We cannot MacGyver our way out of the climate crisis
Why hopes that human exceptionalism will solve global warming aren’t the right way of thinking
For more than a generation, MacGyver has, in many ways, served as the fictional embodiment of human exceptionalism. If you’re unfamiliar with the character, he was the star of an eponymous ABC series from 1985 to 1992 and, in every episode, even when he had limited supplies, he would invariably use his keen intellect and amazing ingenuity to solve problems. There was no jam he couldn’t work his way out of (think, diffusing a bomb with a paperclip).
MacGyver’s smarts were so beloved that he spawned not only a reboot series in 2016 on CBS, but also as a recurring parody “MacGruber” on Saturday Night Live, which was made into a film in 2010. In popular culture, his name has become a verb. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “to MacGyver” as making or repairing an object “in an improvised or inventive way, making use of whatever items are at hand.” An Urban Dictionary definition offers a more fantastical explanation of MacGyver: “Someone who can jump-start a truck with a cactus.”
In the real world, it’s reassuring to think that MacGyvers are out there, ready to devise impossibly ingenious ways to address any issue. But when it comes to one of our most existential threats — global warming — that hope can also be dangerous.
Simply put, we cannot MacGyver our way out of climate change.
Don’t get me wrong: Breakthroughs in technology must be part of the equation when dealing with global warming’s life-altering impacts. Thankfully, we see examples of this nearly every day. For instance, a multinational team of scientists recently found that “naturally occurring heating, including from human bodies … could eliminate the need for batteries in some small devices,” the publication E&E reported on March 1. Elsewhere, stories about promising developments in fusion technology, which involves merging atoms as opposed to splitting them to make energy, are growing more commonplace.
No doubt, these developments show the exceptional nature of the human mind. (Yes, there are real-life MacGyvers out there). But we cannot solely rely on them to make climate change go away for a number of reasons.
The first is that waiting for exceptional humans to save the day leaves the rest of us non-MacGyvers more likely to become complacent. As two researchers at Northeastern University explained in a paper they released in January: “If we think that humans are unique and separate from the rest of the natural world, we might not think that humans could be impacted by climate change.” The study came to a troubling conclusion that a belief in “explicit exceptionalism was inversely related to mitigating attitudes” toward global warming.
This is a big issue. Whether everyone admits it or not, we are all already feeling the impacts of the climate crisis through wildfires, floods and extreme weather events. As such, we all must lean in to solve this problem — through pressing our leaders to take action as well as through consumer and lifestyle choices — rather than planning for a white knight to ride in.
For those who believe others will do the necessary MacGyvering, there’s a second problem: Unlike on television, where MacGyver always comes up with answers just in the nick of time, the real world doesn’t often work that way. Take fusion technology. It has the potential to be a game-changer, but the most optimistic projections don’t have it becoming any sort of reality for more than a decade. Innovation will come, but they might be too late if we just sit around and wait for them (especially when time is running out to address climate change’s most serious impacts).
Finally, when we do get new, scalable technology, a question remains: Will it be used correctly to address climate change?
I recently took a University of Edinburgh online course on carbon capture technology. I looked forward to hearing about all the breakthroughs on direct air carbon capture, which most experts believe will be necessary to avert the greatest damage from global warming. While this technology was mentioned, the vast majority of the classes focused on using carbon capture in the process of burning fossil fuels. This would lower the amount of carbon dioxide injected into our atmosphere, but even with tremendous efficiency, it would perpetuate our dependence on the very fuels that got us into this mess.
In other words, these professors were recommending investing a majority of our MacGyvering skills into innovations that tinker around the edges rather than defuse the metaphorical bomb. Even if we have the know-how, we cannot be sure that it will be applied adequately, strategically or wisely to solve our climate problem.
All this means that, while there should be scientists and researchers working on cutting-edge work to address global warming, it’s deeply important that the rest of us keep plugging away at shifting our country and our planet from a dirty, dangerous dependence on fossil fuels to a sustainable path.
By making it a priority to move to zero carbon options that are already on the menu — such as electric vehicles and solar and wind energy — we can fix problems for the long haul. To be sure, even these technologies still need fine-tuning and greater innovation, but they are far enough along that we don’t need MacGyver to show up with a paperclip and duct tape to save the day.
