| Translated literally, the word "pandemic" means "pertaining to all people." As of this writing, the novel coronavirus has spread to more than 170 countries around the world. It's an acute, rapidly unfolding crisis that we are facing all together, as an entire planet. But just before Covid-19 burst onto the scene, we at WIRED had been spending months thinking intensely about the more chronic, and more slowly unfolding crisis that pertains to everyone on Earth: Climate change. You could think of the coronavirus as a painful and very high-stakes practice round for facing an inexorable global threat: Its danger is bearing down on us whether we like it or not, but we can bend the curve in humanity's favor if we act together and make the right moves. When we decided to dedicate an entire issue to the climate crisis, we knew we didn't have time or patience for stories that would instill despair. Stories that would tell you, yet again, how bad things were. Or that would bother with the absurd debate about the existence of global warming. Instead we wanted to identify what those right moves are. We asked: What can we do right now, with the tech we have, to make the biggest impact on the climate in the next ten years? We went out to the smartest, most elegant writers we knew and asked them to think about four big, crucial areas: capturing carbon, feeding ourselves, getting around, and powering modern life. We also asked: How can we set up institutions, on the grandest possible scale, that will take risks, invest in innovation, and invent all those things that we can't see around the corner yet? And how can we as individuals—whether we're inventors or insurance agents—set ourselves up to make the biggest difference without shutting down? As the essayist Mary Annaise Heglar writes in our pages, " "It's true that you can't solve the climate crisis alone, but it's even more true that we can't solve it without you." Sound familiar? —The Editors |
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