Climate Change and Sustainable Solutions: A Night with Entrepreneur Aaron Fyke

With coal lobbyists heading the Environmental Protection Agency and global emissions continuing to rise despite dire reports of the climate passing one dire benchmark after another, speaking with hyper-competent and extremely driven professionals like Aaron Fyke is always reassuring. An engineer by training, co-founder of six alternative energy companies, and outspoken climate activist, Fyke is truly the kind of motivated entrepreneur we need as it becomes clear just how much we must cut emissions in order to avoid runaway global warming.

Though Fyke began his presentation with a sobering account of the potential destruction resulting from climate change, unlike your typical tree-hugging, fist-shaking environmental activist, he did not warn us that the only way to save the planet was for everyone to turn off the lights when they leave a room or take shorter showers. In fact, he rejected this kind of small-scale activism as unnecessary shaming and focused on larger-scale solutions, illustrating with fascinating graphs and figures how many types of alternative energy had already achieved "grid parity," or become cheaper than fossil fuel sources. In the face of his bleak vision of Earth's future, this optimism was comforting and he pared with a plea for those of us who want to affect real change to pursue a career path (not just in STEM) that could tie in to addressing climate change.

I walked out of Fyke's presentation wondering whether it was all enough. The gloom-and-doom warnings and business-friendly optimism seemed irreconcilable and left me wondering whether the powers of the market would be strong enough to solve global warming or governments and international bodies would need to take drastic action that could cut into the profit margins of major corporations. I hope the market forces are as potent as Fyke made them sound because global governments seem to be in denial or else taking far too little action to address what Fyke called the greatest crisis of the 21st century.