Climate change can feel distant until extreme weather turns up at your door. After Queensland floods sent water under my house, I realised the real danger is not only rising average temperatures, but more floods and droughts happening now. This article summarises three short books that explore a practical path: use innovation and systems thinking to lock carbon into soil, buy time for clean energy storage to mature, and build new environmental service industries.
Sandy’s Sister Is Coming
Sandy’s sister is coming to blow your house down. What can you do about it?
I wrote three short books because I do not think we are winning the climate change war. If you want the longer version, you can find them on Amazon. If you find the ideas useful, tell your friends.
Why I Stopped Thinking of Climate Change as “Future”
Like many people, I used to think of climate change in an abstract way. It was something that would happen “way into the future.” Then the Queensland floods arrived and water ran under my house. I live in a high-set Queenslander, so I was lucky, but the message was clear.
The real danger is not only higher temperatures in the future. It is the increase in extreme weather—floods and droughts—that is already happening. This is a “here and now” issue. Action is needed now.
Book 1: How Innovation Can Help Us Solve Climate Change
When I looked deeper, the situation seemed bleak. The Kyoto targets for developed countries were based on what was politically acceptable, not what was actually needed. And even if those targets were achieved, emissions from developing countries would more than offset the savings.
We put tens of billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year. Despite all the effort to reduce emissions, global emissions keep growing.
Renewable energy sources like wind and solar could potentially supply enough energy to meet our needs. But there is a practical problem: without effective, low-cost storage, renewables cannot fully replace fossil fuels for a modern economy that needs power on demand.
Then I came across a startling piece of information: vegetation is absorbing roughly thirty times all man-made emissions. So why is there still a problem? Because most of that carbon returns to the atmosphere through oxidation and decomposition.
In simple terms, the largest emitter of carbon is not only electricity generation or transport. A vast amount of carbon is released by rotting vegetation. That raises a practical question: why can’t we divert more of that carbon so it goes into the soil and stays there?
I am an innovator. My most socially important innovation is a system with the potential to remove large amounts—gigatonnes—of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while improving soil quality. Better soil also makes food production more resilient in a changing climate.
The aim is not to ask wealthy countries to abandon their lifestyles overnight, or to tell developing countries they must stay poor. The goal is to create a pathway where living standards can be maintained or improved without triggering catastrophic climate change.
Of course, removing gigatonnes of carbon is not trivial. It is a logistics problem as much as a technical one. That is what the first book is about.
Key words: climate change, soil, carbon, science, innovation, greenhouse, sequestration
Book 2: How the Eco Corporation Will Emerge
Imagine if thirty years ago someone predicted that the biggest companies would not be car makers or oil giants, but companies with odd names like Apple, Google, and Facebook. They would make serious money not mainly from physical products, but from services.
Those services would have sounded unbelievable at the time. People would locate things, communicate instantly, and share massive amounts of information worldwide through something called the internet. Friends would be checking if you needed a local mental institution.
Now I want to make a similar prediction for the next thirty years. The internet era will mature and stabilise. The next wave of major companies will earn their living by providing services that manage the environment.
This is not only about “being green.” It is about building systems that can measure, manage, and improve outcomes—soil carbon, water cycles, farm resilience, and large-scale restoration. If climate change is the defining constraint of the next era, then environmental services will become a defining industry.
Key words: climate change, soil, carbon, science, innovation, greenhouse, sequestration
Book 3: How Science Can Fail Us
A title like “How science can fail us” might sound like a climate denier’s delight. It is the opposite. Climate change is real and happening now. This book is about how modern science can sometimes hinder solutions when it becomes too reductionist.
The reductionist approach breaks problems into small pieces and studies each piece in detail. That is powerful, but it can also slow action when the problem is urgent and the system is complex. In contrast, the innovator’s speculative approach uses systems thinking: build something that works, learn from real-world feedback, and refine it over time.
The problem we face is clear. Resolving climate change requires a dramatic reduction in fossil fuel use. But developing countries have economic needs, and affluent countries want to maintain comfortable lives. In the short term, simply abandoning coal and oil is not politically or economically acceptable.
Renewable energy is abundant—wind, solar, wave power—but storage and controllability remain immediate practical limits. Storage may be solvable, but it could take decades to mature at the scale needed.
Embedding carbon in the soil can give us breathing space while clean energy storage evolves. We should not wait for perfect scientific understanding of every detail of soil microbiology before acting. We already have working systems for increasing soil carbon, and those systems can be improved over time.
Changing agricultural practice is achievable if the incentives are right. Increasing soil organic content also supports food security and food quality. Carbon trading is the most fashionable mechanism at present, but the tools must be simple and accessible for farmers.
It may help to think about the steam engine. It was built to solve an immediate problem: flooded mines. Mine owners did not wait for thermodynamics. They used working engines first, then science refined them later. We need the same mindset now.
We have workable technology to embed carbon in soil. It can offset emissions. Scientific understanding will improve, but we should not delay action while we wait for perfection.
Key words: climate change, soil, carbon, science, innovation, greenhouse, sequestration
Where to Find the Books
You can search for these books on Amazon by using the terms “resolving climate change” or “Colin Austin.”
Or go to Amazon and search directly for “resolving climate change.”
