Can we fix climate change?

On St. Patrick's Day I went with my father to have dinner. We saw one of my father's friends at the restaurant and one of the topics we had was about climate change. He was saying that electric cars are worse than gas cars, and that we can't fix climate change so we might as well just give up (I'm paraphrasing). I was shocked! Why give up? That to me is cowardice. What are we supposed to do, give up and not even try? Tell our kids, grand kids and great grandkids "sorry we fucked things up, tough luck for you?" Or should we try and heal this planet?

We know why fossil fuel and coal companies are against change. It’s about money. What are gas stations going to do? Become charging stations? The thing is gas cars aren’t going to go away overnight. Sure, when the US goes to 100% sales of electric cars there won’t be any new gas-powered cars, but there will still be existing ones. It’s not like the government can make everyone buy a new car or transform their old car into an electric car. It would be nice if we could just get rid of gas fueled cars, but that wouldn’t happen for many years. We have to stop fracking (Injecting liquid at high pressure into underground rock to force existing fissures and extract oil or gas) so and going toward 100% sales of electric cars is a good goal to reach. Doing a Google search says we’ll run out of fossil fuels by the year 2060 if we keep burning them at the current rate anyway so we should work hard toward an alternative now.

As for coal, what are these companies going to do? They can get into solar, or some other type of power. They’re making a lot of money now so what’s their incentive? They don’t care their workers are getting cancer, or that it’s depleting resources from our planet. They keep pushing “clean coal” but what is this?

In a 2020 Popular Mechanics article they define clean coal as “capturing coal emissions from burning coal and storing them under the earth”. “Ideal spots for this include old oil and gas fields, which have already dug into the earth, but any deep saline formation, filled with porous rock and salty water, will do. Ships could also send the CO2 to refineries in the ocean. The idea is that the CO2 stays there for millions of years and eventually chemically binds with the surrounding rock.” This article talks about the use of “clean coal” when it gets to plants and not how bad mining it is. Coal mining is still dangerous to the workers and to the planet. Miners have died from doing their job, they can get anything from cancer to black lung which is a disease minors get from inhaling coal dust over time.

Say there is a slim chance that we can fix things, slim and trying is better than just giving up. We could do better. If solar was cheap enough (and if there weren't companies out there that lie to get people to get it) more people would have it. If power walls were cheap enough more people would have those. The more people that have solar and a battery back-up for energy the better for the planet but the power companies don't want this because it'll mean less money in their pockets. If this were to happen though it would be better than nothing until other technologies are developed. Maybe hydrogen power in the home? Or something else.

The interesting thing about solar and Powerwall together is that you fill up the batteries with power during the day via solar and then you use the power from the batteries at night. If there is any leftover you can sell it to power companies for the grid so they don't have to make as much power.

What if we move to Mars? The problem with this is we'll just do the same thing there and the same thing to the next planet and the next one unless we learn our lesson. If history shows us one thing, we're really bad at learning lessons, either by mistakes we made or other people's mistakes (unless the learned lesson makes companies money that is). That's the thing though, now that we know Mars and other planets are possible, the wealthy can move and the poor will be stuck on a wasted planet that they didn't think was worth even trying to fix.

I think we should just try and do whatever it takes to fix our planet, if not for us for the future generations to come. If we don't at least try, what does that say about us as a race?