No Matter What Adults Say, Science Will Save Us
This text was written in creative writing class with my pre-teen students in California, as they were willing to take part in the MIT Technology Review Young Writer’s Contest. This is a collective work and we chose not to associate the students’ names with this text, so we cannot officially submit our essay.
Age of the students as of December 31, 2019: 13.
Contact information: Catherine COSTE
Greta: « You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words (…) They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. »
Humans are breathing in oxygen and releasing the carbon dioxide out; plants and trees do just the opposite, as they need the carbon dioxide to grow leaves, branches and trunks. In exchange of that, they will give oxygen. Wood is carbon, humans are (altered) carbon, charcoal is carbon; even oil is carbon, as it comes from entire forests that are now stuck in the depth of the ground. Burning oil for transportation is like burning trees: as a consequence, you release, among other things, CO2 in the air. Burning palm trees, or paper pulp producing trees, or massively relying on charcoal as heating source in winter saturates the air with huge amounts of soot particles and sulfur dioxide. If people breathe this air during long periods, they suffer and suffocate.
« People suffer. People are dying »
The science of air pollution by particulate matter concentration says that carbon dioxide emissions are far from being the only culprit.
Looking into problems related to carbon dioxide emissions is helpful, however we need to keep in mind that many toxic products that burn do not produce carbon.
We are focusing on fires because of global warming, while people who have trouble breathing are afraid of getting cancer.
The obsession with carbon can barely be called science, as it has been simplified to the extreme to make it monetizable: a company will buy from another one the right to pollute. A « clean » company will establish certificates that it will sell to polluting companies. Carbon offset is the new politically correct. But how about sulfur dioxide and other (toxic) airborne particles? I was with my parents in Beijing, we could not get out of the hotel, and in the fog I could clearly see that CO2 was definitely not the main problem.
Nutella is being accused of killing orangutans, while palm oil is a very minor cause of deforestation. Nutella is responsible for 0.01% of deforestation that affects orangutans. If you stop eating Nutella it will get you to save an orangutan’s nail. But what can be done to stop or reduce deforestation (paper pulp, palm oil industry)? It takes more science to:
- better know orangutans and their lifestyle,
- find other industries that will not cause deforestation or toxic haze or fog,
- find other sources of paper pulp for client countries.
How?
Instead of killing them, we could reprogram living bacteria. Yes, fungi bacteria reprogramming is a thing. Imagine bacteria that we can engineer to change their function(s)! Using computer programming languages to modify and/or enhance the biology of some bacteria could help us engineer buildings that auto-repair during earthquakes, or airplane wings on an aircraft in flight that are in charge of preventative maintenance, are able to carry out emergency repairs.
« Technologies that barely exist »…
Liquid hydrogen, electricity:
A fuel cell can produce electricity and heat. Fuel cell busses already exist and are in use, for example in Pau, France. In this case, the fuel is hydrogen, which is generated onsite. Also, we could create genetically engineered bacteria that can produce zero-emission hydrogen fuel.
… but why?
Imagine paddlers who are coordinating their strokes, the canoe happily gliding forward in the water… You must be super efficient in using your entire body to propel. For cars to use less fossil (carbon) energy, you need to invest in R&D. Then you get a new product. Something highly competitive. A cutting-edge motor of some kind. R&D in industry is just like paddlers coordinating their strokes. Forwards: you bring the new product onto the market; backwards, you go back to R&D, in order to get ready for the next move. Now, governments asked car industries to engineer products that would make less air pollution. They didn’t demand they come up with solutions that make no air pollution. Return on investment can be made only if you are super efficient in using your entire body to propel.
Forwards. Bring your latest innovation onto the market. Backwards. Go back to R&D and this time, maybe, just maybe, you will look for disruptive stuff like fuel cell cars.
If you skip the phase where you bring your latest innovation onto the market, you won’t get any return on investment. You cannot sustain two phases of R&D in a row. Remember: you need to coordinate your strokes. Once forwards, once backwards. Going twice backwards simply won’t work.
This is the thing about my generation, you see. We want to look for the right technologies, focus on them. Make them exist. Technology is not evil. Except when you leave a problem like haze, air pollution, with no solution.
Adults think that all technologies will end up being more or less evil; we think good technologies are not nearly enough in today’s world. This is what Greta unintentionally says: we lack good technologies, those that will serve us. Engineering bacteria to enable a missile to auto-repair in the air, then find and destroy its target: that’s the kind of scientific project that gets instant funding today, sadly. It is so easy to criticize sustainable technology when all you do is put all your efforts into the wrong technology. The newly invented science of collapsology basically says that growth is evil. That people would rather die than pollute. We need to refocus, keeping two things in mind:
- Growth for growth’s sake will bar us from finding fulfillment.
- In science-fiction, growth is the only alternative to totalitarianism. Adults say robots will steal their jobs. We say crappy technologies only get you crappy jobs. We say robots are the best escape route from crappy jobs. Science is of cross-border essence, relying on compassion and mutual aid.
