I have been listening the the Breakthrough Institute and Joe Romm from Climate Progress bickering over a recent Nature article about the magnitude of carbon emissions cuts required and if our current path will get us to where we desperately need to go. Unfortunately, we seem to have constructed a circular firing squad, again, magnified by the hostile rhetoric tossed around. The real problem we have is that we are hitting a discontinuous period, one that we will live our lives in, one that is “Off-the-Charts”. Under Business-as-Usual, carbon emissions go through the roof and we stew in our own effluent. However, declining availability of conventional fossil fuels will raise both their price and the impact on the environment per unit of energy delivered. The problem is NOT Peak Oil, but rather Peak Habitat (for Humanity).

Then, we have the astounding growth in population (which is leveling off), in development, in the spread of information technology, the spread of pandemic disease, in the spread of low-cost weaponry and transnational criminal organizations, in the mapping of the human brain and the manufacturing of biological organisms, and of course the understanding of physics and nanotechnology. Head spinning yet?

Nobody “knows” what will happen in the future, however our best scientists have told us we need to eliminate and bring down carbon emissions to something closer to 350 parts per million C02, to avoid playing a coin toss of if we inherit a world worth living in. Scary, hell yes, it is.

However, what we need is NOT simply new, disruptive technology. In fact, it isn’t always political will. Sometimes, we need innovative solutions, to deploy the technology we have, to not using technology at all, new ways to connect, we need innovation in how we think as much as in what to build. I want to share something from an amazing project, WorldChanging:

“WorldChanging.com works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it’s here. We only need to put the pieces together…
Every link we post is informed by technology, but the new possibilities we cover aren’t just high-tech. Sure, we all need to understand the uses (and dangers) of advances like biotechnology, the Internet, ubiquitous computing, artificial intelligences, “open source” software and nano-materials. But we also need to know how best to collaborate, how to build coalitions and movements, how to grow communities, how to make our businesses live up to their highest potential and how to make the promise of democracy into a reality. We need to understand techniques as well as technologies, ideas as well as innovations. How we work together is as important as the tools we use. The Worldchanging Manifesto“

The Breakthrough Institute and Climate Progress have a common failing that, despite their individual brilliance, makes them miss an essential piece, one they share with the “Tired” environmentalism of the 70s. The federal government is run by politicians, who are followers, rather than leaders. They WILL follow us if we start to build a new sustainable world, new experts in sustainability, if we develop the Breakthrough THINKING that gets us to a fundamentally different world, one that charts its own path - not on any presenter’s graph. That is the true task the Campus Climate Challenge - developing the new generation of thinkers who can light the world up with brilliance for a bright green future - and can reshape the world through our understanding of systems, of open-source organizing and knowledge bases, of revolutionary new media technologies, of a collaborative rather than individual vision for the world. So give me a break.