Towel on the Floor: How to End Climate Change

We have all seen these signs in hotel rooms on the East End.

They read:

SAVE OUR PLANET

You Make the Choice

A towel on the rack means “I will use it again.”

A towel on the floor means “Please exchange.”

Yup, there you go, the clean, simple way of getting rid of climate change.

But give it some thought before you take this action. The human race is unique among all the species in the universe. We have, entirely by our own efforts, been able to burn so much carbon fuel that we’ve actually enabled an entire planet to alter its temperature. This is an incredible achievement.

Do you really want to end the results of this remarkable achievement with just this simple act?

Someday, an alien landing here looking back on all this will be able to say we think this happened with the dinosaurs and don’t know why, but here we DO know why and we know how, with one simple flick, it all ended. Those humans. Wow.

Seriously, I am completely baffled that we don’t end climate change the old fashioned way, by creating an engine or series of engines down here on the Earth that will gather up the atmosphere bit by bit and clean back out the carbon. I’m told it can be done. We’ve done it on a small scale. There should be an international effort involving all of the world’s scientists and manufacturing companies to bring about a 100,000 engines that will do that. We made the commitment to go to the moon in 10 years. We did that. Now we have this other situation. And yet we are not even talking about this. This is not even something on the table.

Here is the kind of thing we put on the table. Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Airlines in 23 countries, including the United States, agreed last week to reduce the pollution by 4% from all aircraft brought into service after 2028.