omy, I said. Maybe there’s a way to store
much more electricity in a smaller space,
without requiring cobalt from the exploit-
ative deep mines of the Congo.
In retrospect, it’s not a terrible answer.
But I wasn’t sure if it was the best one. I
thought a lot about the question after we
arrived back home. And then, at a meeting
here at wired, I floated it by my colleagues.
In due course, either because it’s a great
question or because parents overestimate
their children—and journalists overestimate
their bosses—it became the inspiration for
this entire issue.
Yes, we did end up taking some liberties
with the question, stretching it in some ways
and constraining it in others. We primar-
ily focused on technology that exists today,
so there are probably fewer wizarding-
world-type projects than my children
would like. And we narrowed the scope of
our assignments to what we consider the
five most crucial areas: how we eat, how we
move around, how we keep the lights on,
how we capture carbon, and how we can
set up institutions that can take the risks
needed to solve this problem. Children
who are now in booster seats, all around
the world, are going to be inventing solu-
tions to the crisis, and they’ll need support,
investment, and, yes, well-designed capi-
talism to get them off the ground.
Even we optimists at wired know this is
a very, very bad situation—likely the most
complex problem humans have ever faced.
We know that a lot of what has been lost is
never coming back, and to grieve is human.
But wired’s purview is the future, and really
the only way to think creatively about the
future is with something like optimism. Not
the blind kind, but the informed kind. We
can be hopeful without being obtuse.
We want our readers to feel empowered
when they finish reading, because the solu-
tions are gathering steam all around us. We
can lay carbon-sucking concrete in cities
that have largely exiled cars. We can reengi-
neer rice paddies and then store our leftover
rice in vastly more efficient refrigerators.
We can even, yes, make better batteries. We
can solve this.An Awesome
Question
_How can we make the biggest impact on climate
in the next 10 years? Go!START
BY Nicholas Thompson ILLUSTRATION BY Eiko OjalaNICHOLAS THOMPSON (@nxthompson) is
wired’s editor in chief.NOT LONG AGO, I WAS DRIVING WITH MY
three sons back from trying to ski on a
mountain that doesn’t really have snow
anymore, and we were talking about cli-
mate change. They’re 11, 9, and 6, and
they’re upset, as they should be. They
know that their adult years will be spent
in a world of raging fires, flash floods, and
mass extinction. They love Greta and resent
their elders. The future feels different and
vaster when the actuarial tables give you
80 years to go, not 40.
We talked about turning our thermo-
stats down, eating less meat, and putting
the cable box on a smart plug. I promised
to install solar panels. I tried futilely to
explain what capitalism is and why it was
still a reasonable way to organize human
affairs, despite CO 2 levels now reaching 415
ppm. I told them there was still time. They
found my explications unpersuasive andmostly shared each other’s anger (except
when the older boys reported that some
environmentalists argue against having
three children; that didn’t go over well with
their little brother). Gradually, though, their
rage turned to pragmatism. That’s when
my oldest son asked: “If there’s one thing
that I could invent that would help, what
would it be?”
It’s an awesome question—maybe a
quintessentially 11-year-old one. From our
first moments of consciousness up through
childhood, the things we think we might
be able to do with our lives broaden and
broaden. And then, at some point around
adolescence, they start to narrow. Our
imaginations shrink, our obligations grow,
we charge ahead on certain roads and
avoid the ones less traveled. Eleven is won-
derful. You’re aware of the world and its
limitations, but if you’re lucky your imag-
ination hasn’t been crimped yet. Really,
maybe, you can do anything.
The question hung for a second, and then
I just took my best guess. “Maybe build a
better battery?” A breakthrough in energy
storage could go a long way toward improv-
ing the prospects for electric cars, the wind
industry, and the entire renewable econ-