Ten Creative Solutions to Climate Change That You Will NOT See in the Mainstream Media
If I thought solar, wind, electric vehicles and reducing meat consumption were the keys to addressing climate change, I would say so. But I don’t. So I won’t. Here’s what I think.
“The press is the hired agent of a monied system and set up for no other purpose but to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.”
--Henry Brooks Adams, historian (1838-1918)
The official story that we hear endlessly in the media is that global temperatures are rising almost solely due to fossil fuels and carbon emissions. So the solution is to reduce fossil fuels and carbon emissions.
This is not strictly wrong. But it’s a half truth. So it’s severely misleading.
Not that I know everything, but in my five years as a climate reporter, I’ve rooted out some of the deceptions in the mainstream coverage. I’ve also studied some of the real solutions.
See what you think …
Solution #1: Let plants cool the planet.
Plants could rapidly cool the planet, if we gave them the space to do their work.
Plants emit or “transpire” water, in large quantities. This transpiration causes cooling. I call this “evaporative cooling.” When water evaporates it cools its surroundings. Evaporation literally takes heat from the surrounding air.
When you step out of the pool, it’s cold because of evaporative cooling. When you step out of the bath or the shower, it’s cold because of evaporative cooling. When you walk under a shade tree or into a forest, it’s cool, not just because of the shade. It’s cool because of evaporative cooling. Evaporating water literally takes heat from its surroundings, and cools the surrounding air and surfaces.
We need to have more plants on earth. Here is a great video about How Plants Cool the Planet.
We could have more plants. We have eliminated half the plants in the last 5,000 years, according to this article from Greenpeace.
So we have lost half the biomass, half the plants and half the cooling capacity that plants provide.
How to bring plants back: Change how we manage our forests, our oceans, our landscapes and our farms. Also ask: What are we doing that is destroying our plants, and what could we do to bring them back?
Consider: We humans eliminate plants, not because we are bad, but because we are being ruled by people who are taking more than their fair share of our resources.
If so, then the key is to get control of our government and stop letting a few elites run the show and ruin our natural resources.
Solution #2: Restore healthy soils
Soil has a tremendous capacity to absorb carbon. In addition, soils have a tremendous capacity to absorb rainfall, thereby preventing both flooding and drought.
We can restore healthy soils on our farms, by following the five principles of soil health, as set forth by Gabe Brown in his bestselling book “Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey Into Regenerative Agriculture.”
The Principles of Soil Health include the following:
Avoid chemical fertilizers
Avoid excessive tillage
Avoid chemical pesticides (including insecticides and herbicides)
Cultivate a diversity of plants.
Always keep the soil covered with plants (such as cover crops) or organic matter (such as leaves, wood chips or crop cuttings).
If possible, incorporate animals, such as livestock.
This may seem like a lot of brand new information for many people. But citizens need to be aware of the value of healthy soil, even if you are not a farmer or a gardener. From a public policy standpoint, this is more important than solar panels, in my view. Yet solar panels get all the press.
Healthy soil can go far to prevent flooding, because healthy soil absorbs rainfall. It is runoff, not heavy rain, that causes flooding. Healthy soil absorbs heavy rain, thus preventing runoff and flooding.
Healthy soil can go far to prevent drought, because healthy soil absorbs the rainfall and holds onto it. Drought is not just a function of low rainfall. It is a function of bad soil that lacks the capacity to hold onto the rain.
It’s not the rain you get, it’s the rain you keep, that really matters. When someone asks how much rain you got, you want to be able to say, “all of it.” You kept all of your rain, because it soaked into the soil and did not run off.
News reports blame flooding and drought on “climate change.” This is glib. It is idle talk that distracts from real solutions.
Here is my video covering Gabe Brown’s Five Principles of Soil Health.
Solution #3: Let people work less
We need to make it so people can live a dignified life in relative security, without having to work long hours and without having to empower the world’s worst corporations.
People have to work long hours for low wages. A long work week is not good for our carbon footprint. A shorter work week would be better.
We can partially alleviate long work weeks by raising the minimum wage, which is currently $7.50 in the U.S. It would be over $20 per hour now, if it had kept up with inflation since the 1970s.
We can also partially alleviate this situation by strengthening our pro-union laws. Jane McAlevey has written two very good books about union organizing and the benefits to society. One is called “Unions, Organizing and the Fight for Democracy.”
When workers don’t have enough power, then the “owning class” tends to have all the power, to the detriment of workers, i.e., most of us. Too much power resides with the owning class, and not enough with the working class. We need to shift power from the few to the many. Strengthening our unions is one way to shift power from the few to the many.
Jane McAlevey makes the case that unions tend to benefit their communities, including non-union workers, not just themselves. For instance, when teachers strike, they are not always asking for more pay, but for better facilities, smaller class sizes and better support services for students.
At some point, we have to entrust the working class with more power. The only alternative is to allow all power to reside with the very few. That’s not democracy.
Besides, a struggling, sick, needy, exhausted populace does not have the bandwidth to care for the environment.
Solution #4: End fossil fuel subsidies
We would use less fossil fuels if they were not so artificially cheap. They are artificially cheap because we subsidize them in many ways.
We subsidize fossil fuels with tax credits that help companies lower their tax bills and federal loan guarantees that help companies get cheap credit.
We subsidize fossil fuels by allowing them to pollute and thereby shift their environmental costs onto the public.
We subsidize fossil fuels when we use our military to control the oil in other countries. According to Noam Chomsky, a study found that 30% of the price of oil is subsidized by our military actions, which make oil cheaper. The alternative is to let other countries control their own resources and let them negotiate their own prices on the world market.
If the price is a little higher, then that’s fair. What’s not fair is to use our military to take the oil, essentially stealing it from the people of other countries. This was a primary reason for the arrogant, cruel and catastrophic U.S. military interventions in Iraq, Libya and Syria, over the last 20 years.
Solution #5: Stop scapegoating fossil fuel companies.
Fossil fuel companies have become a scapegoat. The media treats us to an endless stream of negative propaganda about the “evil” fossil fuel companies.
These companies do evil things, but they are no more evil than the banks who finance their drilling operations.
They are no more evil than the agribusiness giants who use fossil fuels to destroy the soil, pollute the waterways and poison the bees.
Fossil fuel companies are no more evil than the weapons dealers who use oil to manufacture instruments of death for profit. They are no more evil than the transoceanic shipping companies that pollute the ocean with “bunker fuel” a substance so toxic it cannot be used on or near land.
And fossil fuel companies are no more evil than the mining companies that routinely destroy vast swaths of forests and waterways to access iron, gold, silver, aluminum, copper, lithium, cobalt, lead, uranium and nearly every metal on the periodic table, including the metals needed to make solar panels and wind turbines. See more at Solution #8, below.
Today, people are complaining loudly about fossil fuels. And the people complaining loudest about fossil fuels do not have a plan for dealing with fossil fuels, because there is no real plan for reforming the industries that use fossil fuels.
Solution #6: Regeneratively Grown Meat
Some may be shocked when I suggest that meat could be part of the solution. It is true that factory farming has a big carbon footprint and a big ecological footprint. But factory farming is not the only way to grow livestock.
Cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens have a good life when they are raised ethically. And livestock, when they are raised ecologically, can have a very positive impact on the land.
Those who disagree will please expose themselves to the work of Will Harris, in Georgia, as depicted in this video.
Please also introduce yourself to Joel Salatin in this interview with Joe Rogan.
Defending Beef by Nicolette Hahn Niman is a great book that defends beef from an environmental standpoint and a nutritional standpoint.
Here is my interview with Nicolette Hahn Niman.
Please understand: We need healthy grasslands. Our climate, our fellow species and our waterways need healthy grasslands.
Grasslands and grazing animals evolved together. A grassland can only thrive when it has grazing animals. Grazing animals cycle the nutrients. They contribute manure. They even provide a healthy disturbance to the ground. For example hoofprints provide a place where rainwater can pool. Also, grass needs to be grazed. Grazing tends to remove dead or dying parts of the grass. Grazing animals also eat the seed heads, thereby spreading the seeds and cultivating biological diversity.
For more on this topic, please see my video interview with Mexican rancher Alejandro Carillo.
Cattle and sheep often do have a negative impact on the land, but it’s not the fault of the animals. It’s the fault of how we raise them. We don’t manage them holistically. We don’t rotate them properly from pasture to pasture.
It’s not the cow. It’s the how. It’s not the mere presence of livestock, but our (good or bad) management that makes all the difference.
Solution #7: Don’t be fooled. A plant based diet is not inherently good.
We hear endlessly that eating less meat will lower our carbon footprint, that we should try to get our nutrition from a “plant-based diet.”
Here’s my question: What is a plant-based diet?
In reality, a plant based diet can include the use of genetically modified corn and soy products. It’s not the genetic modification that is the problem. But the genetic modification makes the crop plants resistant to Roundup, a weed killer. So the farmer can spray large quantities of Roundup without killing the crop plant. That’s the purpose of the genetic modification. The harm is done by the herbicide.
The purpose of this method is to lower the financial cost of growing corn and soy, but at great expense to our health and the environment.
We’ve seen a dramatic increase in the use of Roundup in the last 30 years.
Here are some of the consequences, according to the public advocacy website Beyond Pesticides: “Despite the prevalent myth that this widely-used herbicide is harmless, glyphosate (N-phosphono-methyl glycine) is associated with a wide range of illnesses, including non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), genetic damage, liver and kidney damage, endocrine disruption, as well as environmental damage, including water contamination and harm to amphibians.”
We COULD grow food without chemical herbicides, and we need to try. The first step is to change public policy so that it does not tilt the playing field strongly in favor of the worst farming practices, which only benefit the agribusiness giants. For example, in the US, something called crop insurance tends to favor farmers who do not practice Gabe Brown’s Five Principles of Soil Health, referenced above.
Farms COULD be wildlife habitat. Farms COULD be good for our water supply. Farms COULD serve to prevent flooding and drought.
Most farms do not support wildlife, are not good for our water and do not prevent flooding or drought. This includes nearly all of the farms that grow “plant-based” food.
Note: What’s bad for water and wildlife is always bad for our carbon footprint, because healthy ecosystems absorb carbon, whereas ailing ecosystems emit carbon.
Solution #8: Let’s slow WAY down on the production of solar power, wind power and electric vehicles.
Solar, wind and EVs are the big three “solutions” to climate change that get most of the press. A lot of money has been invested in slick photographs that make solar panels look shiny and clean and photos that show wind turbines looming in the background, as if to say, this is what a bright, shiny, carbon-free future looks like. And of course electric vehicles are sold as carbon free and even pollution free.
I submit to you that this is 90% hype and less than 10% truth. These are profitable corporate products. They fit a powerful narrative that environmentalists want to believe: That technology will save us. That we just have to make a few minor adjustments. That if we just switch to renewable energy and electric vehicles, we will have a 100% clean, renewable and carbon free civilization.
It’s a powerful story. But mainly, it’s false and misleading.
For one thing, solar and wind require a whole lot of land. We need land for forests, for healthy soil and for growing healthy food. We need land that is capable of absorbing rainfall like a sponge, so as to prevent flooding and drought.
Also, solar, wind and EVs require a whole lot of mining, per unit of energy produced. Mining has always been harmful to people, to wildlife and to our waterways.
Please read this article “Why mining to make renewables will destroy the planet” by Alice Friedemann, based on the excellent work of French journalist Guillaume Pitron.
We need to replace much of the “biomass” (i.e., living matter, and ecosystems) that we humans have eliminated in the last 5,000 years. Solar and wind are a step in the wrong direction, because they require so much land, both in the footprint where they are installed and in the footprint of the massive mining operations, from which the raw materials emerge.
Solution #9: Watch “Planet of the Humans”
One of the best movies about the true state of the climate movement is Planet of the Humans, available free on YouTube.
When it was released in 2020, on the 50th Earth Day, it ignited a firestorm of upset feelings from environmentalists, and a well-orchestrated smear campaign from those who opposed its message. Those who criticized the movie were upset because it exposes the lies of a corrupt industry that is deeply embedded with Wall Street, whose primary aim is making money, usually at the expense of the environment.
Here is my interview with Planet of the Humans writer and director, Jeff Gibbs.
And here is Max Blumenthal’s masterful 9,000 word exposé of the film’s critics.
Solution #10: End the World Trade Organization and get back our Democracy
This Solution is a variation on Solution #5, above. It does us no good to vilify fossil fuels or fossil fuel companies, without seriously reforming the industries and the legal frameworks that cause us to consume fossil fuels at such high levels.
One such legal framework is the World Trade Organization, which is the international body that governs international trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
These are called “free trade agreements.” But they are really investor’s rights agreements. They give investors and foreign corporations the right to sue any country, state/province or city to set aside any law or policy that might interfere with their profits. The net result is that countries no longer have the right to protect their own people. For example, Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador would like to limit the import of genetically modified corn into Mexico, because it’s not good for his country. But that will be difficult under NAFTA.
NAFTA has caused two million Mexican farm workers to be unemployed. This is bad for small farmers who would otherwise be able to grow food for their communities.
According to Michael Parenti in his book The Face of Imperialism, the World Trade Organization “ ... has ruled against laws deemed barriers to free trade. It has forced Japan to accept greater pesticide residues in imported food. It has kept Guatemala from outlawing deceptive advertising of baby food. It has eliminated the ban that various countries had imposed on asbestos and on fuel and emission standards for motor vehicles. And the WTO has ruled against marine-life protection laws and the ban some nations imposed on the importation of endangered-species products.”
The World Trade Organization serves to shift power from the people to the oligarchs. The WTO is part of a scheme whereby people have to work in sweatshops. It’s good for profits, but it’s bad for people. The WTO is a big part of the reason that farm workers have to work low-wage jobs to grow crops for export, and don’t get to grow food for their communities. Often hunger rises with GDP, when countries shift from local food production to import-export economies.
The WTO is a legal framework which we could exit just as readily as we entered it. And it would be great for the environment and the people of all countries if we did just that.
The WTO is a world in which “there are no countries, only companies,” because the WTO eliminates the ability of countries to protect their own people and their own environment.
Conclusion: Let’s change the conversation
My goal has been to introduce Solutions that are not normally discussed in the “mainstream climate media.”
Maybe you don’t agree with every solution. That’s fine. But why are these issues not discussed--with any regularity--in the mainstream climate coverage?
I submit to you that we are being played. We are being asked to obsess on solutions that will not work and ignore solutions that will work.
As referenced in the Henry Adams quote above, “The press is the hired agent of a monied system and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved.” What does and does not gets press coverage is a function of who owns the media and who sponsors the media. We should expect to see coverage that promotes the interests of the elites. And we should expect to NOT see coverage that erodes their interests.
We have to defend nature. We have to grow our food in cooperation with nature. We have to nurture our plants, our wildlife, our ecosystems and our water cycles. And we have to protect our people. Without that, what kind of democracy do we really have?
We have to understand how power is wielded, and we have to change how power is wielded.
To do that, we have to change where we get our information. We need to get our information from independent journalists, not the hired guns that populate the “trusted” media.
We don’t want to get 30 years down the road only to discover that we have listened to the wrong people, trusted the wrong people and followed the wrong people. That would be a big waste of time.
Great work, Hart. I appreciate you bridging the science to the politics. Though the green energy movement claims to be science-based, it is an economic/political project, and needs to be addressed as such.. Thanks.