Macro climate solutions:
Solar farms
Wind farms
Global funding
Big tech
Massive carbon sequestration
Micro climate solutions:
Residential solar
Micro wind turbines
Microgrids
‘Intelligent’ tech
Micro loans
Forest management
Macro life goals:
Get married
Make a million dollars
Retire early
Write a novel
Build a dream home
Micro life goals:
Get to the gym 3x a week
Have a family night every Friday
Work at a job I enjoy most of the time
Get enough sleep
Contribute 5% of my income to charity
When we have big global problems, it’s tempting to favor big global solutions. And when we have our lives ahead of us, it’s tempting to set out to achieve all the big outcomes.
Here’s my contention.
Every macro activity, goal, or project also has macro unintended consequences.
Just as making a million dollars might mean that you hate your job as an investment banker, or building a dream home might mean you have no money for other things, large scale wind farms kill a lot of birds, and big tech inevitably leaves out the disadvantaged people and nations.
I am very aware of the time-crunch of reducing our global carbon emissions, and in my late 40s, I am also very aware of the time-crunch of achieving life goals. However, the tighter the timeline, the more I find myself tending towards the micro.
If we build smaller (but more numerous) micro wind turbines, the more likely we are to be able to protect birds from fatal collisions, and the quieter the turbines would be. For example, let’s say each residential roof (or shed, or fencing, or lightpoles) had a handful of small wind turbines that we could pop a cage over (picture the way a fan is protected by wire), or there are now bladeless micro-turbines being tested. It likely wouldn’t produce much power, but it would produce some. Combine this with much more residential solar (not just on the roof, but in all sorts of applications - walls, driveways, playgrounds, mini neighborhood solar farms), and then dig in some residential geothermal energy, connect smart devices inside the home that use power most efficiently (‘intelligent systems’), and then connect up clusters of houses and businesses onto microgrids (a small-scale grid that can operate independently, but is usually also connected to the main grid).
This kind of microgrid is unlikely to be completely self-sufficient on every single day for normal use, but it would be more resilient when the main grid is down (enough shared neighborhood power for basic needs), and under normal conditions, it could offset an enormous amount of power use that can then be supplemented by larger scale projects. We would need fewer large scale projects because the power needs would be smaller.
As I enter the second half of my life and career, I have no interest (ok, less interest) in making a million dollars, and I’m more concerned with making sure each week supports the numerous things that are important. Income yes, but also time - for friends, travel, and health-supporting activities, for example.
The reality is that numerous things are always important and trade-offs have to be carefully considered. Clean energy is not more important than wildlife. Big carbon sequestration infrastructure is not more important than avoiding further marginalizing already-oppressed people.
Also, scaling up micro solutions can equal macro positive impact. Universal residential solar will give us more solar energy overall than big solar farms. Organizing your life around a good week, every week, will give you a good life overall.
It’s not that we shouldn’t have big goals, and can’t have big solutions (we need a mixed portfolio for sure), but they shouldn’t actively diminish our ability to let the micro moments and the micro activities serve us (even better).
I have to admit to being concerned about our headlong rush towards towards ‘Big Clean Energy’. I think we will end up with some similar problems to what we have with ‘Big Oil’. Not the carbon pollution, but large corporate interests controlling pricing and access, already depressed neighborhoods getting all the noisy machinery and debris, reduced ability for wildlife to move about ecosystems and engage in normal patterns of behavior.
I would hate to see us ‘solve’ one set of problems only to find ourselves in a swamp of others.
So instead of most of the money going to macro projects, I’d like to see us invest much more heavily in communities, neighborhoods, buildings, and human-scale smart tech. I’d like us to experiment on multiple fronts at the same time and truly make our homes and businesses serve our own and our neighbors’ energy (and social, and food, and creative) needs.
What would happen if, at the same time as campaigning for global climate solutions, we became activists for #NeighborhoodStrong….?
Brilliant. ♥️