Why North America's killer heat scares me

The relationship between Smallpox and Cowpox was well known even in the 1700s. (Though the concept of infectious diseases was not understood until the late 1800s, the people who hung around cows a lot didn't die of Smallpox as much).

Turns out that Cowpox was the same viral-family as Smallpox, and that Cowpox could be used to lessen the effect of Smallpox.

So there were absolutely animal reservoirs of the Smallpox viral family. The disease was shown to hop from different species (from humans to cows and vice versa).

Like it or not, the remainder of humanity is rapidly industrializing. First, no amount of lifestyle changes in the West is going to offset the pollution and environmental degradation this could cause. Second, neither you nor me are in a position to tell them that they can't also have the trappings of a Western-level middle-class lifestyle once they can afford it.

If humanity wants to get serious about climate change, we need to think big. Really big. Global-scale big.

First: energy. How can we get the whole world converted to 100% solar and geothermal in the next 10 years? No more oil, no more gas, no more coal, no more ICEs -- there needs to be a global moratorium on fossil fuel tech to stop CO2 emissions. We should be mass-producing and deploying solar panels like there's no tomorrow. We should be giving them away to people (and countries) who will install and use them. Let's help industrializing countries leap-frog fossil fuels and go straight to renewables.

Second: water. Once we solve the energy problem, we're gonna need large-scale desalinization plants. We'll want to make so much green energy that desalinizing and pumping ocean water will be cheaper than pumping it from aquifers and rivers.

Third: food. Forget about "organic" food -- we need GMOs that resist pests, take less water to grow, and can put up with higher heat and lower quality soil. We'll need either a green way of producing meats, or a really high quality meat substitute, because humanity's appetite for it isn't gonna decrease anytime soon. At the same time, it needs to become "cool" to be vegetarian or vegan, in the way that Teslas made EVs "cool."

Fourth: shelter. Find your local NIMBYs and run them out of town. We're gonna need lots of high quality and high density housing to reduce the carbon footprint required to keep modern civilization running. It's cheaper and greener to supply water, air conditioning, electricity and sewage to 100 people in 1 building than 100 people in 100 houses. We should be building every single human being a condo in a high rise for free.

Fifth: manufacturing. Power all factories with renewable energy. If it can't be plugged in, make it battery-powered. If it produces waste, find a way to throw green energy at the waste to render it inert (or recycle it).

We can achieve all of the above today. Solar is cheap and getting cheaper, and you don't need that much of the earth's surface area to supply electricity for the whole of humanity. Once you have basically limitless solar energy, you can get cheap desalinization and cheap water pumping, which unlocks mass irrigation and with it, farming capacity.

Housing sounds like a tough political problem at first, but few people will say no to a policy of "everyone -- rich or poor -- gets a free condo." Even existing homeowners would take a second home in a big city, even if all they do is use it for storage or weekend visits.

Manufacturing can be made greener and greener as more and more energy becomes available. If energy isn't your limiting factor, then you can divert energy towards safe waste disposal -- for example, you could convert carbon dioxide back molecular oxygen and carbon with enough energy. This I think will be key to manufacturing the goods and services that 7+ billion people will want in a sustainable way.

Building a coalition that cares about climate is needed. Then politicians will see that the issue has a reliable voting block they can depend on for their careers.