I went on a long hike with my out-of-town friend who was visiting me last week. We hiked to about 2,500 feet of elevation without seeing snow. This is extremely rare for the first week of May in Montana. While this is terrifying for the future of our planet, it was lovely to have the opportunity to enjoy a dry, blue-sky-day hike and show my friend the 360-degree views from the summit which we would normally be unable to reach. When the subject of the “apocobliss” (love this word, btw) silver lining of this unusual weather came up in our conversation, I decided to try out the strategy that I outlined in my last post about how to turn everyday small talk into a conversation to fight climate change. The result was far more powerful than I expected.
As it turns out, my friend is in the process of figuring out how to invest about $500,000. He had not thought about the possibility of investing that money to both fight climate change and produce a financial return, nor had he considered that he may be able to produce better financial returns by doing so. As it also turns out, my friend is uniquely positioned to implement this strategy, because he is very knowledgeable about renewable energy technologies and was willing to share his knowledge with me. He also happens to be an expert on one of the most important technological advances proposed to combat climate change — building data centers in space. I learned from our conversation that this is a far more challenging feat than most people understand, because of the complexity of downlinking data back to Earth. This is important for me to know when I am attempting to inspire others to take action against climate change and someone says something like “I don’t need to worry about climate change because we’ll just use technology to innovate our way out of the problem.”
In approximately seven minutes, I introduced him to an avenue for fighting climate change and he gave me some important tools to do the same. Coincidentally, that’s about the same amount of time as an average everyday “small talk” conversation that inevitably brings up the weather. It got me thinking:
What’s the ripple effect I could create by simply maximizing every seven-minute chairlift, cocktail party, locker room, and bus ride conversation?
I’m inspired to find out!
