Many of the people concerned with climate change have their favored ways of dealing with the problem. Electrify transportation (and everything else). Switch to hydrogen and biofuels. Use renewables like wind and solar. Move toward transit-oriented development and plant-based diets. Capture carbon dioxide with plants, soil, and even machinery and lock it away. Focus less on mitigating climate change and more on making society more resilient in the face of floods, droughts, and sea level rise.

Each climate solution has value, but none of them solve everything and can even have problems of their own.

Solutions and problems

• Electrifying everything

Switching to electric vehicles could help, but getting materials for batteries is hard, expensive, and dirty.

• Hydrogen and biofuels

Making hydrogen and biofuels often requires fossil fuels and may use up valuable farm land.

• Renewables

Solar panels and wind turbines take energy and materials to build and manufacturing can create pollution. Also, we'd need to manage inconsistent power output.

• Carbon capture

Plants and soil can only soak up so much carbon dioxide and direct carbon capture requires energy and expensive equipment. Also, we have to lock captured carbon dioxide away somehow.

Combining solutions

Maybe each of these methods can address drawbacks in others. We could use excess energy from renewables to make hydrogen or power direct carbon capture. Transit could decrease how many cars we need to build. We could even use carbon dioxide to make biofuels.

It's crucial that people don't get so focused on their own solution that they don't see the potential downsides and how their technology interacts with other solutions.

There's likely no silver bullet for addressing climate change. We'll need to find new ways to live and make energy, reduce emissions, capture and lock away greenhouse gases, and deal with what lies ahead.