International Polar Bear Day is coming soon: February 27th. On this awareness day, we draw attention to the challenges polar bears face in a warming Arctic and the urgent need to act on climate.
But what are the most viable climate solutions? Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, a world-renowned climate scientist, shares her thoughts below. Her approach is broad, positive, and inclusive, giving everyone a way to plug in.
We need climate solutions that will:
- Generate energy from clean sources that don’t produce carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases—because fossil fuel extraction and combustion is the number one cause of climate change, responsible for about two-thirds of the problem.
- Reduce heat-trapping gas emissions from other important sectors, like agriculture, land use change, industrial processes, wastewater treatment. and more—because these are responsible for the remaining third of the problem.
- Help us use our resources more efficiently—because did you know that the average U.S. household wastes $165 per year, for a total of $19 billion, on “vampire” power, and one-third of all the food grown world-wide is wasted?
- Suck some of the carbon dioxide we’ve produced back out of the atmosphere and put it into the soil, where it helps restore the land, or turn it into fuel, or stone, or other useful products.
There’s no one silver bullet that will fix it for us: but there is a lot of silver buckshot.
Read the rest of my answer, here.