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When I was choosing my major for undergrad, I was determined to address climate change to the greatest extent possible. I wanted to understand it, why it was happening and why we were confident in our conclusions, what it would likely cause, and how we could mitigate it. The issue with understanding climate change is that its causes and effects stretch across the entirety of our society. One academic field, much less without graduate school, is utterly insufficient to grasp the issue with as much detail as I wanted. I’m not saying Volts is a substitute for a graduate degree, but it has been invaluable in creating a high level picture to gain awareness of what is being attempted and what is stopping progress.

For those that want a quick rundown about what this “high level” view is, I will give you a high view of the high view. Climate change is caused by greenhouse gases, which are molecules capable of redirecting long wave radiation, acting as a blanket that redirects energy radiating from the surface of the Earth back into itself. Things get warmer. Things get weird in a bad way – as in hundreds of millions of people being displaced (see the 2023 IPCC report) and we lose
tens of trillions of dollars globally over the rest of the century (this is more debated and is incredibly tricky to estimate with confidence, however this estimate seems most likely to me and is reflected in various studies).

This damage is caused by heat, making it biologically untenable to live in regions currently occupied and increasing fatalities from heat stroke, droughts and/or flooding, undermining farming and infrastructure, equatorial diseases expanding their range, sea level rise, and the increasing severity and frequency of storms and wildfires. Climate change will likely cause ecological destruction on the scale of a mass extinction, as most species will be unable to evolve or move quickly enough to adapt, accelerating the current, alarming trends of biomass and biodiversity loss.

Most people don’t really care about nature or realize how dependent we are on its processes to sustain us, so I won’t elaborate here. But, you should check it out if you’re curious! Ask your friendly neighborhood environmental scientist. They are abundant and looking for work. All of these events are what’s most likely in store assuming nothing catastrophic happens, like the West Antarctic ice sheet causing meters of rapid sea level rise. The two major contributors to this problem are CO2, aka carbon dioxide, and CH4, aka methane, aka natural gas.

That’s setting the scene before Volts comes in at all. The first question is where are the emissions coming from? They come from using fossil fuels – generally by burning them – with a couple exceptions. The large buckets are: electricity generation, agriculture, transportation, and industrial/manufacturing processes. Honorable mentions go to leaking methane infrastructure, changing how we use land that once sequestered carbon (this overlaps partly with agriculture), and residential burning of fossil fuels to heat, cook, etc. Okay, David Roberts, time to learn about…everything.

Learning about how we generate, store, and deliver electricity to people is the cornerstone of understanding how to address climate change. Everything hinges on the electrification of our existing processes, substituting current gas consuming vehicles and industrial processes for electricity based systems. We have yet to figure out how to electrify cows. The best solution so far is don’t eat meat. Especially don’t eat meat responsible for 50% of global deforestation – yes, that’s cows. There are well respected estimates that place the cost of electrification as lower than the value of the lives saved (based on their projected productivity, not some morality nonsense) purely by ceasing local exposure to pollution caused by fossil fuels, which are linked to millions of premature deaths across the world annually. That doesn’t count the costs of climate change. To be clear, the health benefits from not using fossil fuels arguably pay for the energy transition by itself. Electrification is a reasonable and achievable pursuit. Volts dives deep into existing, nascent, and potential technologies and companies that could and do make the energy transition possible, the laws, governmental bodies, regulation, and legislation upon which and through things are built, and the surrounding financial, academic, and political players.

I guess put that way it seems like a lot. And it is. If you want a shorter version you can look at Terra.do for how to transition your skills into a climate job, or make your current job a climate job. I think Volts provides an excellent high level view of addressing climate change, exposing and describing all the major parts of the puzzle, enabling a person to dig deeper where and as they wish while having context for the larger picture as they do so. It lets a person picture what we have to do together over the following years, and how you as an individual could play a role.