Gigaton Problems Need Gigaton Solutions

Abstract

Achieving sustainability requires commanding the whole problem, not just iterative efforts that barely strike a moving target.Numerous challenges have been identified as critical for sustainability, including population growth, access to energy and resources, climate change, biodiversity decreases, and widespread poverty.Governments, industry, researchers, and advocates have proposed and begun to implement a range of actions and policies designed to tackle these challenges.Many of these practices are helpful for approaching sustainability, but their contributions typically do not match the scale of the challenges they aim to tackle.For example, recently the City of Pittsburgh announced plans to spend $24 million to replace 40 000 of its existing street lights with LED lights.This project is estimated to eliminate 17,853 tons of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions per year (1), which of course is very helpful.(Editor's Note: "tons" in this document are U.S. "short" tons, as opposed to SI tonnes [t] where 1 t ) 1.10231 ton.)However, this is only an approximately 0.6% reduction in the total CO 2 emitted by Pittsburgh (2).Although replacing street lights is likely to save Pittsburgh money, such a small reduction in CO 2 emissions contributes little to solving