We really mean everyone: people of all walks of life, rich and poor, millionaires, billionaires, hippies, big corporations, car manufacturers, energy providers, farmers, and regular hard working people. [One potential exception might be coal miners, you guys might have to switch to mining something else...]
But we also need to help out our friends in the animal kingdom, like elephants, cheetahs, tigers, gorillas, whales, corals, and polar bears. Especially the polar bears. But these are just a few of the many species that will face increased pressure if global temperatures rise much beyond current levels.
We need to explore innovative solutions for managing climate change without crippling the world's advanced, high tech economies; and without restricting industrial and technological growth in developing nations.
Goldilocks Earth is designing solutions that will achieve real climate stabilization targets and create tens to hundreds of thousands of new jobs in many sectors across the globe.
Our designs leverage existing capabilities and foster the development of new technologies to create solutions beyond the current carbon focused strategies. They will be safer and will not rely on all nations reaching unrealistic greenhouse gas reduction targets.
We have some big ideas, and our initial research looks promising. But we need lots of help. In the short term, we need some capital to get bootstrapped faster.
We will bring academic and private sector research together to develop coherent processes and actionable solutions for creating the largest engineering projects in history.
Carbon dioxide is part of the problem, but it’s not the whole problem, and it’s not going to be the whole solution either. We need to expand our focus beyond carbon dioxide. This does not mean that we can take our metaphorical foot off the metaphorical gas pedal in trying to curb these non-metaphorical CO2 emissions.
In other words: keep building electric cars, planting trees, switching to LED lights, power efficient appliances and televisions, intelligent heating and cooling solutions, and build way more windmills.
But CO2 is not the only culprit. Nitrous oxide, methane, and other harder to pronounce gaseous compounds also act as greenhouse gases to trap heat in our atmosphere. And simple water vapor, both invisible and visible (such as clouds) may be the most important greenhouse gas.
Numerous proposals and even trial experiments geared around increasing cloud cover to reflect more sunlight have failed to consider the dramatic effect of water vapor as a greenhouse gas.
Tampering with the chemical composition of our atmosphere, especially by adding exotic compounds, poses immense risks. If we don’t get it exactly right, global temperatures could actually increase, or worse, we could flip the climate into a condition of global cooling, a far more disastrous situation, which in turn could result in “runaway global cooling” which has happened in the past, and is a serious threat to the majority of life on Earth.
Even worse, there’s almost no easy way to undo the damage and remove these chemicals, some of which may have long half-lives. At this stage, pursuing these strategies is far too dangerous.
While our climate and weather knowledge has increased dramatically over the past 30 years, the Earth’s climate is a complex dynamical system and is subject to the effects of chaos. As late as 1990, there were only a few obscure papers that mentioned global glaciation, the Snowball Earth theory didn’t gain significant acceptance until the 1990’s and later.
This highlights a major shortcoming in the campaign to prevent increased global warming: an incomplete understanding of the global climate system. We must develop more sophisticated models and accurate simulations before we commit massive investments to any courses of action.
We, Earth’s global human population, are failing to meet the necessary targets for CO2 emissions, and if we continue to focus almost exclusively on carbon mitigation, we will fail spectacularly.
Consider this example: as of 2017, the United States is responsible for 13.77% of the world’s fossil carbon dioxide emissions. Even if the U.S. were to instantly drop to zero greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, projections suggest that within a few years, possibly less than a decade, increases from developing nations will make up for the delta and overall global emissions will be right back to current levels and will continue to rise.
China is already responsible for over 28% of global fossil CO2 emissions, but despite respectable efforts and policies, their emissions continue to rise. It is doubtful they will meet their Paris Climate Agreement commitments, nor will many other nations.
Even if most of the developed nations rapidly achieve carbon neutral or even carbon negative footprints, the reductions will not offset the increases from the developing world. These developing nations make up a significant fraction of the global population, and their greenhouse gas contributions will continue to grow as their energy production and appetites increase. The result will be a global failure to meet CO2 emissions targets.
Finally, even if the Paris targets are met, some studies have concluded that this will not provide any significant reduction in rising global temperatures.
It is important to state that in no way do we mean to impart blame on one set of countries or another. Pointing fingers and posturing between countries and groups is not productive.
Citizens in developing nations and economies are in various phases of industrialization, social and technological transformation and growth. It is unreasonable (and we believe downright unethical) to expect or suggest that they should not continue to develop and improve their quality of life. We need to help them grow with clean energy solutions and provide financial aid and incentives to promote various environmental performance goals.
We are quite literally “all in this together”. Unless we focus on beneficial solutions for everyone, the end result will be nothing short of failure on a global scale.
Those immortal words, spoken by NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz, are as valid today as they were during the Apollo 13 mission in April of 1970.
While we applaud the efforts and sentiments of those promoting green energy solutions and a cleaner world, our analysis projects that these efforts will fall far short of the necessary targets. In other words, they will fail. So we must develop new, innovative approaches to global climate stabilization. And we are working on exactly that.
We are developing some uniquely promising ideas that will work even if carbon mitigation efforts fall short. These new projects are designed to be safe, effective, and controllable. If developed, some of these solutions would be the largest and greatest engineering projects in history. They will create jobs, drive economic growth and spur technological advancements to benefit everyone.
We are creating a global initiative: The “Goldilocks Earth - Climate Stabilization Initiative”, focused on developing solutions that have multiple positive impacts and near-zero negative effects. We design for prosperity, not austerity.
This will be a global, community driven effort that focuses on developing real engineering projects and solutions, not just drafting legal mumbo jumbo and hollow international agreements.
To do this, we need some boot-up capital to get started and gain momentum. We are bypassing normal funding routes such as angel investors and government grants, at least initially, as we do not want anyone to feel that they own the organization and steer it away from the mission.
The more we get, the faster we’ll be able to ramp up. Once we get our basic infrastructure in place, we will begin engaging and recruiting experts and engineers from around the world. We will need help in many areas from various industry leaders, world governments and organizations, academic institutions, as well as volunteers and pioneers.
The Greatest Generation was aptly named. They weathered the Great Depression only to face World War II where they made sacrifices that few of us today would be willing to make. And with little more than slide rules, they were able to split the atom, break the sound barrier, and send people to the moon and back.
“It’s not the end of the world, until it is.” - unknown
As humans we are faced with a unique challenge:
Thus it becomes easier to turn a blind eye and let future generations shoulder the burden.
Despite many achievements and technological advancements, current generations have been stereotyped as lazy, self-centered, entitled, and more. But, in the words of Benjamin Franklin:“Out of adversity comes opportunity.”
Speciecide, the “extinctification” of a species, is the most horrendous of crimes; of which, only humanity can truly be guilty. But if we start soon, we have the chance to save many more species than if we wait or do nothing.
A gauntlet has been thrown down before us.