Plans (maybe how I fit in)

Things I may fit in on. Things I think would be good fit. Things I commit to fitting in on.

Climate change:

  1. Freedom Forge for Electrification and Zero-Carbon Electricity in the US (electric cars, heat pumps, batteries, rooftop solar, RPSs with solar and wind turbines) [1],
  2. R&D for outstanding tech problems (airplane biofuels and/or bioplastics) [1] and
  3. Green Marshall Plan to export green techs to other countries (including ITIF: stimulate clean energy in other countries, via R&D funding and/or export of technologies) [1]. This seems relatively comprehensive to me: get US carbon down to near zero with existing tech, solve the additional tech and then get other countries to zero also.
  4. Plus mass conservation (not exclusive with above). [2]
    1. Vegetarianism. [3]
    2. Reduced flying and driving.
    3. Reduced stuff.
  5. Carbon capture [4]
  6. Deep adaptation, especially for people going to be hit by sea level rises, food price increases, etc. [5]
  7. Geoeng?
  8. [6]


  1. Prevention
  2. Detection
    1. Biosurveillance
  3. Response
    1. Faster vaccines in the “can’t squash it early” pandemic
    2. Past epi ID control techniques and how to control if malarial mosquitoes made it to Chicago


  1. Food and health: Epi farming: true garden seems fine but less preferable bc non-natural but how bad healthwise is the non-natural effect or the pesticides that’s where epi comes in, also some science of gardening would be nice but again not naive disturbances of systems we know to work.

Refer to “don’t do.”


  2. Some estimation of how long this might take: 20-30 years (zero to saturation of mobile phones) (but this may be gated more by manufacturing or resources in this case; can we do this?) to some time to replace things, vs. information spread. Maybe ERE statistics research to some extent.
  3. Vegetarian cooking. Footprint of different (standard) meals. Impact of buying local, etc. Maybe just messaging a lot of this stuff upfront, including why we do it. And then pubbing if it’s not out there.
  4. “Biological approaches to carbon capture appear far more promising (Hawken and Wilkinson, 2017). These include planting trees, restoring soils used in agriculture, and growing seagrass and kelp, amongst other approaches. They also offer wider beneficial environmental and social side effects. Studies on seagrass (Greiner et al, 2013) and seaweed (Flannery, 2015) indicate we could be taking millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere immediately and continually if we had a massive effort to restore seagrass meadows and to farm seaweed. The net sequestration effect is still being assessed but in certain environments will be significant (Howard et al, 2017). Research into “management-intensive rotational grazing” practices (MIRG), also known as holistic grazing, show how a healthy grassland can store carbon. A 2014 study measured annual perhectare increases in soil carbon at 8 tons per year on farms converted to these practices (Machmuller et al, 2015). The world uses about 3.5 billion hectares of land for pasture and fodder crops. Using the 8 tons figure above, converting a tenth of that land to MIRG practices would sequester a quarter of present emissions. In addition, no-till methods of horticulture can sequester as much as two tons of carbon per hectare per year, so could also make significant contributions. It is clear, therefore, that our assessment of carbon budgets must focus as much on these agricultural systems as we do on emissions reductions.”
  5. Accept impacts? Violence of natural disasters, sea level displacement, food (bunch of species gone / can’t grow in this), disease.
    1. I’ll be interested in growing food, going to a safe place to live (no sea level, no disease, No violent natural disasters) And having self-defense/Non-incentive to steal (which might just be protecting people from the impacts now) and money.
    2. I’d be interested in growing food now and storing it as yields now are the highest. The food thing does scare me a bit, e.g. plastics, etc. Is there a science of gardening that also does not lead to bad centralized effects?
    3. Water supply: can I get water pumped up still?
    4. Give refugees a place to live.
    6. “It involves people and communities rediscovering attitudes and approaches to life and organisation that our hydrocarbon-fuelled civilisation eroded. Examples include re-wilding landscapes, so they provide more ecological benefits and require less management, changing diets back to match the seasons, rediscovering non-electronically powered forms of play, and increased community-level productivity and support… I learned about leadership and communications and began to research, teach and advise on these matters, in the political arena. I began to work on systems to enable re-localisation of economies and support for community development, particular those systems using local currencies. I sought to share that knowledge more widely, and therefore launched a free online course (The Money and Society Mass Open Online Course). I began to spend more time reading and talking about the climate tragedy and what I might do, or stop doing, with that in mind. This rethinking and repositioning is ongoing, but I can no longer work on subjects that do not have some relevance to deep adaptation. Looking ahead, I see the need and opportunity for more work at multiple levels. People will need more support to access information and networks for how to attempt a shift in their livelihoods and lifestyles. Existing approaches to living off-grid in intentional communities are useful to learn from, but this agenda needs to go further in asking questions like how small-scale production of drugs like aspirin is possible. Free online and in-person courses as well as support networks on self-sufficiency need to be scaled. Local governments will need similar support on how to develop the capabilities today that will help their local communities to collaborate, not fracture, during a collapse. For instance, they will need to roll out systems for productive cooperation between neighbours, such as product and service exchange platforms enabled by locally issued currency. At the international level, there is the need to work on how to responsibly address the wider fallout from collapsing societies (Harrington, 2016). These will be many, but obviously include the challenges of refugee support and the securing of dangerous industrial and nuclear sites at the moment of a societal collapse.”
    7. Big evidence: starvation (declining food yields). How will I grow food, and declining ability to grow food anyway? ALLFED. “uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war… But when I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you wouldn’t have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.”
    9. And the psychological in addition to physical aspects of resilience: “Typical projects include improving the ability of small-scale farmers to cope with weather variability through the introduction of irrigation and the ability of urban planners to respond to rising sea levels and extreme rainfall events through reengineering drainage systems.”
    11. Adaptation: how to defend against new disease vectors (malaria-carrying mosquitos in Chicago?).
  6. I might also add:
    1. Some provision for retiring fossil fuel plants.
    2. Common instrumental: do this stuff with friends outside the context of work, and message into a movement