1/25/2024 0 Comments Storme cooper![]() Julian Quiñones/CNNīut we still need dirty fuels to build all this new stuff and in your third year on Earth, we were just starting to wrap our heads around the trillion-ton problem of moving generations-worth of excess carbon out of sea and sky and back into the rock and seabed where it came from. In a balloon over the Alps, legendary aeronaut Bertrand Piccard described how he found over 1,400 money-making, Earth-healing start-ups and tried to convince me that the answers are all around us, if only we can think like a balloonist and “change our altitude and attitude” by dropping the ballast of wasteful ideas and dirty fuels.īertrand Piccard, left, gets a hot air balloon ready for flight as Weir looks on. ![]() The world’s most abundant fuel source might be hydrogen made from sun and sea water, or little nuclear fusion stars in boxes filling batteries made of salt or minerals mined on the Asteroid Psyche.Īll this utopian stuff is technically feasible but, as I learned filming “How To Unscrew A Planet” for CNN’s “The Whole Story,” they must also be scalable, affordable and profitable, which means our fates will be decided as much by marketers and influencers as policy makers and engineers. Your buses could bring you to school on sunlight and then help power your classrooms after dark. One wild penguin colony or sustainable neighborhood at a time, I’m trying to balance out the firehose of peer-reviewed dread by focusing less on Life As We Blew It and more on Life As We Know It Could Be.Įvery week, I get pitched a world with airships hauling clean fuel instead of diesel tractor trailers, and sting ray-shaped robots that sink seaweed to bury carbon instead of factory-fishing trawlers that clear-cut the sea. Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Imagesīut my mental health improved when I decided to spend more time between disasters over in the panel of goodness and light. Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights" shows the creation of the Garden of Eden, how humans enjoyed themselves, and then Hell. I spent the first couple years on this beat obsessing over the dark side of the human triptych in our real-life version of “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” while occasionally sneering at all the freaky human decadence causing our downfall in the middle – what Hieronymus Bosch called “Humankind Before the Flood.” The leading cause of childhood death is now a bullet – or usually several at once – and some nights, the only thought that brings me peace is that you are half-Canadian.īut one thing I’ve learned as the first Chief Climate Correspondent on American television, when your beat is a “hyperobject” – a phenomenon so vast it exceeds human comprehension – one of the upsides is that you can choose to squint at it from an infinite number of angles on any given day. If that’s not enough to make a new Old Dad stare in the middle distance, the nation of your birth has also been torn apart by $787,500,000 worth of lies without apology and conspiracy theories around every corner. Energy from clean sources, like this windmill in Texas, is heating and cooling more homes in America than ever before.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |