It’s nice and particularly important when it comes to climate protection not to rule out options too quickly. Anyone who just says what is absolutely not possible – bans, incentives, CO₂ storage, wind turbines here, wind turbines there, renunciation, no renunciation and all sorts of other devilish things – is ultimately making it quite difficult for themselves to face the biggest challenge Humanity. A long time ago, my colleague and Climate Friday inventor Dirk von Gehlen wrote here (and here too, by the way) about the “sense of possibility”, i.e. the feeling for things that are not yet, but could be if you dare. Of course it is still needed.
Nevertheless, I’ve often had to think about the fact that sometimes a little realism wouldn’t be wrong. Recently my colleague Natalie Neomi Isser from the photo editorial team put together incredible pictures of Mars for a very practical little travel guide. Everything looks really great. But let’s be honest: freezing temperatures, no usable atmosphere, at least on the surface no liquid water, and then people like Elon Musk keep talking about how people should settle there at some point? What a strange thought when we already have a perfectly habitable planet that just needs to be treated a little nicer.
Compared to such ideas, the nuclear fusion research that my colleague Theresa Palm has been working on these days is very pragmatic. And I have to admit that I find it all very fascinating. But if you consider how many technical problems are still completely unsolved: I’d rather not rely on a finished nuclear fusion reactor waiting around the next corner to suddenly replace fossil fuels.
Especially since there are enough things that have been tried and tested to slow down climate change: wind turbines, solar cells, storage, CO₂ prices, electric cars, trains, speed limits (hello twice, Ministry of Transport), and so on. Maybe we should just focus our sense of possibility on the possible first, the impossible can always come at some point.
With this in mind, I wish you the best possible weekend.
(This text comes from the weekly Newsletter Climate Friday you here free of charge can order.)