.
9. Ban the export of oil. Oil should be used only for the domestic market as petrol and gas use ramps down. Oil can still be used to manufacture necessary plastics. This also means we are freer to be less dependent on imports. Banning the export also means that it travels less, and emits less carbon in its transportation.
10. Build more offshore wind farms. A big criticism of wind farms is that they are noisy and unsightly (and how accurate this criticism is, is questionable). Building more offshore wind farms mitigates these two objections. The windmills can also be built very large, which generates more electricity.
11. Regulate a switch to carbon sequestering concrete. The production of concrete has a high carbon cost, and its used in pretty much any construction project, from roads to buildings. However, there are net carbon sequestering alternatives that are even stronger. They cost a bit more, but increased use is likely to bring the cost down.
12. Ban soil tilling which kills 90% of earthworms and takes out too many nutrients from the soil, changing the chemistry so that it emits carbon instead of sequestering it, and making it more vulnerable to erosion. The alternative method to farm is to poke a hole in the ground and plant a seed, called no-till farming. Tilling is easy with heavy machinery, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find an automated way to plant without tilling that works just as well. Farmers will need to be supported in changing over equipment with outright grants or interest-free loans.
13. Provide ration coupons for meat, eggs, dairy. Meat, eggs, and dairy consumption produces a lot of methane, so we need to reduce what we consume. With ration coupons you can still have it, it can still be farmed, but it is dramatically reduced. Rationing could also be ramped up over a period of time so that it is not a traumatic change for consumers or farmers. Ration coupons shouldn’t be tied to individuals, so that those who find it easy to give up these items could sell them to others who are having a harder time. There would be cost in administering such a system, but using apps that interact with point of sale terminals could at least make it feel like it’s not out of the 1940s and 50s.
14. Provide tax rebates and interest-free loans for solar installation. Solar lends itself well to small installations on houses, so we should encourage all homeowners and building owners to install at least some solar. Electricity demand will rise as electric cars become more widely adopted and as home heating and cooking converts away from gas. One of the biggest objections to solar is that it peaks in the middle of the day, but this is also when cars can be charging as their owners are working.
15. Build thorium and fast-breeder reactors. This is probably the most controversial item on this list, as fear of nuclear meltdowns are widespread. This is the item I would also give up first, as nuclear is not a renewable resource. However, the thorium reactor design produces less radioactive waste than conventional reactors. Fast-breeder reactors eat up the spent fuel of conventional nuclear reactors. They are also inherently safer than earlier designs. One downside is that they cost quite a bit to build, although they do last for a long time, and provide a steady supply of electricity. Given that most renewables provide uneven supply that doesn’t react quickly to changes in demand, we would do well to look at building thorium and fast-breeder reactors.

Carbon mitigation

While reducing carbon use and methane production helps reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we emit, we can also suck up some of the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere.

1. Plant billions of trees in the UK. Trees are an excellent way to sequester carbon, and it’s a low tech solution that’s easy to implement, it’s just a matter of scaling up dramatically. What’s a bit more difficult is determining where the trees should go and who should do it. For instance, we should not be planting trees in bog land, as bogs sequester even more carbon and methane than trees. Draining this land would release enormous amounts of greenhouse gases. A portion of the trees planted should be earmarked for lumber and for food (apples, pears, cherries, chestnuts, etc), and the remaining should not be monocultures of a single species, but rather a variety of species that would grow well in a specific habitat and could provide food for native birds and mammals. New forests should have bushes, ferns, and flowering plants planted that also help to enrich the ecosystem. As for the who, the government should take the lead on mass planting, but the public should be encouraged to plant trees on their own property. Farmers could be provided with grants and resources to plant more trees near hedgerows or strategically in fields to provide shade and help prevent erosion.
2. Reclaim grazing farmland for forests. If meat consumption goes down, we can reclaim grazing land for forest. This could be for orchards that produce revenue for farmers, or natural forests, where farmers could be compensated for their land.
3. Help to green the Sahara and other areas that have been transitioning to deserts due to human action. There’s already a project to green the Sahara, but we could provide expertise and some partnership funding. Again, healthy soils help to sequester carbon, and converting deserts to grasslands to forests all over the world would be a worthwhile endeavour. Building solar and wind farms in the Sahara could also help with greening it.
4. Help to generally plant trees in other countries. Again, Britain could provide expertise and partnership funding to get the ball rolling. Haiti for instance, is nearly deforested, and suffers greatly from soil erosion. It makes the effects of hurricanes worse and poisons fish stocks in the surrounding waters. Helping to reforest could have a huge positive effect for Haitians as well as help with sequestering carbon.
5. Regulate glass containers so that they are made in a set of uniform sizes so they can be washed and reused by any manufacturer rather than being melted down and reformed. When I was a kid growing up in Canada, I remember glass soda bottles being reusable. When you were done with them, you returned them to the store and got a deposit back. They were washed out, refilled, and resold. If glass containers were manufactured in set volumes and sizes, they could similarly be washed out and reused, without the faff of trying to figure out which manufacturer owns which container design. Washing and sterilising uses less energy than is used to melt down and reform glass as it is recycled.
6. Clean up fish nets from the ocean to help marine life rebuild. Lost or discarded fishing nets are one of the biggest plastic pollutants in the oceans, and helps to reduce fragile stocks. Cleaning these up is a big task, but we should try to do it. We should also regulate the manufacture of nets so that they are biodegradable, which his how nets originally were, or so that they are easily recycled.
7. Heavily regulate the fishing industry using an ahupua‘a system. An ahupua‘a is a Hawaiian word for an area that’s regulated by an expert to say when and how much food can be taken in an area and theoretically this can be automated. Using an ahupua‘a would help marine stocks recover and helps to sequester carbon. This would be a big pill for the fishing industry to swallow, and there would still be competition from other countries for stocks. A global or regional approach would be best, and it would help to ensure that fishing remains viable for centuries to come. In the short term, the fishing industry could help with the science of regulating and monitoring the stocks.

Funding

There’s a limited amount we can do with our current knowledge and resources, so we need to dig in and do research to develop new technologies.

1. Provide funding for battery research. The thing that will slow down adoption of renewable energy the most is the uneven supply it provides. Batteries help to solve this issue, but we need lots of batteries working at scale, and we’re not there with the technology yet. We need to go all in on this.
2. Provide funding for researching how to scale up geothermal energy. Like solar, geothermal is basically free to exploit, except for the initial cost. Unlike solar, it provides a steady supply. One of the main barriers to geothermal adoption is that current tech relies on relatively shallow heat sources, which are not viable in all areas. We should investigate how to generate electricity at low cost from cooler areas.
3. Provide funding for carbon sequestration research. Even though there’s a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere compared to historical levels, it’s still not abundant enough to do significant chemistry, and that’s a big problem. We’re going to have a hard time figuring out a way to sequester carbon as good as or better than plants do, but it’s a worthy question to pursue.
4. Fund research into recycling spent materials, especially rare earth metals used in batteries that take a lot of carbon to dig out of the earth and transport from Australia or Africa. This is a huge crisis looming for batteries that could slow or stop their use which could scupper the fast adoption of electric vehicles and renewable energy sources. We need to do better at this, and we need to do this yesterday.
5. Fund research for the engineering of electric planes. Electric planes do exist, but the technology is in its infancy. Sailing carbon neutral across the ocean is not really feasible any more. We should try to develop electric planes, or even hybrid and hydrogen systems.

Plastics reduction

The manufacture of plastics does contribute to greenhouse gases, but it’s also potentially a waste of a valuable resource that we should probably be conserving. Discarded plastic is also having a dramatic negative effect on ecosystems, so we can’t keep making and using it at the scale we do today.

1. Ban polyester in frequently-washed garments. Polyester is used because it’s dirt cheap but it fuels fast fashion, which means not only does it contribute to plastic waste, it generates a lot of carbon emissions in its transportation to market. Outerwear could be exempt because it is not washed frequently, is not generally fast fashion, and provides special attributes like helping to waterproof a garment.
2. Provide ration coupons for clothing to combat fast fashion. If people are forced to buy less, they will buy better. This is primarily aimed at plastic fabrics, but most fabrics are problematic in one way or another (cotton for instance requires a lot of water, wool requires animal farming, and rayon/viscose produces a lot of hazardous chemical runoff in its production, even if it’s biodegradable). Provide Subsidies for poorer people so they can invest in well made sustainable clothes.
3. Create a significant plastic tax for items using non-recyclable plastic packaging. Possibly expand this for items that while recyclable, are not often or not easily recycled. For food items this could be 10p to start with; for household items like soap it could be 20p; for non-food items it could be £1.

Miscellaneous

There are some items that don’t fit into the above categories, and are not as urgent to address but could help in solving the crisis.

1. Require corporate quarterly earnings to include carbon footprint of all operations. In recent years it has been mandatory for large companies to report their gender pay gap. While this has been controversial, it’s been a useful way to measure pay inequity and more importantly keeps the issue in the spotlight. This could be useful in keeping an eye on how corporations, who are the biggest emitters, address the climate crisis.
2. Keep churning out quality BBC and Netflix documentaries on nature and the climate crisis. Britain is renowned for the quality of its documentaries world wide, and this will help to keep people focused globally on the issue.
3. Share technologies with other countries. This seems a little obvious, but we can goose this along by hosting conferences, inviting scholars around the world to participate with us in our research, publishing cheaply, and creating open source software and technology where applicable.
4. Set a net zero goal of 2030. Currently the goal in Britain is 2050, which is faster than not doing it at all, but is a little unambitious. If we set a difficult goal, we can strive towards it with more urgency and focus and are less likely to put things off until it is too late. Morally we should be taking the global lead (and we kind of are) given that we started the industrial revolution.
5. Start a global genomic survey of as many species as possible. The climate crisis is changing habitats far faster than species can adapt to. Even if we meet our net zero goals fairly soon and stay under 1.5ºC of warming, there will be an irreparable loss to biodiversity. This is an incredible shame, but also a potential loss of medicines, food sources, and novel materials. A genomic survey could help ‘bank’ biodiversity for the future and potentially recover from a mass extinction if we take too long to turn things around.
6. Codify into law a robust, clear, and humane asylum/refugee process. Work with other countries that have the capacity to help with resettlement. Doing this now instead of as a knee jerk reaction later could prevent atrocities we would never live down. People will come, let’s not be horrible to them.

On this list perhaps you noticed that there’s no wild-eyed things like seeding the ocean with iron or building solar shades in orbit. The list is made of items we can do now, or at least have a good idea of what their impact would be. Maybe we will have to resort to hare-brained ideas, but we shouldn’t be putting all our hopes into them. Also, given this list is aimed at the hand throwers, these people are not going to be convinced by such technologies and may become even more cynical, and cynical is not where we need to be right now if we are going to pull off the biggest project humans have ever undertaken.

So what can you do to help with this list? Donate to tree planting schemes or plant some trees yourself. Pick an item and write to your representatives about it. Pick an item and start an online petition. Discuss the list with the people you know (especially those that are the hand throwers). Discuss the list where you encounter negative or denialist comments on social media. The media is still largely in the phase of making sure the public knows there is a problem (and given how much denialism there is, that’s not shocking), so it’s not focused as much on the litany of solutions. What we need immediately is to move the momentum from discussing the problem to discussing, and then adopting solutions.