Today in Philly we’re under a Code Purple Air Quality Alert for particulate matter due to wildfire smoke. What’s missing from the announcements and the reporting is that wildfires are increasing in frequency and scale due to human-caused climate change.
Today the pools and spraygrounds are closed. Trash pickup is suspended. The mayor is advising everyone who can to stay home. The commissioner for the department of public health says to wear an N-95 or KN-95 mask if you need to go outdoors.
This is what climate change looks like when it’s at home.
What could we solve now?
I don’t know about you, but often when I try to think about climate change, I get overwhelmed. It’s too big and too scary. It’s easier to let it stay abstract, a planet-level problem, something for people more powerful and important than me to deal with.
But lately, I’ve been thinking about all the clean energy startups I’ve worked with over the years. I wondered: if we put all these solutions together, the hardware and software — plus new AI-enabled coordination capabilities — how far would that get us?
The answer is: pretty damn far.
The technology for a clean energy future mostly exists already — but in pieces. The U.S. already has major pieces of a clean-energy system, but the hard work is turning those pieces into reliable, affordable, coordinated infrastructure.
The clean energy future already exists — in pieces: Read the research
I don’t like this new normal
I don’t like sitting indoors because the air outside smells like burning tires and burns my eyes and my throat.
I don’t like that this is the new normal.
I don’t want this to just keep getting worse, while we don’t talk about why it’s happening.
We know why it’s happening: human-caused climate change.
We have tools to fix this — now
And we have many of the tools to fix it. Now. This wasn’t true until recently. Hardware development has been moving fast, and AI is a game changer here — it can help coordinate increasingly complex energy systems.
But now that it is possible, we need to get on this. We need to build the infrastructure. We need to incentivize the shift even further.
We desperately need to stop disincentivizing or shutting down the solutions we’ve been working on.
Unless you enjoy that burning sensation?