The Climate Crisis Is A Miracle

CMO Network The Climate Crisis Is A Miracle Jonathan Brill Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Speaker/Advisor/Radical Change Expert @: info at jonathanbrill . com Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories.

Got it! Nov 5, 2022, 08:23am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin The climate crisis is caused by our species moving out of poverty. It’s the result of decreased starvation, death, violence and suffering. It’s the inevitable outcome of the proud peoples of China, India and South East Asia leaving subsistence and entering the US-Level middle class.

It will be exacerbated and can only be resolved by the acceleration of this trend. Contrary to what the Twitterati tell us, the answer to pollution isn’t for Westerners to drink out of paper straws. This simply won’t save the turtles .

81% of global plastic inputs to the ocean come from Asia where a lack of modern infrastructure makes water dumping the practical reality. The answer isn’t less straws, it’s more roads. Plastic Waste in Our Oceans Our World in Data The problem isn’t how to convert the world to electric vehicles on Tuesday.

If China and India ramp up their Tesla purchasing too fast, they’ll explode the climate. The resource intensive nature of electric car production and regional dependence on coal, mean that it takes 78,700 miles for the carbon emissions of a new EV to balance out with a new gasoline automobile. The solution isn’t to kill Ford, it’s to go nuclear.

It’s also not to shame the US, whose relative share of global carbon emissions has been dropping for 70 years. That’s long before we started to understand the impact of CO2 on the climate. Annual CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, by world region Our World in Data MORE FOR YOU The ‘Backsies’ Billionaire: Texan Builds Second Fortune From Wreckage Of Real Estate Empire He’d Sold ‘God Of War Ragnarok’ Is The Second Highest Scoring Game Of The Generation, So Far China’s 20th Party Congress and Critical Implications For US-Sino Economic Relations While I believe that the West should regulate its way to net zero carbon emissions, this will not solve the problem.

Nature and the rising middle class in Asia will simply fill the hole. California’s massive reduction in per capita carbon emissions over the past 18 years has been offset by a single season of wild fires in the State. And this is dwarfed by the increase in total Chinese carbon emissions.

The problem cannot be solved with point solutions or with browbeating, it must be solved systemically. No-one is to blame here, unless you consider a massive global improvement in our human condition blameworthy. We are living through a miracle.

Change in GDP per capita over time Our World in Data COP 27 , the big global climate conference starts this week. The climate priests will pound the Gaia drum. The PR people will gaslight their favorite bogeymen using selective data.

Don’t let them fool you. Climate change isn’t an American problem, a Chinese problem, a big oil or a cow fart problem. It’s the result of our species thriving.

For any number of reasons, we need to both increase the rate AND grapple with the flip side of our miracle. We can’t solve this through competition or virtue signaling. Calling out the Koch brothers and Trump didn’t drive change at COP 1 or COP 26.

Perhaps there’s a more positive pathway. Perhaps we lean into hope. Perhaps we highlight the bigger picture.

Perhaps we celebrate our human potential. Perhaps we stop tearing each other apart and instead fund adaptation to the change in front of us. Right now, we are funding less than 10% of the climate adaptation pipeline required to sustain our progress as a species.

We won’t continue to thrive until we recognize that our biggest challenge AND our greatest achievement are the same damned thing. Follow me on LinkedIn . Check out my website or some of my other work here .

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