It’s very easy to give in to despair when considering climate change.
You can read headlines day after day – animal and bird species on the brink of extinction, forests being clear cut, coral reefs are dying. It’s enough to make you want to give up.
And then there’s those bits of news that make you think maybe we can actually get out of this mess after all.
Last year, TransLink announced a trial of two electric buses. Just a few, rolling out soon.
Yet we have a lot of room to grow – Canada is home to four electric bus makers, yet very few major cities have started buying their products. Better still, the lifecycle costs of electric buses – maintenance and the fuel difference between electric and diesel – make them only a bit more expensive than traditional models right now.
In a few years, it would be stupid not to switch – we’ll save money.
Then there are electric planes, which sounded insane just a few years ago. We still don’t have a good green replacement for big long-haul jets, but Harbour Air has announced it is planning to switch to an electric fleet. Local commuter prop planes with electric engines are coming out in the near future.
It’s beyond transportation, though, that there are stories that could have a massive impact.
We know wind and solar are getting cheaper year after year, as are batteries for storage.
But industry is the other big challenge – chemicals, plastics, cement, and steel making consume oil or coal, and generate CO2 in massive quantities.
We can see the solution when it comes to cars and buses and trucks, and to power generation. Industry is a harder problem to solve.
That’s why companies like Solugen are a source of hope.
Scientist Gaurab Chakrabarti was studying cancer cells when he discovered a protein that could turn sugar, water, and oxygen into hydrogen peroxide.
A chemical used in everything from swabbing scrapes to massive industrial processes, hydrogen peroxide is mostly made now from oil and gas byproducts.
Solugen – which started in a tiny Texas sub-let lab space filled with hardware store PVC pipes and gear bought off eBay – started making enough hydrogen peroxide, cheaply enough, that they could make a profit.
Then they got more and more funding. Now they’ve created a portable truck-mounted system and they’re going to start competing directly with the big industrial suppliers.
And all they need to make this common chemical is engineered yeast.
There’s a lot of these little solutions out there, from using more engineered wood (as in Langley City’s latest condos) and less concrete, to straight up hauling CO2 out of the atmosphere (as a company based in Squamish is doing right now) there’s plenty of reason to be hopeful that we’ll make it through.