Black and white image of stick figure with a flask and electronic device in their upraised arms. Overlaid text says "Stand back, I'm going to try SCIENCE"

We (should) all know by now that we need to take decisive action on the climate crisis. But which actions?

Most Americans think that recycling is the answer. It’s definitely not.

Jonathan Foley from Project Drawdown has used SCIENCE! to figure out where are the points where we can act right now to leverage our impact realistically, quickly and cheaply. To that last point, Foley says “these cheap climate solutions are the best bargain in human history. They save money now, and prevent disaster in the future.”

I’ll take that deal.

The TLDW is that there are lots of climate solutions out there and we humans should focus on ones that are

  • Evidence-based: proven interventions, not wishful thinking or start-up hype
  • Cheap: as he says some of these are not only not expensive, they’re cheaper than what we’re doing right now. This is also important so we can do lots of these solutions
  • Ready to go: there’s a time-value to carbon so it’s better to act now than later. He compares it to investing. Like the adage goes, the best time to invest was twenty years ago, the second best time is now. (Not included in the adage or talk is that waiting 20 years for the perfect investment is stupid.)
  • Targeted: there are geographic hot spots where we can focus our efforts to get the most impact per effort.
  • Beneficial: we can use science to ensure that our climate solutions are good for people, too – especially in terms of equity and justice.
  • Aligned: here he means matching our climate fighting efforts with the relative importance of each sector. Electricity is 21% of the overall problem and transportation 5%, yet two-thirds of private investment goes toward transport (in the form of EVs). The U.S. government, on the other hand, focused two-thirds of their investment on electricity, to the detriment of “food, ag and land use” or “industry” for example.

As Foley concludes, “We still have a narrow window of opportunity to stop climate change, but we’ve got to make every day, every move and every dollar count like never before.” With science, we can.