High-tech solutions and the “narrow mind” problem

• Climate change is a topic that cannot be escaped nowadays. The concern about ongoing changes and the impacts are both mainstream and everywhere: student movements, top-politician decisions, businesses (across all sectors) realigning their practices. massive media coverage. All show a concern about the scale of the problem and the effort needed to reduce current man-made emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄) and others, since these emissions are higher than what can be absorbed naturally without negative consequences (as reported by the IPCC here).
• People being people, the search for high-tech solutions that can remove CO₂ from the air has been a focus of researchers and investors for several years. Particularly when such technology can also create good business opportunities. But what to do with all that CO₂ that needs to be removed? One of the key ideas is to use it to create synthetic hydrocarbons, the building blocks for the fuel and plastics that we use in such a large scale. A recent article at the MIT Technology Review and another one at The Atlantic, give an interesting view of the scientific efforts and economic considerations of making such solutions real, usable and “market-ready”.
• The video highlight of this month shows different technical solutions being pursued and stresses how they require a large initial investment, often coupled with strong public incentives (subsidies) in order to have the right market and policy conditions. Only then can they reward the investors, be launched commercially, and – eventually – be large enough to actually make a difference. But will these solutions change our resource usage patterns – which create the problem in the first place – or simply allow us to keep doing more of the same for a while longer?
• Given the scale of the problem, the IPCC states in it’s latest special report that such solutions will play an important role in the near future and that it’s important to pursue them. People being people, we need to be careful about focusing on short-term solutions for one single aspect of the problem (man-made CO₂ emissions), ignoring the fundamentals of our current system and how it creates many other large environmental and social issues: from seas drowning in plastics to loss of terrestrial biodiversity, vulnerable coastlines, soil degradation and fragile food production systems, innequal access to resources and opportunities, etc.
• Here at Reforestation World, we try to highlight solutions that can bring multiple benefits, such as restoring forests and promoting better livelihood in the process. But it is important to remember that there are other ecosystems in addition to forests that can also absorb CO₂, on land and water, and that guarantee numerous functions vital for our existence and safety. These need to be on the table and invested on as well. And, ultimately, we need to invest hard in taking better care of our global house – or we risk becoming prisoners of high-tech solutions for one problem after the other.