4 September 2022

‘No Dumb Questions’: Is there a climate change silver bullet?

Dave Levitan,  Jake Garcia, and Tom Nagorski

Climate change is of course a vast problem — global in scope, involving every aspect of society and concerning nothing less than the future of the planet. Given that, it’s not surprising that policymakers and millions of ordinary people crave easy or quick solutions.

In January, Grid’s Climate Reporter Dave Levitan joined forces with Grid’s data visualization team for a look at roughly a dozen measures, from grand-scale change (meeting all the Paris Agreement pledges, weaning all Americans off fossil fuels, among others) to smaller-scale policy prescriptions (cuts in cement and steel production, and limits on deforestation), to assess the relative difference such measures would make, if any or all were implemented. It was at once a hopeful and sobering look — all under the heading of what Levitan called “paths to a cleaner, cooler world.”

This week, in our video series “No Dumb Questions,” Levitan takes up a fundamental question about the climate crisis and possible ways to mitigate against its effects: “Is there a climate change silver bullet?”

The short answer, as you might guess, is no. But as Levitan notes, it’s a “no, but …” — meaning, there are actions to be taken that might collectively amount to something approaching a “silver bullet.”

And it’s not a dumb question at all. Watch Dave Levitan’s answer here:

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