Do You Trust Governor Sarah Palin With The Fate Of The Polar Bears? (An Annotated 2009 Retrospective)
I received a letter in the mail the other day from the National Resource Defense Council (N.R.D.C.) with the heading “Do You Trust Governor Sarah Palin With The Fate Of The Polar Bears?”. Well the first thing I said was no. I don’t trust you enough to send you ten bucks. I’m not interested in getting a polar bear plight conscientious hand bag either. So that left me with one choice. I am generally interested in finding a way to help out our polar bears friends. So I decided to bring my idea here, to you, my avid readers. I want to put the power into your hands because it is a problem that future historians will call everyone’s.
2025 Reflection: The Politics of Climate
It’s wild to see how quickly political figures and organizations can date a piece. What’s relevant here isn’t the specific Governor, but the feeling of apathy and distrust in institutions. I felt then that the most innovative solutions often come from grassroots ideas. I still feel now that these are things big N.G.O.’s (Non-Government Organizations) and governments overlook. That conviction hasn’t changed, even if my specific idea has been stress-tested.
Plastic is a pretty terrible thing. It never goes away. It is toxic if exposure is maintained for too long or too close. It only photodegrades and even then, it can take decades. Photodegradation doesn’t return the item to the soil in a biodegrade sense. It only breaks it into perpetually smaller pieces that continue on to microscopic levels. Recycling of the product is not available or supported everywhere. See, plastic is a lot like polar bears. People don’t want to acknowledge it as a problem. It can be deadly to wildlife, the planet and its inhabitants. It also floats. Yeah, plastic has this nifty little problem where when you leave it in the ocean it floats on forever. Recently, reports revealed the severity of trash in the Pacific Ocean. Screens can be dragged behind boats to fill bags with trash constantly. Most of this trash is plastic and it’s floating nicely at the top of the ocean. Ebbing and flowing with the waves.
“Something” is causing the icecaps to melt. It’s probably us, but I’ll stay neutral as we can’t seem to agree on that. The habitat of the polar bears has been slowly diminishing. This causes them to slowly starve to death. They are left swimming until they can no longer and drown from exhaustion.
The Synthetic Iceberg Proposal
Teaching a polar bear night course on life vest usage seems problematic so I propose a nationwide outreach program. Americans have lots of plastic. We can’t help it, we’re close to sweating it from our bodies so it makes sense we have it. Problem is what do we do with it after we have it? School children seem to like to collect things for a cause. The youthful are wonderful this way. They’re not as apathetic and jaded to causes as the older are.
So what we do is we have kids in elementary, middle and high school everywhere collect milk jugs. We have refuge teams and fishermen troll the pacific for plastic particles to collect for the cause. Who cares where they come from we just need millions of these pieces of plastic. We collect all of these milk jugs and other plastic pieces. Then we recycle and reprocess them into giant plastic icebergs. Then we deploy these icebergs all over the arctic. In the winter, when ice reforms around them, the polar bears won’t know the difference. In the summer, it will give them places to rest.
2025 Technical Rebuttal: The Scale and The Microplastics Risk
These extra areas of white reflective material would have the effect of reversing the warming climate of the Arctic. See it’s not just an American patch on the problem like usual. It’s a solution masked in a band aid. Now all it needs is community support… and someone who owns a plastic factory.
The core idea is based on the Albedo Effect—using a white, reflective surface to bounce solar energy back into space. This is scientifically sound. Yet, the scale and material are the non-starters. The amount of ice lost covers millions of square kilometers; the plastic needed would be billions of tons. More critically, the harsh Arctic environment would cause the recycled plastic to break down. This breakdown would release massive quantities of microplastics into one of the world's most vulnerable ecosystems. It would do more harm than good to the marine life that the bears depend on.Final Thoughts: 2025 Update
One of the reasons the oceans are warming is the melting of ice sheets that formerly reflected light and heat. I always thought that a solution to this would be making synthetic icebergs out of recycled milk jugs. Is that at all possible? A professor once told me that they’d just float away. But, I thought weighting them would be a solution. I also thought the returning ice would lock them in place.
Technical Rebuttal: The Physics and Logistics
Your professor was right. Anchoring millions of individual structures in the deep, stormy, and constantly shifting Arctic waters presents an astronomical engineering challenge. This challenge is currently insurmountable. Furthermore, a plastic structure would simply absorb heat and degrade. It would not undergo the cooling phase change (melting) that real ice does. The energy needed to collect, transport, and manufacture this quantity of plastic is massive. Its carbon footprint would be net-negative for the climate. This would outweigh any gained reflective benefit.2025 Reflection: Where We Go From Here
Looking back, I realize my idea was a powerful expression of frustration. It showed a wish for a tangible, visible solution to a massive, invisible problem. It correctly identified the key mechanism (albedo). But, it completely underestimated the scale and complexity of the execution. Crucially, it overlooked the secondary environmental damage of introducing plastic into the Arctic.
The conversation I had with Gemini confirmed an important insight. Creative geoengineering ideas are powerful. Nonetheless, the immense inertia of global systems means we must increasingly shift our thinking. We are now in a phase where we must focus on both mitigation and adaptation.
Large-scale emissions reduction remains the ultimate goal. Yet, we can’t wait for an administration or a world leader to get us there. The most immediate, powerful, and hopeful action begins with us. Instead of aiming for a grand, unreachable synthetic iceberg, let’s focus that same energy on two simple ideas we can teach the next generation:
Reduce at the Source: The power isn’t in recycling the plastic we have. It lies in never buying it in the first place. Teach kids to be mindful consumers: to choose reusable bottles, reusable bags, and products with minimal packaging.
Act Locally, Build Resilience Globally: Continue to encourage collection and recycling efforts, like the milk jug drives. See them as a lesson in community stewardship. They are not just a feedstock for a giant plan. Every piece of plastic kept out of the ocean is a win. Every conversation started by a student is a seed planted for a more resilient future.
Yes, we’ve lost critical time on prevention. But, we still have the opportunity to build a new, mindful culture of consumption. This culture also emphasizes resilience. That is a task for every person, every community, and every generation—not just a politician or a plastic factory owner.
