What I told my daughter about climate change
“Do more” optimism wins
In today’s Diary:
She came home a doomer
A city lifted from below
The farm with all-night sunshine
The evilest book ever written
“Do less” environmentalism is dead
Hey Rational Optimist,
My 7-year-old daughter Aubrey came home from school last week and told me humans are ruining the planet.
She had been reading David Attenborough.
I loved Attenborough as a kid. I owned every BBC nature series he ever made on DVD. The man could narrate a snail crossing a leaf and make it seem fascinating.
But sometime in the mid-2000s he lost the plot and morphed into a prominent climate doomer.
My 7-year-old comes home from school and tells me about melting ice caps and how humans are the problem. Uh-oh.
It’s easy to laugh off anti-human climate hysteria when it’s coming from a YouTube video. It’s much harder when it’s coming from your own kid, sitting across from you at the kitchen table.
I sat her down and told her the story she isn’t being taught in school.
For half a century the climate conversation has been about “less.” Drive less. Fly less. Eat less. Grow less. Build less. Burn less. The whole debate assumed human beings are the problem and shrinking ourselves is the solution.
American entrepreneurs are now writing a different story in factories from El Segundo to Berkeley.
We can grow and get richer and the earth can be more beautiful than ever. It’s the rational optimist’s answer to climate change.
This past year I visited three founders inventing cool new climate related tech that works.
300 million people will face routine coastal flooding by 2050.
And up to now the best idea anyone has had is… building walls?
A young founder in Berkeley says, “What if we raise the ground instead?”
I drove to his warehouse in Berkeley to see if he was bluffing. He wasn’t.
The first thing I noticed walking into Terranova’s facility was the muddy Cybertruck. It looked like it’d been dragged through a field.
Founder Laurence Allen told me it was towing rovers around a walnut orchard near Sacramento, where Terranova has been quietly testing this system behind us:
Terranova raises land with a material made of wood chips, the same mulch under your local playground. It blends them with water into a slurry and pumps it 40 to 60 feet underground. The land above rises inch by inch, at 2-millimeter precision.
Engineers can control the process through a SimCity-like dashboard. One of Laurence’s goals is to lift San Rafael, his hometown. Parts of San Rafael are sinking 2 inches per year due to sediment compaction.
You don’t have to evacuate the city to lift it. The homes and schools rise with the land.
This has been tried before. On an abandoned Italian island in 1971 researchers injected cement into a 900-square-meter plot. The land rose 10 centimeters. But the process never scaled because cement is dense and needed injection wells every 10 feet. The expense and manpower needed were far too great.
Terranova has built two key unlocks. First, the wood-chip slurry mixture. It easily flows underground so wells can be spaced 1,000 feet apart.
Second: autonomous robots.
Two robots work the job site. Atlas, a car-sized rover, crawls into position. Prometheus, the injection pod, bolts onto Atlas and delivers the mixture underground.
Laurence let us steer a Prometheus rover from an app on his phone. A 12,000-pound machine controlled like a video game.
A third unit, Ark, sits in a shipping container at the edge of the site, blending the slurry and running the fleet over Starlink.
Terranova is the definition of rational optimism. Sea-level rise has always been a “fate” problem: You either build very expensive walls (Boston was quoted $2.4 billion, and New York will spend over $100 billion on sea walls) … or you move.
Terranova is pioneering a third way that doesn’t cost billions of dollars. It will make sinking cities a problem our grandkids read about in history class.
A mile away from where SpaceX builds reusable rockets…
A 60-person startup is crafting giant space mirrors to give you sunlight on demand.
Reflect Orbital was founded by Ben Nowack, a former SpaceX engineer, and Tristan Semmelhack, who dropped out of Stanford to start the company.
Ben gave us a tour of its HQ in March. He’s one of the most impressive founders I’ve ever met. I walked out thinking, “How the hell did a startup build all this?”
Reflect is launching satellites with giant Mylar mirrors into orbit. Each satellite flies along what space engineers call “the terminator line.” It’s the moving boundary between day and night about 600 kilometers up.
The ultra-thin mirrors catch sunlight and bounce it down to Earth. Roughly 5 kilometers of ground receives full-moon brightness. Build a whole constellation of these satellites, and one solar farm could get continuous redirected sunlight all night long.
And solar farms aren’t the only customers.
Sunlight on demand would let us grow crops faster and light up remote construction sites. Ben is also targeting disaster-recovery zones. If someone gets stuck on a mountain, it’s easier to rescue them when it’s light.
Reflect’s public booking portal already received more than 260,000 illumination requests from 150+ countries. Yes, you can order sunlight on demand today!
The mirrors are the part you must see to believe. Each is 18 by 18 meters, about half the size of a basketball court, and weighs only 35 pounds:
They’re made from Mylar, the same plastic film NASA uses to insulate its spacecraft. The material is so light a palm-sized piece literally floats in the air. And when folded, the whole mirror slots into a container the size of a microwave oven!
Reflect’s HQ is a maze of innovation. On one side engineers spot-check the stretched mirrors for any imperfections. Behind plexiglass a clean room of bunny-suited engineers assembles the satellite.
Reflect’s first satellite will soon launch on a SpaceX rocket, with the goal of lighting up ten cities around the world with its mirrors.
Like every good LA hard-tech startup, the factory spills out into the parking lot. Reflect’s engineers built a 13-meter-long oven to cure the carbon-fiber booms that hold the mirror.
I also spotted a rack of dumbbells beside the oven for getting a pump in between inventions.
As a teenager Ben built homemade nuclear fusers in his garage with a friend from down the road named… Laurence Allen.
Yep, the same kid you just met who’s using autonomous robots to lift sinking cities. I’m bullish on both.
Over a 20-year period Reflect’s tech could change the world.
The price of land is in part driven by how much sunlight it gets. Everyone wants to live in California because the sun is always shining.
If you can deliver extra sunlight to, say, northern Idaho, you will change the price of the land. You turn the empty acres of nowhere into the Beverly Hills of tomorrow.
“Would this get done without me?”
That’s the question Casey Handmer asks before he decides to start a company.
Terraform Industries exists because, as far as Casey can tell, no one else was going to build the machine that turns sunlight into natural gas. I visited Casey at his castle-shaped factory in Burbank, next door to Walt Disney’s original studio.
Casey talks fast, like he knows there’s not enough time in the day to explain all the ideas ricocheting around his brain. He’s building a machine that turns sunlight, air and water into pipeline-grade natural gas.
Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels has always been pitched as using less. Nice idea… but completely unrealistic.
Casey is taking a different approach. His “Terraformer” machine is basically a mobile chemical plant the size of two shipping containers. It creates synthetic natural gas in three stages:
Stage one pulls CO₂ directly out of the air.
Stage two splits ordinary water into hydrogen and oxygen, using electrolysis powered entirely by solar panels.
Stage three combines hydrogen with the captured CO₂, making methane that’s indistinguishable from the natural gas already flowing through US pipelines.
“Mark One” of the machine pumps out enough synthetic gas to power about 30 American homes:
Many people had this idea before Casey. The exponential collapse in the price of solar is finally making it economical.
The cost of solar panels has collapsed 99% since 1990 and continues to fall rapidly. In sunny areas, Terraformers can already make fuel cheaper than pulling natural gas out of the ground.
Casey’s prediction, delivered with total conviction over lunch in Burbank: “Solar cells are panes of glass that print wealth. By 2040, 95% of our energy will come from solar-powered sources.”
There is a date on the wall of Terraform’s Burbank factory: June 15, 2026. That’s the day Casey is moving the entire Mark One out of Burbank to a test site in the Mojave Desert.
Another one of my favorite founders, Ian Brooke of Astro Mechanica, posted a photo of a pallet of Terraform natural gas canisters. Astro’s supersonic jet is engineered to run on liquefied natural gas. Casey is making the fuel, and Ian is making the engine.
Casey is also spinning off Terraform Desalination.
His master plan is to refill California’s Salton Sea with 3 million acre-feet of fresh water, build cities around the rim, and turn what is now California’s worst environmental disaster into something closer to Lake Tahoe.
That, my friends, is how you solve “climate change.”
Not by cowering down, but by using technology to green the earth.
The floor at the entrance to Terraform’s lab is painted, in capital letters, “WE WILL WIN.”
Laurence Allen is trying to raise sinking cities. Ben Nowack is attempting to bend sunlight. Casey Handmer is making pipeline-grade gas out of thin air. Big, hairy, audacious goals.
ROS co-founder Matt Ridley recently wrote about butterfly biologist Paul Ehrlich, who embodied “do less” environmentalism until his death.
Ehrlich was famous for writing The Population Bomb, which predicted hundreds of millions of people would starve to death by the 1970s and 1980s because we couldn’t feed a growing population. The book became the bible of “do less” environmentalism.
It is one of the evilest books ever written.
Ehrlich was wrong… in part because Norman Borlaug, an Iowan agronomist, created high-yield wheat varieties that would feed billions more humans.
Most people are still arguing the Ehrlich position on climate. Meanwhile modern-day Borlaugs are inventing the future.
This is what I sat my daughter down and told her about. Aubrey will live to see the year 2100. She will see and be part of wonderful things we cannot yet imagine. I want to immunize her against the do-less worldview before it takes hold.
I’m teaching her the “humans are restoring the planet” story. Tell every kid you know the same.
The stories we tell the next generation are what they will grow up believing and doing.
Click “like” and “restack” to help keep those stories optimistic.
—Stephen McBride
P.S. Vote below on which stories you want most.
I appreciate the optimism in this piece, but a few of the technological examples deserve a closer engineering look.
1. Raising cities is far more complex than raising land.
The idea of lifting ground level is interesting, but cities aren’t empty soil columns. Beneath any major urban area you’ll find subways, sewer mains, storm drains, gas lines, electrical conduits, fiber trunks, and building foundations — all rigid, interconnected, and not designed to flex. Raising a field is one thing; raising a city block is another. A more realistic application might be lifting seawalls or specific structures rather than entire districts.
2. Orbital sunlight capture fits into a long‑standing civilizational pattern.
Human societies have always moved toward capturing, storing, and redistributing solar energy — from photosynthesis to fossil fuels to photovoltaics. Orbital mirrors are an early rung on that ladder. But they come with orbital‑mechanics constraints, atmospheric scattering, and governance questions about who controls nighttime illumination. They’re promising, but not magic.
3. Plants need darkness — but winter light extension is a real opportunity.
Most crops evolved with a daily dark cycle for respiration, hormone regulation, and root‑zone processes. Anyone who has done hydroponics knows that 24/7 lighting stresses plants — timers exist for a reason.
That said, extending daylight in winter is a legitimate agronomic strategy. Crops like winter wheat exploit cold seasons to avoid pests that thrive in summer, then resume growth when conditions improve. Supplemental light could help with season extension, but not continuous illumination. The goal is to modulate photoperiod, not eliminate night.
4. Innovation matters — but biology and infrastructure impose constraints.
The broader “do more” message is compelling, and many of these technologies are worth pursuing. But credible climate optimism needs to integrate engineering realities and biological limits, not skip over them.
I totally agree with you about Sir David Attenborough. I loved his nature series -- gave a lot of his Planet Earth DVD sets to friends and family. But when he went into this climate doomerism spiel, I was disheartened.
I thank you and the ROS. Please keep up the great work.