Can Engineers Solve Global Warming?

Educators and activists often comment on how difficult it is to talk about the issue of global warming without overwhelming one’s audience. So it was good to see Saul Griffith’s presentation at ETech mounted online for all of us to share. Griffith is a MacArthur fellowship winner who works as an energy educator and a champion of innovative uses of wind power. According to Griffith, all we have to do is:

• Calculate the temperature we want the planet to be.
• Figure out how much carbon we can burn.
• Find our individual carbon goal, and change our lives accordingly.

Well, I’m glad that’s all cleared up.

• » See also: Is Global Scale Biofuels Production Good or Bad for Climate Change?
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Okay, so the world isn’t run by engineers; in fact, the real problem is, our world is divided up into arbitrary geopolitical units that currently compete with one another for resources. Still we have to start somewhere, and it’s the engineers and other scientists that give us the tools to calculate where to start. And I like Griffith’s motto, which is “Know what you can do, so you can do what you can.” Don’t throw up your hands yet; download Griffith’s presentation in its entirety at Wattzon.com or read an excellent summary written by Ethan Zuckerman .

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