> The message is clear – NPR expects its readers to be passive consumers of climate change solutions. I get the opposite impression from its headlines, at leas

> The message is clear – NPR expects its readers to be passive consumers of climate change solutions. I get the opposite impression from its headlines, at least when applying Betteridge's law: NPR presupposes that the technological solutions will be insufficiently effective, and that there's nothing to passively consume. All we can do is cope and hope that the socioeconomic and political systems that created this problem in the first place will somehow fix it. > SpaceX promises perhaps the dumbest solution to climate change possible: colonizing space. Elon Musk has convinced legions of people that it will be easier (or maybe better? more desirable?) to colonize Mars to save humanity than to avoid destroying the only planet where food literally grows on trees and water falls from the sky. 1. Elon Musk is not the (only) one doing that convincing; the idea that we could and should be expanding humanity's reach into the Solar System and beyond instead of confining it to a single planet that's already straining to support us predates Elon Musk's very existence. 2. It ain't just Mars. Mars is attractive because it's close and it has some far-future hope for terraforming, but as far as sustaining human life goes it ain't that great; there's a whole asteroid belt full of worlds chock-full of both water ice and hydrocarbons (meaning they've got the raw resources for food and water without needing to rely on Earth), and beyond that are the gas giants with dozens (hundreds, maybe) of moons with similar abundances of water and hydrocarbons. 3. Keeping the entirety of humanity confined to Earth is fundamentally unsustainable without either some very dramatic decreases in quality of life or mass exterminations that make the Holocaust look like child's play; even if we can freeze the population at its current number, the cat named "industrialization" is already out of Pandora's box, and the developing world is, well, developing. Space colonization is a vital pressure relief valve; the optimal end-game is to get the entirety of human industry and the vast majority of humans off Earth, so that Earth's biosphere can heal from the damage we've done to it over the last few centuries. The fact that Earth is the only planet where food literally grows on trees and water falls from the sky is exactly why preserving it is of utmost importance; anything that can be done beyond Earth must be done beyond Earth if we expect there to be any trees or water left on it in the coming centuries.