c-Tech heads V c-realists

the battle for our future

I’m probably one of a minority group who didn’t enjoy Game of Thrones. That said, the series did a good job of presenting the infantile intriguing and plotting ‘leaders’ do to get and maintain power. As in the past so today, people scheme their way into positions that give them a high social status and power-over. There are few, if any, differences between what goes on in the school playground and what happens in the circles and institutions run by the political and industrial elites. Gangs, loyalties, bullies, different agents (teachers, monitors, prefects) ensure that authoritarian rules are enforced. Exclusion, detention and punishment being the tools used in both the school playground and the government ones. These are replicated within the various playground cliques and groups.

Without followers a leader isn’t a leader at all, said person is just a complainer blaming their problems on someone else or on a group of people. Our social systems, especially today with the social media echo chambers, encourage people to ‘pick a side’ and a leader. Again, as in the school playground so in the post-school world.

Climatologists have been trying to warn the world about a possible existential threat. Scientific ecologists have been doing the same when they study, talk and give conferences about bio-diversity loss, the destruction of agricultural soils, pollution and all the rest. An existential threat is just that, a risk that could cause the collapse of the systems on which we depend to survive. Faced with these warnings and the possibility of a threat to our existence it would seem logical to really check them out. Having done so and having found that they seem credible it would the seem logical to do something to about these crises. Instead, we squabble, we split into vested-interest factions or do the ostrich.

The various industries whose business strategies and products are behind these crises use the good old Tobacco Industry Playbook. DARVO is an acronym that stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. Greenwashing, astroturfing, fossil-fuel solutionism, technological optimism, emphasize the uncertainty. Marginalise those people calling for action, discredit them and mouunt legal actions against them.

In this article, the researchers examine the Playbook in more depth

Today we see the consequences of these strategies and what happens when people promote polemics and policies that ‘divide to control’. As we did in the playground we seek out the faction that best suits us. In the next part, I will use c for the word climate. I need to point out that each title describes a sliding scale. For example, there are extreme denialists and very moderate ones, the majority will gather somewhere around the middle.

c-Denialists. It’s a conspiracy. Only God can change the climate. It’s all made up.

c-Sceptics. It might or might not be true but the climate scientists want us to adopt measures we don’t want and probably don’t need, it’s a form of Fascism.

c-Soothers. Humanity has always been able to adapt to climate change, so it’ll all be OK. After all, Humans live quite happily in the desert and in the Arctic. We are rapidly finding technological solutions that will sort the whole thing out, so no worries.

c-Consumerists. There seems to be a problem but I’m not willing to act if I have to give up or reduce what I buy. I don’t want to live with less comfort.

c-Catastrophists. The total collapse of Human civilisation is imminent. Everything we are trying is too little and too late.

c-Campaigners. There is still time, we need to force our leaders to act.

c-Realists. The research is sound, we are faced with an existential threat. Governments and industries are not doing enough and the little they are doing is too slow. This group is divided into 2, the techno-solutionists and the nature-based solutionists (NBS).

Let’s have a quick look at some of the technological solutions. A while ago, I wrote an article discussing the pros and cons of painting roofs and pavements white to cool neighbourhoods versus planting trees.

Trees or paint?

The c-Techno approach is to paint stuff white. This is a form of geoengineering called Land radiative management (LRM). It sounds logical, white reflects more sunlight and this means that surfaces heat up less. But of course, just as so-called biodegradable materials degrade into something else, the reflected light goes somewhere else. LRM actually causes temperatures to increase in surrounding areas. There is also an impact of rainfall, there will be less rain in the LRM zone and the lower rainfall area extends beyond the LRM zone itself. In the end, the surrounding areas are hotter and have less rain than they would without the LRM zone.

Perhaps the mainstay of the c-Techno approach is direct air capture. This involves building machines that extract CO₂ from the air and either stocking it in the ground or using it to produce something. It is used in urea and fertiliser production, foam blowing and to make fizzy drinks.

This can sound appealing, capture carbon, and store it in a geological formation. Better than planting trees that will only stock the carbon while they are growing and will release it when they burn, maybe?

Carbon capture and storage have been used for years on power-station chimneys. The percentage of CO₂ heading up the flue can be up to 20%, and the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere is much, much lower at 0.04%. Extracting something that is so diffuse is very difficult to do at scale. Imagine trying to remove your kid’s wee from the neighbour’s swimming pool. As the authors of this study point out, “removing a single metric ton of CO2 from air requires processing about 1.8 million cubic meters of air, which is roughly equivalent to the volume of 720 Olympic-sized swimming pools.And all that air must be moved across a CO2-capturing sorbent—a feat requiring large equipment. For example, one recently proposed design for capturing 1 million metric tons of CO2 per year would require an "air contactor" equivalent in size to a structure about three stories high and three miles long.”

Then we need to power these capture plants and they need a lot of electricity. If we use fossil fuel-generated power then we produce more CO₂ than we capture. If we turn towards renewables then we have to take into account that when scaled up to extract 10 gigatonnes of CO₂ per year, the extraction industry would use 40% of current global electricity production.

A lot of the people who push for this c-Techno approach tend to mislead us with incomplete or biased figures. They will cost the electricity prices at today’s levels, ignoring the soaring demand for electricity from server farms, electric vehicles, etc. They also tend to not factor in the storage part of the cycle. For it to work the CO₂ has to be transported to a suitable area and then injected into the ground.

There are a lot of these c-Techno schemes and a lot of people hoping to make money from them. On the other hand, these scientists have advised the EU to ban approaches like stratospheric aerosol injection, and cloud brightening.

So how about the nature-based solutions? These are things like protecting, better managing, and restoring forests, grasslands, and wetlands and increasing the carbon content of agricultural soils. This study concludes that natural climate solutions could “offer up to 37% of the mitigation needed between now and 2030 to keep global temperature rise below 2°C”

Proponents of this approach maintain that these nature-based solutions coupled with reducing energy demand and switching to renewables should sort the whole thing out. This could well be true but, as I often point out, the whole thing needs joined-up thinking and planning. Today we see farmers getting upset when they are told that they must put land to forest or let it be rewilded. This is a shame because we know that agroforestry systems produce food and draw down CO₂.

We urgently need community-led holistic landscape management practices. The so-called ‘zone system’ used in Permaculture design is an example of this. A part of the landscape is left to rewild itself, another part is semi-wild and semi-managed. This area provides fruit, nuts, and timber. Another zone is used for maincrops and this is done through agro-sylvo-pasturalism. Then we have the intensively cultivated areas that use as little surface as is feasible to produce as much food as is possible. Local food production reduces or eliminates the need for high-energy use transport systems like shipping.

This type of holistic approach will also address energy wastage from poorly insulated homes. It seeks to create micro-industry ecosystems where secondary products from one activity are used directly as a resource by the next activity in the chain.

c-Burnout. It was pretty inevitable that this would happen. We are continually bombarded with bad news about the climate. We read headline after headline about how governments are failing to act. We, ourselves, feel lost and don’t know what to do. This is understandable because even experts have trouble keeping up.

I have written about the absurdity of cars and how we should design them out of our systems. Yet cars and agriculture produce nitrogen pollution and, bizarrely, where this falls onto forest floors it increases carbon accumulation. Since we have been acting to reduce this pollution it has also reduce carbon storage in forest soils. Basically the nitrogen suppresses the activities of the microorganisms that break down soil organic matter and release CO₂. Lower levels of N deposition means faster breakdown of the soil organic matter and so less carbon storage. It does your head in after a while! The only bright spot in this research was the scientists pointing out that this may be a transitional phase as the system adjusts.

The solutions are there, reduce, protect, rewild, restructure, and rebuild. By connecting and combining these solutions together we can resolve most of the crises with which we are confronted. They are, after all, interwoven. For example, people on low incomes are the worst affected by the climate crisis and pollution. Our current agricultural systems and food industry play a major negative role in the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and ill-health. What is encouraging is that these interconnected, holistic solutions will restore our landscapes, improve health and well-being, reduce inequity and social injustice, improve housing, and produce good food.

What’s stopping us from sorting it all out? We keep following leaders, we keep thinking that some superhero-like figure will do the job for us. History shows us that this is probably a forlorn hope. It’s DIY time.