A Reimagined World

The core problem humanity faces is climate change.  We’re staring down possible decades, or more, of climate disasters, water, and food shortages. It can all be attributed to human activities dumping huge quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which in turn, is warming up the planet.  The repercussions from greenhouse gases will have a long and lasting impact on the planet.  Fortunately, we have solutions!  Let’s dive into the top ways our world can be reimagined.

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A Brief Overview

The goal is to lay out what we need to do to make the biggest impact, aim our efforts to get the biggest ‘wins’ to curb the root causes of climate change, and limit the amount of greenhouse gasses we are dumping into the atmosphere.

If you haven’t already checked out the climate change breakdown, I highly suggest you do, as it sets the groundwork for why we need to fight the causes of climate change.  This battle is the necessary first stop on our journey towards A Grand Future. 

Human greenhouse gas emissions can be grouped into four broad main sectors (jump to any of them below):

• Buildings
• Transportation
• Land & Agriculture/Food
• Manufacturing/Industry

Within these broad groupings, we’ll pinpoint the contributors of greenhouse gases.  In addition, all of these groups have one common denominator: they all need energy to operate.

For each group, energy generation makes up a huge portion of the greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, it’s the first thing we’ll look at.  

Then, we’ll go through the top solutions and alternatives across all the groups that will make the biggest impact in reducing our carbon footprint.  Our aim will be to focus on areas that effect the most people.  That’s where our efforts should be concentrated and will make the most difference.

Unfortunately, this list is in no way comprehensive. However, our friends at The Drawdown.org have complied an amazing compendium with a more exhaustive analysis.  Check it out, if you are so inclined!

Not all the solutions are so cut and dry.  Becoming a fully sustainable civilization isn’t going to be easy. Transforming our world will be a massive undertaking.  But, if you only get one takeaway from all this, it should be this:

We need to DE-CARBONIZE, ASAP!

The Forthcoming Energy Revolution

We need to really take a hard look at the whole energy process – from production on down to consumption.  It all hinges on getting production right and channeling it all the way to the end user.  And, humanity is severely behind the ball when it comes to sustainable energy production.

While energy production (specifically, electricity) isn’t a category on its own, energy generation is critical to running our world’s infrastructure spanning across all the main greenhouse gas categories: Manufacturing/Industry, Buildings, Transportation, Land & Agriculture/Food.   Some estimate that powering our global society contributes over a third of the greenhouse gas emissions alone.

Most of the roadblocks are monetary and institutional bias (as with most things).  The electric companies of today have an oligopoly on energy production and distribution.  They have sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into fossil fuel-based energy production. They aren’t going to just roll over and take down all their ‘dirty’ plants.  Unfortunately, a phased renewable energy approach is probably the reluctant compromise we’ll have to make.

Thus, if we want to start from the bottom up, it’ll start with an Energy Revolution! 

Renewable Energy Production

We need to create a civilization that completely cuts out its reliance and use of carbon-based fuels as fast as possible if we are to prevent the worst-case scenarios of climate change.  We are currently very dependent on fossil fuel derivatives including oil, natural gas, and coal for power production.  The US alone, produces over 80% of its electricity from these carbon derivatives. And the remaining electricity comes from nuclear and hydropower, which have issues in their own right.

We have alternatives; we just need to now scale them and scale them fast.  In some sense, the solution to electric generation is simple, in theory – Go Renewable!  We But, in practice, it’s not so simple.

Go Solar!

Some experts say that the US will only need a total area 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels, to power the ENTIRE country.  That’s an area the size of the Houston metro area.  Big, yes, but surely not insurmountably so.

If it was possible to harness one single hour of all the sunlight that reached the earth it would provide more power than the entire world consumes in a year. Hence, theoretically, the world’s power needs could easily be supplied by solar alone.  Large scale utility solar farms in conjunction with concentrated solar farms (where mirrors are used to redirect the sun’s energy to generate power) are some of the most effective and clean renewable energy solutions we have.  Best part is, once the solar system is setup, the energy from the sun is FREE!

Wind Power!

Wind power generation has become an extremely effective way to produce energy – especially, in areas that are known to have steady wind flow.  In the US, those areas are mostly located in the Midwest and Southwest.  Wind farms, once constructed, will also produce a good amount of power and are fairly maintenance free once they are up and running. 

The two main drawbacks are the price tag and people think they’re ugly. One wind turbine could cost over 2 million dollars; however, it provides power for an average of 940 homes.  So, while initially expensive on installation, the payback period is very attractive.  Wind farms could be constructed in areas where there is a low population density, which would reduce ‘unseemliness’ of them.  And, unlike solar, wind blows at night!

An Integrated Renewable System

Picture a world where putting solar on commercial roofs, residential homes, over parking lots, and highways are commonplace.  We would have so much electricity, we wouldn’t know what to do with it.

Even putting forth a simple building code to ensure homeowners replace defunct conventional shingles with modern solar roof tiles, would do wonders.  Theoretically, people replace roofs every 30 years, so if installing solar roofs were their only option, all US households would be converted naturally over the next few decades.  Having all homes with solar roofs installed could alone supply over 33% of US electricity requirements! 

Supplemented with utility scaled solar and wind farms spaced throughout the country and we could get all the power we’d ever need!

A national program for reform needs to be undertaken. The electric companies need to go completely renewable.  Public works projects could make solar and wind the dominant forms of energy production in as little as 10 years with some gritty dedication.  While providing jobs in the process.

The answer for a sustainable future relies on solar and wind to be realized on both a distributed basis (as on residential homes) and on a utility-scale (I.e. commercial farms)

I realize this is very idealistic, but this is the kind of grand-scale thinking we need. And we need to win the war against global warming in the upcoming decades, if we want to see any future at all.

We Need More Power… Storage

There is one big drawback with converting over to fully renewable energy sources: the power produced is intermittent. Clearly, the sun is only “on” during the day, so solar energy can only be produced during daylight hours.  And it’s only windy… some of the time.

Obviously, we should install utility-grade solar and wind in areas that are most favorable to having a lot of sun and wind, respectively. Using the US as an example again, the Southwest gets more sunlight. While the Midwest is typically windier, as opposed to other regions.  

So, what do we do when that’s not enough?  As said before, there isn’t always going to be wind and the sun isn’t always overhead.

Well, why not store excess power when wind’s whipping and the suns-a-shining?!

Power storage has come a long way in the last 15 years and it’s only getting better. Partially attributed to our friend Mr. Musk and Telsa driving the electric battery revolution.

I’m not going to bore you with all the details, but a Telsa Megapack (a commercial grade battery) can store 3 MWh each.  This is equivalent to storing enough power for 1 US household (using 30 kWh/day) for 100 days!  It’s really impressive that 15 years ago, battery storage on that scale did not even exist. (And there’s even more promising battery technology on the horizon!)

The new electric system will be designed for peak usage.  Thus, on your average day it’ll have a massive amount of renewable energy in excess.  We’ll channel some of the excess power and store it for when we need it.

Taking the example above further, if it takes 100 miles x 100 miles of solar panels to power the US – then with current utility grade battery technology it will only take ONE SQUARE MILE of storage to power the US overnight.  And that’s including a few days backup with quite a bit of redundancy built in.  This is an astonishingly small area needed to meet America’s energy storage needs for over 300 million people.

Additionally, each household would have their own backup battery storage unit(s).  Combined with smart automated systems, blackouts with be a thing of the past. In the rare case there is a deficit in power from the utility company, the house battery would act as a supplemental electric supply to draw from.

So, much in the same way modern supply chains operate: there will be a big “distribution center” supplying your local “store” (in this case, your home).  Except, the “store” can send supply back to the “distribution center”, if needed.  Which brings us full circle: We need a new electric grid.

Re-Charge The Power Grid!

One unseen complication in all this is the matter of electric power distribution. It’s something we take for granted every day, but really don’t think about.

Most of the power grid infrastructure today was built in the 1950s and 1960s and was not meant to cope with the ever-increasing power demands of millions.  Not to mention, our nation’s out of date energy grid will be hard pressed to deal with the different energy ebbs and flows that renewables produce, the individual households pushing power back into the system, or pulling power from different battery storage facilities.

As it stands now, the grid doesn’t really have a hope of bringing us through to the next century.  If how we produce power needs to be re-worked from the ground up, then it follows, that distribution of that energy also has to be revamped and modernized for the future.

A massive overhaul is needed to increase flexibility in the grid. Some of the improvements to the grid of tomorrow will include localized “microgrids” which will react, communicate, and coordinate with macro grids to distribute power.  This will build in multiple redundancies to eliminate power outages. 

To facilitate this, smart AI grid technology will need to come online. AI will be able to instantaneously adjust to the demands needed and supply power efficiently to all. 

These are the most important components necessary for an energy revolution!  However, this is only one side of the equation: the production side. In the next sections, we look at overhauling the consumption side of our carbon-based activities as well.

Buildings?

Yes, Buildings!

The average American spends 90% of their daily life indoors. Thus, it would make sense that we would want to create an environment that meets our ideal preferences.  If it’s hot outside, you’d want it cool inside, and vice versa. 

As you can imagine, getting these conditions to our liking for the 8 billion people of our planet requires quite a bit of energy.  And unfortunately, this means that greenhouse gases are released into the air as a by-product – accounting for 18% of overall greenhouse gasses.

Currently, the majority of humans do not cool and heat their homes efficiently, in a sustainable manner. We need to rethink and overhaul how we heat and cool the places where we spend most of our time.  Let’s put the brand-new power from the energy revolution to good work!

Full of Hot Air

Currently, there are a multitude of ways we heat buildings.  Some examples include propane, natural gas, oil, wood, and electric. 

Our buildings, both commercial and residential, will need to convert and use primarily electricity to power heating systems, if we want to eliminate greenhouse emissions.  Previously, electric wasn’t as economical, but with the advent of fully renewable power sources coming online, electric will become the mode of choice for heating.

Instead of heating via fossil fuel derivatives, we can use electricity to power the boilers to heat our water, electricity to operate the furnace making steam or hot air, or electrify our baseboards.  Electric heating has been around for a while, it just never was too cost efficient. 

That will change with the energy revolution.  Electricity will be cheap and practically free.  Use of electrically powered systems to heat the home will be a no brainer for those who care to save and not burn their money. (pun intended)

Additionally, heat pumps, which were previously very expensive and reserved for big buildings (think hotels) are coming down in price and becoming more efficient.  Without getting too technical, a heat pump is basically like an air conditioner, but used for heating as well.  It distributes air between the outdoors and indoors to meet your chosen temperature settings. 

Unfortunately, heat pumps don’t work as well if it’s really cold (under 30 ^oF) or too hot outside (above 100 ^oF).  That’s where geothermal comes into play!

Geothermal energy taps into the unlimited energy deep down in the earth.  Costs have come down slightly in the last decade, but it’s still quite expensive.  Hopefully, as economies of scale kick in geothermal will be more practical and economical.

When geothermal is installed properly, you will get a constant 55 ^OF in your home – in the summer, winter, spring, fall, in Puerto Rico, or in Alaska. Geothermal, when coupled with electric heating or a heat pump, will make heating and cooling your home very economical and efficient.

Brrr… it’s Cold in Here

We’ve been using modern air conditioning units to cool our homes for over 50 years now.  For many hotter countries, ACs have been a lifesaver for enduring the unbearable heat.  The invention of air conditioning has increased people’s standard of living in hot climates throughout the world over. 

But, of course, there’s a problem with how air conditioning works – you guessed it, they produce greenhouse gasses.  And not just carbon dioxide or methane, but fluorinated gases, which will stay in our atmosphere for thousands of years without breaking down.

The reason this happens, is because like refrigerators, AC units use refrigerants in order to function.  The byproduct of this reaction results in the release of fluorinated gases.

While there are a multitude of proposed substitutes for refrigerants, no particular solution stands above the pack in terms of a solid replacement. 

But as previously mentioned, geothermal is a great solution in cooling buildings.  After the upfront cost of implementation, geothermal will provide a perpetual cooling source for virtually no cost.  Additionally, by coupling geothermal with better insulation, buildings will naturally stay very cool with minimal energy consumption.  This is effectively a completely greenhouse gas free solution!

Smart… Buildings?

There are a plethora of upgrades we can make to buildings to make them greener and more economical.  We are finally entering an era when technology can literally run our home and know our habits better than we do. 

Installing a ‘smart thermostat’ could reduce home or a commercial building’s electric and heat consumption by up to 20%.  Smart thermostats take into account a host of different variables including daily routines and preferences to regulate accordingly. 

Taking it one step further, a ‘universal hub’ can control your lighting, heat, or window shades by tracking occupant movement using motion sensors. Allowing individual rooms to be ‘turned off’ when you’re not using them. These hubs can now even do luxury things like integrate with voice technology and do things like play music, pre-heat the oven, or even dim the lighting just by asking. 

There is a whole gambit of retrofitting practices that can be performed on existing buildings.  With the implementation of stricter green regulations, houses and commercial buildings will have to ensure greenhouse gases are reduced drastically and wastes of all kind are properly handled.  Each of the following innovations and solutions will spawn multibillion-dollar industries:

• Better Insulation – buildings lose a lot of residual heat because they are poorly insulated.
• Natural Solar Radiation – why not use the sun to naturally warm the house!
• Solar Hot Water – use the sun directly to heat water!
• Smart Glass – limits the amount of solar radiation to keep a building cooler by getting opaque.
• Shifting to Clean cooking – teach sustainable cooking practices in the undeveloped world.
• Covert Lighting – LED lights use 75% less energy than incandescent and last 25 times longer.
• Energy Efficient Appliances – new appliances have to meet very rigorous energy requirements.
• Efficient Water Distribution – smart water distribution technology will limit water waste, which will also help with another one of humanity’s biggest problems – water scarcity.

Now, even ‘Net Zero’ buildings are being built with best waste reduction and sustainability practices in mind. These new emission free buildings are perfecting and aiming to eliminate all greenhouse gas production and actually have zero effect on the outside environment. 

Some are even better than net zero, since they produce more power then they need and distribute it back to the grid.  These very modern buildings have parks, gardens, water collection, waste treatment in addition to electricity and heat production.  Truly, marvels of efficiency and where our society needs to go into order to curb our greenhouse gas emissions. 

Taming the Beast of Transportation

The big automotive companies are resistance to change and have kept transportation static for years. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have a healthy planet in 30 years, then enabling rich old guys pay for their gas guzzling super cars and mega-yachts. 

When we broke down the causes for climate change, we saw that transportation makes up 14% of the total global greenhouse gas emitted.  The transportation sector covers a wide range of different subcategories.  Here’s a look at the breakdown of the subcategories below:

To start off, 74.5% of emissions are from ground transportation between cars and trucks.  This is by far the majority of the whole transportation sector and where we should focus most of our efforts. That 74.5% is the big glaring red herring that’s pointing us right to what we need to work on.

Luckily, in ground transportation in subcategories (for cars and trucks), we’re already making some strides towards sustainability.  The auto industry is producing more electric vehicles every year, thanks to market pressure.

Ground Transportation (less than 300 miles)

We know what we have to do: use only electric vehicles. The solution is right in front of us and, as such, is considered the ‘easiest’ solution to combat climate change.  

In theory, we can eliminate all greenhouse gases produced from ground transportation altogether by going all electric. However, unfortunately, ‘easy’, when it comes to converting an entire global culture hell bent on sticking with carbon-based fuel sources, is still pretty freaking hard.

Yes, we have all the technology necessary to make this a reality.  We just have to massively ramp up efforts to convert gas vehicle assembly lines to incorporate modern battery technology.

The Paris Climate Agreement is not aggressive enough.  The conversion to all electric vehicles just needs to be done quicker.  A bold stance to mandate car manufactures to go all electric needs to be adopted by governments and companies all over the world. 

Ideally, by 2035, we’d want every single vehicle produced to be electric.

The beautiful part is, electric vehicles pair so nicely with the aforementioned energy revolution.  Let’s harness all that new clean renewable energy to power all the vehicles!

Additionally, there is more tech that will come to maturity over the next 10(ish) years: autonomous driving.  Cars will drive themselves!

Once autonomous driving becomes ubiquitous and vehicles are allowed to drive on “their own”, there will not even be a need for mass car ownership.  Because there will be a fleet of constantly roving vehicles, picking up and dropping off people and goods. Utilizing transportation as a service will make more sense, cost-wise, then owning your own vehicle. 

Think about it… on a typical day you drive your car to work and it sits in the parking lot for 8.5 hours then you drive it home.  Then it sits in your driveway for another 10 hours and the cycle repeats.  To me, that’s a very inefficient use of resources.  ‘Hailing’ a robot taxi is going to be the logical, most cost-efficient transportation choice in the future.

Unfortunately, as for the current state of affairs – practically zero trucks are electric and electric passenger vehicle production are still only a drop in the bucket.  Out of the 285 million cars registered in the US only 1% (or 2.8 million) are electric vehicles.  But at least, we’re heading in the right direction that number is going up every year. 

Of the 20 million cars made worldwide every year, 500,000 are electric. These numbers are still pitifully low.  We need to do a complete 180, if we want to get anywhere close to renouncing our dependence on fossil fuels for transportation.

Domestic Travel (over 300 miles; up to 3000 miles)

In 2019, 77% of air travel in the US was domestic. This means that domestic air travel (less than approximately 3000 miles), accounts for the majority share of air transportation in the US. (Side note: European flights have similar statistics – a majority of flights were traveling to destinations within the EU.)

There always seems to me that there were no decent options for ‘in-between’ distanced travel destinations.  For instance, if I wanted to go for a long weekend to Nashville, when I’m coming from outside north Philadelphia, do I fly or do I drive?

It’s a 12-hour drive or a 2-hour flight.  So, on the surface, it would seem that if I wanted to save time, flying would make a ton of sense.  However, there are a lot of other factors to consider. 

For one, it’s not just the flight time you have to factor in, it’s the travelling to the airport, the buffer time, and the security check time.  You might have to add on 3 hours for those things.  Then, on the other end, you’ll have to get the car rental, maybe pick up your bags, taxi, and de-plane, add another 2 hours.  So, that 2-hour flight time turned into, a not so fun, 7 hours. 

On top of that, there’s the cost, if you drive with friends you could split gas and get down to Nashville fairly cheaply for maybe $60/person (depending on the car).

While by flying, EACH person is paying the [minimum] $150 roundtrip airplane ticket plus splitting the cost of the rental car at maybe $50/person, for a total of $200 per person for transportation.  Whereas, if you drove down you have access to your car for local transportation in Nashville for free. 

The flight decision doesn’t seem as appealing now. 

We have to deal with these dilemmas all the time. No matter where you are, if you’re considering travelling to a ‘mid-distanced’ location these are some of the factors you’d have to consider.  You have two options: fly or drive.  Sometimes, neither option is all that attractive and both are currently pollution-heavy choices.

What if there was another way?  What if cities could be connected by a fast, reliable, pollution free, and fairly cheap transportation system?

Hyper..What?

I think there is a HUGE opportunity to fill this ‘intermediate distance’ travel niche in the transportation sector.  Long distance car travel and a lot of airplane flights would drop off drastically (along with the associated pollution) with an intermediate-distanced domestic travel alternative.

Well such a thing exists – kind of.  It’s called a train. 

Unfortunately, train technology has been stagnant since oh… the 1930’s.  The problem with trains, currently, is that they’re not necessarily that cheap, fast, clean, or reliable. Other countries, namely China and Japan have proved that high speed rail travel is not only feasible, but desirable.

And we have blueprints and working models for an even better solution – both faster and more cost effective.

This new transportation concept is called the HYPERLOOP!

Basically, the idea of the hyperloop is to put a ‘train’, on steroids, in a tube.  The tube would have a lot of air sucked out, so the hyperloop’s train cars (tentatively called pods) would travel in ‘near vacuum’.  This would enable the hyperloop’s pods to achieve high speeds because air resistance would be insignificant in the tube.  (Get more details at WaitbutWhy.)

Some estimates say that the hyperloop can reach speeds of up to 800 miles an hour!

The minimal amount of air that does build up in the front of pods would be pumped and redirected to the undercarriage.  This would enable the pods to ‘float’ on a cushion of air just as on an air hockey table (with maybe some help from super magnets)! 

These speeds are achieved through a process called electric induction, which is similar to how electric cars move.  The whole system would be completely sustainable and be powered by solar panels mounted on the top of the tubes, which would run the whole distance from city to city.  

By interconnecting all major cities within a country, or region, the hyperloop would be our answer for a fast and modern transit system for intermediate distances.  This would cut back on long distance car travel and a majority of unnecessary air travel to alleviate some travel traffic and associated greenhouse gases. 

Even having a decent fraction of travelers use the competitive, fully carbon neutral hyperloop system would cut down on the glaring amount of airline greenhouse emissions and provide a better transportation alternative.

Give the people better options and they would be more apt to use them.

The hyperloop transportation system is faster, runs more frequently, has less waiting, is powered by clean energy, causes less environmental impact, and is just way more efficient across the board.  This is the kind of solution that is a “no-brainer”.

International Travel (greater than ~2000 miles)

Now that domestic travel is licked and a majority of the flights have been ‘reformed to a greener mode’ of transportation with the aforementioned hyperloop, what do we do about the remaining long-distance flights?

Some decent improvements have been made by some of the big plane manufacturers. Boeing and Airbus have increased fuel economy by modifying plane aerodynamics (google: winglets), shutting off engines while taxing, and upgrading engine fuel efficiencies, but there is only so much one can do with the existing template. 

Planes, as they are, will always produce carbon dioxide as a byproduct using the current constrained and conventional frameworks.  The whole model has to be reimagined and rebuilt from the ground up.

This field is wide open for innovation as we have no real great alternatives to fossil fuel based long-distance travel. 

There’s still some hope on the horizon in using battery and electric technology for powered flight.  But unlike electric cars, we’re still years away from having a high enough storage capacity while optimizing for weight to support long distance trips.

Theoretically, hydrogen power can be used as an alternative energy source.  But, as a viable alternative, right now, hydrogen power is still in its infancy stages and will probably take at least a decade to mature.

One notable billionaire nonchalantly mentioned that he had a design for an electric long-distance jet, years ago.  Unfortunately, it has seemed to be forgotten to time and fallen through the cracks.  Probably because this particular billionaire has a few other things on his plate. So, I crafted a letter to jog his memory.

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Elon, (yes, we’re on a first name basis)

Hey again!  If you’re reading this – please release your VTOL Supersonic All-Electric Jet blueprints to the public – ASAP!  The world needs to start working on them now, so we can replace our current fleet in, say, 20 years.  Thanks, and keep up the good work.

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We hit on the three major areas that will make the biggest impact on cutting out greenhouse emissions from the transportation sector.  But there are also a ton of other opportunities to limit our greenhouse gas emissions as well. Here is a list of a few of them:

• Walk & Bike – opportunities for pedestrian and bike ways are limited.  Creating better options for walking or biking enhances towns, increases health, and prevents greenhouse gases.
• Electric bikes – can increase the range of simply biking and walking, making it a viable alternative to getting in your car if you need to get somewhere locally.
• Carpool – many drive huge SUVs only to travel by themselves most of the time.  Carpooling to destinations is an easy way to save on money, decrease greenhouse gas emissions, and have fun all at the same time!
• Remote Work – Why commute at all, when you can work in the comforts of your own home?
• Hydrogen-based power – A promising alternative clean energy source; still years away from making it to market.
• Mass Transit – the options people currently have are pretty poor. A revamped local mass transit system would be an awesome alternative for people to get around.
• Ocean Shipping – 50% of the sea-going cargo vessels are transporting some form of fossil fuel.  If transportation, energy production, and usage of fossil fuels in all other industries could magically stop overnight, half of ocean shipping would be eliminated as a result.

Certainly, there’s a lot of work to be done, but we’re going to get to see some exciting new innovations over the next few decades!

Land, Agriculture, and Food – Oh My

Currently, our conduct towards the world’s non-human life is truly appalling. As humans, we feel that it is our right to just take over land areas and do anything we want.  We proceed to rape and pillage all resources from the land, ruin habitats, and kill off both plant and animal life in the process.  Then we move on to continue the cycle elsewhere.

This needs to stop.  We are not the only species who live on the planet.  We are eliminating a lot of the vegetation that help us regulate the carbon emissions.  Thereby, shooting ourselves in the proverbial foot. 

As if that isn’t enough, by destroying natural habitats, we are replacing the carbon dioxide capturing plants with livestock and farmland, which emit more greenhouse emissions.  Thus, in essence, humanity is not only eliminating the forests as carbon storage centers for the planet, we are also burning the wood AND having methane producing livestock use the land for grazing to pollute the atmosphere even more with greenhouse gases!  Talk about adding insult to injury.

The Return to Wilderness

Worldwide, 18 million acres of forest are cut down every year.  We are destroying the forested land the size of Austria, every year. Lament on that for a minute.

A lot of the solutions are commonsense, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this stuff out.  If we need the forests to sequester carbon… let’s stop slash and burning the forests.  Simple as that. 

We need to enact regulations that all logging on reserved natural lands would be prohibited.  Natural land areas would be protected by law.  Restoration efforts would be employed on massive scale to restore the boundaries of wild areas to say, prior to the 1800’s.  Only separate carefully, population-controlled tree farms would be allowed for wood procurement. 

Some people would need to be relocated, but that is a small price to pay since the forests are such an integral part in restoring our planet’s biosphere health. Without a majority of the globe covered in plant life, we can kiss a bright future goodbye.  We need to bring back plant life en-masse, if we hope to curb the effects of global warming.

Restoring our natural ecosystems is imperative in the war against global warming.  These habitats include tropical, temperate, boreal, mangrove and coastal wetlands, peatland, marine – basically all types of forests.  Barren and fallow fields that once were forests need to be replanted and restored as soon as possible. A forest could take decades to mature.

Plant First Diets

When you eat vegetables or fruits, you’re considered a primary consumer.  This means you’re eating food directly from the producer level (in this case: the plant).  However, when you’re eating meat, you could be one, two, or three levels removed from a first level producer. 

In other words, the animal you’re eating had to consume feedstock to grow. An animal is a very inefficient means of passing nutrients to you.  In essence, meat consumption is an intermediate step in which a lot of energy is lost.

Objectively speaking, there is waste in eating animals because everything the animal eats is not directly turned into consumable meat.  The animal needs to burn some of its food to do other things like reproduce, breathe, stay active and alive, create bone, and other non-edible parts.  In other words, animal foodstuff does not correlate to a 1:1 ratio in pounds of meat produced.  In a perfectly efficient system, every pound of meat would equate to 1 pound of inputted feed.  These are the conservative conversion ratio estimates for the three main types of meat we eat:

• Chickens – consume 2 – 5 times the amount of feed vs. meat they produce
• Pigs – consume 4 – 9 times the amount of feed vs. meat they produce
• Cattle – consume 6 – 25 times the amount of feed vs. meat they produce

Thus, it takes more land to grow food for animals than if humans just grew crops and consumed those crops directly.  Animal consumption is plain inefficient. 

In addition, ruminates, such as cows, have multiple stomachs.  Their stomachs go through a process called enteric fermentation to digest, which releases a ton of methane into the atmosphere.  If we didn’t consume any ruminates at all, the atmosphere would have an estimated 25% less overall greenhouse gases.

So, what’s the answer?

I believe in the current predicament we’re in, we have to cut back drastically on any kind of meat consumption, or at the very least cut out ruminates from our collective diet.  And I know this is a controversial behavioral change, but the alternatives down the road are much, much worse.

Not to mention the benefits of taking meat, especially, red meat, off the table, so to speak, are pretty impressive.  Deaths from heart disease, obesity, and some cancers, could drop by up to 20%, saving an estimated trillion dollars in healthcare, worldwide by 2050.

I’m not a vegetarian. But, if there was the option to buy synthetic meat over the real thing with no real discernible difference in price, nutrition, or taste, while doing the right thing to limit greenhouse gases, who wouldn’t be game for adopting alternative meat?

Thing is, there are viable meat alternatives and synthetically grown meat (in a lab) already on the market. Both of which are way more efficient than raising an animal for food.

Food Waste(ful) Management

Have you ever been to a restaurant and seen the waiters take away plates?  Half the time there is still a ton of food left, not even eaten.  All that leftover food is trashed.

How often does food go bad in your fridge? How often does a farmer have crops that aren’t viable for consumption? Does food spoil in transportation?  How much food does a supermarket have to throw out because it’s expired?

There are so many places in the supply chain where perishable food can spoil.  It’s estimated that 30 – 40% of food is wasted.  That’s an astronomically high percentage.

Just picture, out of 10,000 cucumbers, 3,000 to 4,000 never gets eaten!  All that wasted energy, time, and money spent on produce – unnecessarily.

Unfortunately, there is no single answer for eliminating food waste on this scale.  The system has to be looked at as a whole, on all levels, on a case by case basis.  Then made to be more efficient to reduce excess. 

If people can’t eat everything, portions should be smaller.  If produce is going bad in transit, then trucks should have better methods to keep produce fresh.  People could create meal plans to plan out their shopping. Or, do food preparation for the week in order to reduce leftovers and waste.  Robust community compost programs could be put into place to reuse biodegradable detritus. These and numerous other ways will ensure we waste not and are as effective as possible with our food supply.

Some estimates say if we get the land, waste, agriculture, and livestock problem completely revamped, we could reduce our total global carbon footprint by 33%. That’s MASSIVE! Consequently, this category is one of the most important when we reimagine our world.

There are many promising additional ideas for sustainable agricultural methods and practices:

• Fertilizer Alternatives – Fertilizers emit nitrogen dioxide into the atmosphere – one of the most potent greenhouse gases. 
• Discontinuing Pesticides and Chemicals – Natural alternatives are numerous, including some below.
• Improved Rice cultivation – Rice is a staple crop for a third of the world’s population and produces greenhouse gases.  Rice can be grown much more eco-friendly with a few tweaks in the growing process.
• Tree Intercropping – the practice of intermingling crops, cover crops, and trees for biodiversity and more sustainable soil composition.
• Silvopasture – like intercropping, this practice integrates trees and pasture land to facilitate a more natural area for livestock to forage.
• Regenerative Agriculture, Permaculture, and Efficient Crop Field Management – a holistic approach to farming using a combination of a variety of practices. These can include: crop rotation, crop diversity, tilling techniques, and combining many sustainable practices into a single unified system.
• Better Soil Management – combined with the above practices – top soil management and soil life cycle mindfulness will be key to the future of farming, which will also prevent erosion and allow for healthier soil.
• Upgrade Irrigation Techniques – for more efficient water use.  For instance, targeted water “drip” systems are shown to be twice as effective as some current methods.
• Sustainable Grazing practices and Field Rotation – Animal grazing is not managed effectively.  There are numerous methods to preserve land for sustainable grazing.
• Feed Additives & Substitutions – By altering cattle feed, we can drastically reduce the methane produced from the digestive enteric fermentation of ruminates.
• Multi-strada Agroforestry – a practice of treating farms like rain forests with a multitude of different plant species grown together to mimic nature.

We’ll need to produce more food, in less space, and with way more efficiency.  I think we’re up for the challenge!

The Dirt on Manufacturing and Industry

Of all the sectors, industry and manufacturing processes produce the most carbon emissions at a whopping 29%.  I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on these subjects, but big reform is needed across the board. 

Making materials like concrete, aluminum, steel, plastics, glass, and other global necessities produces a lot of greenhouse gas emissions that we’re not even aware about.

But, in general, we have to step back and take a first principles approach to critique every material we produce on such a massive scale.  With an unbiased attitude, we need to ask the following:

• Does this material or its production process produce greenhouse gases?
• Can we use alternative materials?  (Are there even better materials?)
• Can the methods of production be changed to prevent carbon emissions?
• Can we re-capture the toxic off-gassing and waste?
• Can the processes be powered by renewable energy sources?

What a load of… Cement

The problem with a lot of alternatives, is that there’s just no economic incentive to use anything else. Because cement production is so cheap and there is no penalty for just releasing pollutants into the atmosphere, people keep doing it.

As a little background, cement is the main component in concrete.  We use the stuff in practically everything from roads, to bridges and buildings, to entire cities.  It’s the second most abundant material man uses, besides water.  (Check out this stylish visualization!)

Cement requires the heating up of calcium carbonate (aka limestone) to break it down into carbon dioxide and calcium oxide (lime), a basic component in cement.  So, for every ton of lime produced, there’s also a ton of carbon dioxide produced. Then, promptly released into the atmosphere. And we produce a SHIT TON of cement.  (And yes, that’s a proper measurement unit.)

If we didn’t use cement or concrete, we could reduce total global carbon emissions by 8%, EVERY YEAR.

The cement process has a plethora of ways it can produce less carbon.  The carbon dioxide off-gas can be contained or actually even re-injected to trap the CO₂ back in the cement. The process can be powered with renewable energy.  Also, even more efficient methods of production are possible.

Nothing for nothing, cement is replaceable, we just have to have the will to do everything in our power to make that a reality.  Reusing thrown out glass, paper, plastics can be used and not put into landfills… win, win! Even discarded concrete debris can be repurposed. 

There are actually numerous of sustainable alternatives to cement. Straw bales can be used for some cement purposes.  Finite can be made out of plain sand.  Cement can even be combined with hemp to form hempcrete!  Ferrock absorbs CO₂.  Grass and cement can coexist and in an eco-friendly layout.

And the list goes on.  Cement can be diluted and mixed with other materials, as well, to form a bunch of different composites like ashcrete, timbercrete, or foamcrete.  Check out the list here.

The ancient romans made a stronger cement out of volcanic ash that did not produce carbon emissions. Heck, if the ancients can do it, we should be able to figure it out! Cement emissions could be a thing of the past.

My point is, we have numerous alternatives.  It all comes down to the cost and breaking the “machine” that is the concrete industry.  They aren’t going to be brought down without a fight.

Real Steel

Steel is literally the pillar that holds all our infrastructure together.  It is the backbone support of all our modern buildings, roads, and bridges because of its strength.

Steel is made by firing up iron and some carbon. Then, to give the final steel product the characteristics desired, a dash of other elements are added.

Every ton of steel produces, on average, 1.85 tons of greenhouse gases in the refining and manufacturing process. This equates to about 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Unfortunately, there aren’t very many perfect alternatives since steel is very enmeshed in the fabric of everyday construction because of its properties and cost.  However, there are some hopeful contenders.

FRP, or Fibre-reinforced plastic, is a hopeful candidate.  Made from polymers, FRP, still is carbon based, however, recycled plastics can be used, which makes it a better solution then regular steel.  The declining costs of production is making FRP an up-and-coming, attractive solution.

If used sustainably with regulation, wood and bamboo could also step in for steel.  Both are strong and have a negligible carbon footprint.

Carbon nanotubes are truly the material from the future – it is over 100 times stronger than steel and lighter than aluminum.  The construction implications of such a material are mind-boggling.  Right now, carbon nanotubes are still in their embryonic phase.  We still have a long way to go in terms of mass production and application.

For now, we need to capture steel pollutants when and where they are produced.  Let’s make sure that the steel process is powered by renewable energy sources until new materials and alternatives are scaled.

Plastics: An Ecological Nightmare

We use plastics for everything; from takeout containers, car parts, toys, electronics, furniture, bags, shoes, appliances, bottles, pipes, medical equipment, straws, garbage cans, tape, insulation, disposable cutlery, cups, packages, clothing, and the lists goes on forever.  Literally EVERYTHING.

And plastics are made from… You guessed it, fossil fuel derivatives – primarily crude oil and natural gas. Creating plastics releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.  And the decomposition of plastics release methane into the atmosphere. Polluting the atmosphere on both ends – great…

However, once plastic is made, the carbon is locked up and not floating in the atmosphere.  That doesn’t stop us from throwing all our plastics all over the place – stuffing landfills, in the wilderness, and suffocating our oceans.  

It could take up to a thousand years for plastics to decompose.  Plastics might outlast humanity at this rate.

Problem is we don’t do enough to make sure our environment is plastic free.  Our recycling programs are pitiful. Our society treats everything as disposable. We hardly have any facilities to process or recycle our waste so we toss everything into landfills. 

There is no cure-all answer to remedy our plastic dependency.  It’ll take time and innovation.  We’ll need to attack all functions on a case by case basis to figure out if there are alternatives or ways to not use plastics at all.

Used plastics can be reused for other functions – pipes or even road materials.  We need to stop putting things in landfills and put all that ‘junk’ to use.  There are better solutions out there, we just need to adopt them. 

Think of all the plastic we save now that VHS and DVDs are out of fashion.  All the packages you buy just to rip it open and throw out.  Now multiply that by everyone on the planet, everyday… it’s completely nuts! 

Why do I have to buy a new container of laundry detergent every time I go to the store?  Couldn’t I have one container and just go somewhere to get a refill?  I’ve sometimes wondered why there isn’t a huge vat of laundry detergent (or insert some other non-perishable) that we could go to the store with a “container” to refill.  Just think of all the plastic waste that would cut out. 

When was the last time you’ve seen anyone use a water fountain?  Why aren’t more people using a refillable water bottle?

Practically everything you buy comes in a plastic container or bottle.  Why not bring a reusable bag when you go to the store? Some states have outlawed one-time use plastic bags – and somehow, people make do! Many local governments in the US are outlawing other plastics like straws, as well.

All these changes are great, but they are glacially paced.  We need things like this to happen all over, attacking plastic use on multiple fronts.

A cultural shift in practices is needed.  We need to change the mindset from disposable to reusable. “Waste not!” We need to think of solutions in terms of biodegradability, recyclability, and compostability.

More sustainable replacements and practices are possible for everyday goods.  And some already exist.  Hemp, bamboo, wood, bioplastics, cloth – cotton, wool, linen are all examples of sustainable materials that can be used for different functions.  Let’s stop producing nylon or polyester, which both contain plastic derivatives. 

Even more exotic materials have been proposed, such as seaweed or mushroom based materials for packaging.

And what we can’t replace, we could reuse and recycle instead of simply throwing away.  In the same vein, more robust programs for recycling plastics are needed as swell.

While I’ve hit on the big contributors of greenhouse gases in the manufacturing and industry sector, there are still a multitude of areas we need to work on, including some of the following:

• Aluminum – needs to be extracted from ore by processing and smelting, which produces greenhouse gases.  Is there a better way to smelt or capture the off gases?
• Glass – The melting process is the culprit here.  Question is – can we make cleaner glass? 
• Capture of Atmospheric Contaminants – not only should we be capturing pollutants at the source, but we need bulk methods to capture carbon dioxide and methane from the air and landfills.
• Compost! – is a very underutilized resource.  All that good biomass can be put to good use for growing the food we need.
• Upgrade Recycling Programs – Re-purposing all thrown out materials is a huge missed opportunity.

We need to change our society’s modus operandi.  Let’s start doing the smart thing for the Earth. 

The Reimagined World

If we want a sustainable, long-term future for our world, we need to buckle down and start to focus on getting the big wins implemented.

Below is a recap of the top 15 major transformations we need to make across the biggest greenhouse gas producing sectors. To steer humanity towards a sustainable future, we’ll see the greatest successes if we adopt the following ideas:

1. Transition from dirty, carbon-based power to renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar.
2. Make up for dips in renewable energy production by having a backup reserve of power storage.
3. Modernizing the power grid to be more flexible and adaptable.
4. Replace fossil fuel-based heating systems with renewably sourced electric heating.
5. Substitute refrigerants in AC units with other methods of cooling, such as geothermal energy.
6. Use modern smart technology to monitor, regulate, and adjust our buildings.
7. Convert all vehicles from gas guzzling, carbon emitters to clean electric as soon as possible.
8. Construct a green, low-cost transit system for mid-range travel, reducing the need for cars and planes.
9. Innovate a sustainable airplane replacement for overseas destinations and long-distance travel.
10. Stop deforestation, start protecting, and reforesting the wild to restore Earth’s natural habitats.
11. Implement a plant first diet to more effectively use resources and cut down on greenhouse gases.
12. Look at the supply chain from producer to consumer and eliminate food waste at all levels.
13. Replace cement with alternative materials that emit less greenhouse gases as by-products.
14. Decide on a greener solution for steel to support our infrastructure.
15. Substitute the universal use of plastics throughout every facet of our society.

These are the big areas where we need to improve and some of the proposed solutions I’ve come across.  If you have any more – please share!

It’s important to note that while doing all these transformations seem very daunting, we have the capability to do all these things.  We do not need as yet invented technology, the solutions we can implement are feasible.  Collectively, the choice is ours.

Unfortunately, we have to make all of the above improvements on a massive-scale to have any meaningful impact.  A 5% adoption of electric vehicles isn’t going to cut it, that’s just a drop in the bucket.  Everyone needs to make these changes, if we are to have any effect.

Just as we’ve made leaps and bounds in the digital space over the last few decades, humanity has to direct the same efforts to make progress in the real world.  Don’t get me wrong, we’ve made some headway.  Nonetheless, if we plan to make it to the next century, we’ll have to use all the tools at our disposal to evolve into a carbon free species.

Towards A Grand Future

The atmospheric composition is already changing.  Soon we’ll start to see an exponential shift to a hotter Earth if drastic measures are not taken. The consequences of extreme climate change will cause an inconceivable amount of devastation, which would be unimaginable from the relatively pleasant climates we experience today. 

So far, up to this point in history, our planet’s natural systems have adjusted to much of the effects of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions.  This will not continue.  We’re already seeing record breaking temperatures every year and more frequent extreme weather conditions.  If we do not curb our reliance on fossil fuels and other processes that pollute our planet, future generations will be very screwed. 

The oceans, ice, plants, and soil are compensating for our carelessness and absorbing a lot of the temperature increases and greenhouse gases. But they are reaching a saturation point.  In the coming years, they will not be able to help us. If we don’t transform our ways, a runaway greenhouse effect could arise and the world would be forever altered… for the worse. 

Being more cognizant of what we’re doing to the planet is the first step.  Any way we can reduce, reuse, recycle the things that produce environmental contamination should be top of mind. 

Education is the second step.  People all over the world need to be taught how each and every one of us effect the environment. And how our collective choices are affecting the Earth’s health and the future.  Improvements can be made by modest action, whether it be persuading “advanced” developed countries to change their practices, showing the citizens of developing countries ‘greener’ methods, or educating women on making smart nuclear family decisions.

We’ll need to implement all these changes and more by taking bold action to bring about a desirable future. Once we commit to the Reimagined World initiatives, opportunities will be plentiful.  Entire new industries and sectors of the economy will need to open up to convert our society over.

Most people think jobs will be lost by eliminating our reliance on fossil fuels.  However, just the opposite is true.  Jobs will be plentiful.  We’ll need more people than ever to work on these huge engineering projects.  The transformation to a sustainable world will require millions of people working toward a common goal.

We’ll wish we had more people involved with all the progress we’re making!

We need to see a complete cultural shift away from anything that produces greenhouse gases very soon.  I cannot stress it enough that in order to build A Grand Future together, we must first eliminate the production of greenhouse gas emissions to have any hope of making a difference.

The future of the planet depends on humanity ELIMINATING ALL greenhouse gas emissions. There is no other choice.

That being said, it’s not going to happen overnight.  It will take decades to changeover to a carbon-free society.  And while this change is occurring, we’ll still be dumping billions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere.  Even if we did everything in our power to get to zero emissions, residual greenhouse gases will still cause global temperatures to rise to untenable levels.  We need to do even more…

Find out how we’ll Save Our Planet!

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