The majority of us know we have a big fat problem on our hands, a climate crisis if you will. Many of us doubt that we will be able to dig ourselves out of this messy grave we’ve dug, however thankfully many of us are also all about trying. It seems to me there are two categories of global warming responses. High tech and low tech. Given our societal situation, the high tech solution is more likely to succeed whereas the low tech route makes much more intuitive sense. Living in San Francisco, I see the best of both sets of solutions.

High tech: High tech solutions to global warming are designed such that we can continue to live excessive lifestyles but emit fewer GHG’s. Examples include electric, hybrid, fuel cell and other low-carbon vehicles so that we can continue to eschew public transit and drive cars; photo-voltaic and other renewable energy technologies so that we can continue to use as much energy as we want on a daily basis; cloud-seeding to clear pollution instead of reducing pollution in the first place, and so on. (There are many many blogs only devoted to such things, so I’ll stop here). These solutions do not address the fact that our excessive lifestyles got us here in the first place and technology was often an enabler of our polluting ways. That said we have gotten used to a certain way of life and now people expect to live a that way. There may be no turning back and technology can help ease the outcome of our ways.

Low tech: On the opposite end of the spectrum are those people and techniques that address climate change by eliminating the sources of the problem altogether. This generally involves adopting practices long since given up by mainstream Americans.

Example 1) Eating homegrown or otherwise local food. A recent New York Times article picked up on a trend of outsourcing the gardening of one’s back yard to grow food for one’s family. (Interestingly, this trend has roots in my employer’s back yard with MyFarm, and you can see a small sliver of my face in the background of the above NYT article photo – probably the only time I will ever make the front page :) ). Local, organic, sustainable (however you define it) food is in, and there is a shift backwards to the days when we used to grow our own food, even if we may end up paying someone else to do so for us.

Example 2) Off the grid living. It has become increasingly popular to take your house off the grid, which means relying on renewable energy in one form or another. Interestingly this can sometimes be very high tech.

I don’t have a remarkable conclusion to this split in the green movement. But I do know that like all things, the workable solution to our environmental woes will come from a combination of high and low tech solutions. We are not about to go back to the farm en masse, however I think people can be nudged stepwise towards a less polluting lifestyle. And I doubt we’ll invent a silver bullet high tech solution, though our technologies will continue to make going green more fun and easy.