Without the Earth, we have nothing
🍂 Fall is starting to settle in here in Berlin. Some of the leaves on the trees have started turning and the weather is certainly crisp now. We’re breaking out our jackets, hats, and warm socks for our walks around the various parks the city has to offer.
🌍 It’s so awesome that David Attenborough is lending his voice to help Prince William launch the Earthshot Prize. _“Drawing inspiration from the concept of moonshots, which since the moon landing in 1969 has become shorthand to talk about the most ambitious and ground-breaking goals, Prince William announces the Earthshot Prize: an ambitious set of challenges to inspire a decade of action to repair the planet.”
📺 William spoke at last weekend’s six-hour long TED Countdown event which featured more than 50 speakers sharing ideas about how to accelerate solutions for the climate crisis. The entire event is available online.
🤯 The thought that’s really stuck withe me from the event is Professor Myles Allen’s statement that the fossil fuel industry could address climate change by decarbonizing fossil fuels. “Global warming won’t wait for the fossil fuel industry to die. And just calling for it to die is letting it off the hook from solving its own problem. In these divided times, we need to look for help and maybe even friends in unexpected places. It’s time to call on the fossil fuel industry to help solve the problem their product has created. Their engineers know how, we just need to get the management to look up from their shoes.”
💡 There are a lot of technology issues to solve with carbon capture and storage, but making decarbonizing fossil fuels a direct cost of goods sold through regulation neatly sidesteps the impossible mechanics of how to get an effective carbon tax in place to pay for it. There’s a lot of potential for this to be one effort that we can use in the portfolio of solutions which we need to deploy in the next decade.