All the superpower governments of the earth are in Copenhagen to negotiate large, complex treaties that mandate carbon output, which have implications for pretty much every aspect of an economy, a culture, and life in the respective countries.
But all that could be made moot by us. We can change world energy on our own, decrease the carbon footprint as a grassroots project from the bottom up.
If each us, or even a quarter of us, installed solar panels on our roofs, and reduced our dependency on the grid by say, 40% to 50%, if a quarter of us did that, then we’d create a critical mass movement that would grow exponentially.
We could tilt on its head a local power plant by getting, say, a fifth of a local town to shift to solar. That would garner some local attention in the community, force some changes with the local company in terms of more generous compliance rules and regs, grab the attention of local politicos, and thus begin a mass movement. Scales of economy would kick in with costs. And who knows what contagious behavior would occur one town over, and the town over from that.
Before you know it, we’d have real policy change on a local level. And that’s how real change sticks, when it’s bottom up.
So lets broadcast, tell our neighbors, tell your aunt, tell co-workers. Yes, let’s hope good things come from the worldwide summit in Copenhagen. But really the true summit is in each of our neighborhoods, and it’s convening now.
Policy Level
As Al Gore says, “We have at our fingertips all of the tools we need to solve three or four climate crises, and we only need to solve one.”
While we force change on-the-ground level, the macro promises can follow. And while they discuss such policies in Copenhagen, there are a few zany geo-engineering ideas tossed about that hopefully never see the light of day from the authors of
SuperFreakonomics, who think a technology will come along that will simply wipe out the current carbon problem. They offer some suggestions.
- A large man-made system that would force the deep cold water to the top of the ocean, a constant rotation so that we’re drawing the coolness of the deep water to the surface.
- After volcanic eruptions, the sulfur dioxide reflects sunlight for months, creating a cooling effect. We should mimic that by shooting large amounts of sulfur dioxide 18 miles into the sky.
- A massive amount of boats with the technology to create cloud cover over the ocean.
Critics are quick to debunk these ideas, but it does show ingenuity. Given the efforts any one of these would take, wouldn’t it be easier to give thousands and thousands of homes and businesses their own individual means to generate clean power? Changing how we generate power is the solution. Conjuring up a magic bullet that keeps our behaviors the same is like doing the same thing and expecting different results… isn’t that the definition of insanity?
