Is it worse to have no climate solutions – or to have them but refuse to use them? | Rebecca Solnit

Tech barons are forever predicting some amazing new technology to fix the climate crisis. Yet fixes already exist

There are so many ways to fiddle while Rome burns, or as this season's weather would have it, gets torn apart by hurricanes and tornadoes and also goes underwater - and, in other places, burns. One particularly pernicious way comes from the men in love with big tech, who are forever insisting that we need some amazing new technology to solve our problems, be it geoengineering, carbon sequestration or fusion - but wait, it gets worse.

At an artificial intelligence conference in Washington DC, the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently claimed that [w]e're not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we're not organized to do it" and that we should just plunge ahead with AI, which is so huge an energy hog it's prompted a number of tech companies to abandon their climate goals. Schmidt then threw out the farfetched notion that we should go all in on AI because maybe AI will somehow, maybe, eventually know how to solve" climate, saying: I'd rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it."

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell's Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility