Knowledge is power, especially for those who are as relentlessly concrete and logical as some of our kids.
I don't know if this is true. More knowledge is not always reassuring. Sometimes, learning more makes you even more anxious. Frankly, I avoid stories about global warming at this point. I know how it works and what it's going to do, and reading about it makes me feel extremely agitated and upset. We do many, many things to reduce our contribution to it, but I feel deep and overwhelming despair if I read too much about it, and that can be paralyzing.
Well, one place where knowledge = hope is information regarding some of the progress we're making as a society on energy alternatives.
For example, the ability to
store energy off the grid, as opposed to the current use-it-or-lose-it system, would greatly improve the efficiency of generated electricity.
This stuff takes captured industrial emissions and turns it into ethanol.
Plus, there is historical precedent to fall back on, where an environmental catastrophe triggered by humans led to a response and solution. We no longer burn coal or whale oil in our homes. Despite producing 25% of the world's commercial timber,
US deforestation is no longer an issue, with forest coverage stable since 1907. Etc.
