Climate change, oh, climate change... have I missed you?

Middle school students at a climate rally in Reno I attended on 20 Sept 2019.

Hm... Climate change is a challenging topic. It occupied a significant portion of my thoughts and purpose from the middle of my undergraduate degree (2011) to before Natasha and I went on the Watson fellowship (mid 2016). Through Natasha's Watson, I began to look at using renewable energy for rural electrification purposes and connected this will climate change mitigation through the lens of climate adaptation (helping people adapt to the effects of climate change). Pursuing rural electrification work was on some level a valid pursuit to fighting climate change, but in some respects, it was a way for me to deviate from focusing on mitigation. Adaptation work is very meaningful, but still, at this point, the best way for adaptation is still mitigation by lowering emissions.

I used to think that everyone has their own part to play and you should do things that fulfill you as a person and that there are other pressing problems out there and that there will always be problems out there to fix and so on... but recently, those have just become excuses.

And I refuse to shirk that responsibility. I just can't do it. Focusing on climate change made me miserable before, but that's in part because of how I approached it. And I can't just say, "climate change makes me miserable, so I'm just not going to think about it". I can't. I just need to be smarter about how I focus on it.

Climate change is the defining problem of our generation. Anyone breathing today is responsible for its solution because that is the only way the problem will be solved.