The Climate WebPreview
Open in TheBrain

Module 3 Learning Activity

Let's recap this climate solutions module. There are lots of things in lots of areas, whether policies and measures, technology innovation, law and legal liability. One way to think about this is whether there are silver bullets out there that could play a huge role in tackling this problem.

If there were silver bullets, they would be -- as I've already mentioned -- carbon pricing and electrify everything. But those two things are not going to do it by themselves. People get into the idea of silver buckshot as shown in the picture here. That means, there are dozens of things that we ought to be doing.

The reality is that we could solve climate change. We could, in theory, prevent more than two degrees Centigrade or three degrees Fahrenheit of average global temperature rise, even though it's unlikely. But we have the technologies, we have the ability to do these things, at least from a technology perspective and from a theoretical policy perspective. The real question is, will we do it and will we implement the policies and measures that would make these things happen?

That is the trillion-dollar question of climate change.

In the PDF for this module and in the e-book for the course, you can dig deeper into some of the technologies and policies and measures that I've talked about here. I'll point you to some videos. There's a lot of fascinating stuff going on, and if you spend a few minutes digging into that information, I think you'll reinforce some of the lessons that we've tried to cover in this module.

I'll mention now the idea of “climate chess.” You can see in the slide hundreds of chess pieces. It's a metaphor that we'll get to again in a later module in the course specifically around the idea of climate chess. I mention it here because I mentioned silver buckshot, i.e., there are lots of things we could be doing.

Some people refer to all these things as silver buckshot. I like to think of them as we ought to be playing better climate chess, where we have all these different pieces on the board, policies and measures, technology, innovation, legal strategies, and lots more. All these things are on the board, but how do we move them around the board to actually make a difference on climate change?

It's not like we want to just shoot these things out of a shotgun the way you do with pellets. That's not the idea. We need tactics. We need strategy, and that's why I like the metaphor of climate chess that we'll get into a little bit later.

We've had a whirlwind tour around the topic of “can we prevent climate breakdown”? The answer is largely, “yes.” The question then becomes -- and this is what we will get into in the next module -- “well, okay, then why aren't we doing that?”

So come back for the next module.

Additional Materials

We’ve covered enormous topics in this Module, and you could literally spend weeks exploring them in the Climate Web. Rather than pointing you to specific reports or news stories, I’m going to point you to some of the spots and Insights Pages you can use to start digging deeper into these broad topics, and from there there is no limit to how far you can dig.

For starters, The MANY Ways to Prevent Climate Chaos thought in the Open Access Climate Web opens up a lot of content.

For the more specific topics:

Policies and Measures
Technology Innovation
Economic Metrics
Legal Change