Solomon Goldstein-Rose - The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change

Im twenty-six years old, and I cant remember a time before I understood and worried about climate change. Most Millennials take for granted that climate change is a serious problem that will cause devastating floods, droughts, storm damage, illnesses, and large-scale human and animal displacement in our lifetimes. And we know that if we dont reverse the current trend of greenhouse gas emissions, the effects will reach a new order of magnitude within our childrens lifetimes.

Solving climate change is more important for our future than tackling many other worthwhile causes, because so many issuespoverty, disease, immigration politicscannot improve if climate change worsens.

Like most people of my generation, I want to live in a safe world and pass on a better one to my children. Throughout my life, Ive asked myself what I could do to help solve climate change. This drew me to study engineering, and later public policy; spurred me to run for Massachusetts state legislature right after college and get elected at age twenty-two on a climate-focused platform; drove me to spend thousands of hours reaching out to energy system experts, professors, startups, and fellow activists to understand the ins and outs of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change solutions; and prompted my recent shift to full-time climate change work.

This book is a product of that work. Along the way, I realized that most people, including me, tend to take on pieces of the problem that seem achievable, but dont understand whether or how those pieces might contribute to a solution that addresses the full picture. Perhaps most significantly, few people take into account the importance of developing countries, which emit two-thirds of global greenhouse gases each year.

Most of the specific ideas here have been written about before by other experts. The point of this book is to tie it all together into a framework that gives us a comprehensive perspective on what is needed so we can be more focused and effective in our advocacy.

Despite so much amazing work done over the years, the world is still nowhere near on track to solve climate change. The problem is not only worsening, its worsening at an accelerating pace as we continue to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere each year. The efforts of global agreements, national and state-level advocacy, and corporate promises combined have all failed to set us on a path that could add up to a complete reversal of greenhouse gas emissions in the timeframe laid out by the latest sciencea 100% solution.

Part of our failure to act is because people havent been totally sure what action is truly needed. For example, the school climate strike movement that youth leader Greta Thunberg is heading has repeatedly put out statements calling for policymakers to act but not specifying what exactly they should do. Sometimes theyve specifically said that its up to the adults to figure that out. Meanwhile, legislators, who generally have equally incomplete understandings of energy and agricultural systems, push for incremental steps they see as politically viable and in the right direction without any sense of whether those steps could possibly add up to solving the problem globally. The US Millennialled Sunrise Movement and related groups have called for a World War IIscale mobilization, which is an apt analogy for the general scale needed, but, within that broad vision, what exactly is needed? What constitutes enough to solve climate change? Without knowing the answer, we have no metric against which to judge political proposals or with which to guide how we direct our efforts.

This book has two goals. The first is to demonstrate how much bigger we need to be thinking if were going to actually meet the consensus goal of climate scientists and the United Nationsreducing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels by the year 2050. The second goal is to lay out a specific framework, which is both technically and politically viable, that actually does add up to a 100% solution to climate change. My hope is that, with a specific blueprint to rally around, climate movements can focus their efforts and achieve more concrete results.