Bringing Home the Baku
In Baku Azerbaijan at COP29, Colombia’s minister of environment, Susana Muhamad, told Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow!:
We are making — tripling renewables, but at the same time, we’re expanding fossil fuels. So we are not dealing, we are not tackling, really, the climate problem, and we are creating more energy capacity. We are not using renewables to replace fossil fuels. And this is a big problem. And the reason is we haven’t created the economic conditions for that economic transition.
She really gets at the nut of it, doesn’t she? I was having a Zoom call with a colleague in Denmark and we started chatting about the new Taylor Sheridan streaming series with Billy Bob Thorton, Landman, set in the oil fields of the Permian Basin. In the pilot episode, four roughnecks are riding to work near Midland, Texas, when the driver casually tosses a takeaway coffee cup out the window. “Is that normal?” my friend asks.
In Texas, yes. In the oil fields? Absolutely. That was kind of Sheridan’s point. It is Cine Realite. The whole series is letting us view a rape in progress and telling us, “Hey people, this is normal where we are.”
In Denmark, they’ve been struggling for decades to slash their carbon footprint. Was there social pushback? Of course. However, as successive generations of schoolchildren grew up and moved into positions of greater responsibility, the new normal was to do whatever you possibly could to change your lifestyle to save the planet. Not everyone in Denmark is a saint, but the culture is, like most of Scandinavia, one of taking pride in working together to solve significant problems, even when that might entail some personal sacrifice. It is social democracy in action. That attitude may go back to the Vikings, or it could be from the impact of European wars over the centuries, but this is just how things are and how people think. It is hard to imagine a Dane tossing a coffee cup out of a moving vehicle.
The election of Donald Trump was a social reaction to the loss of an unsustainable lifestyle. It was the first stage of our collective grief.
It was interesting in Baku to hear talk of prioritizing an economic transition coming from a Head of Delegation at a UN Conference who is a Palestinian born in Bogotá. The usual line you get from a two-third worlder at a COP is the “historic justice” demand for massive financial assistance to continue their unsustainable path to overdevelopment and enable them to match the profligate consumerism of, say, Denmark. Often it is not an unreasonable ask—clean drinking water and sanitation for the barrios of Bogotá, for instance. Framing it in terms of historic guilt (which is ironic in a place like Baku, where they’ve had an oil industry since the 15th century) automatically alienates the deep-pocket countries that you need. In that direction lies the cliff that we human lemmings are all racing towards. “Development” as most see it—endless economic growth, including creating more barrios—is biophysically impossible. Don’t ask an economist. Ask a biologist.
Instead, Muhamed seemed to be saying, we need to rethink economics. We need to redefine “development.”
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In the next White House, the economic rethinking Elon Musk is urging upon Donald Trump is BitCoin. More generally, Musk and Ramaswamy, as co-chairs of the Department of Economic Efficiency (D.O.G.E.), formerly the Council of Economic Advisers, would switch the U.S. off the dollar standard and into crypto. Musk knows he will get his way simply by offering his patron a vanity coin that can inflate his personal wealth by trillions. “Nobody’s seen anything like it… nobody has ever been this wealthy.” Simple. Done.
In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk, he described how Musk ran Tesla and SpaceX and then carried that over into his takeover of Twitter. The top and middle managers, who were being worked such long hours that it drove them nearly insane, would watch in horror as Musk slashed carefully engineered parts out of cybertruck or spacecraft designs—or Twitter oversight structures—simply firing whole divisions of highly skilled and experienced people. His attitude was, if it breaks the product, we will gradually put back in some of the parts we took out until it works again. To Issacson’s amazement, Musk’s radical surgery actually succeeded more often than it failed, allowing Musk’s companies to run incredibly lean and astronomically profitable, human costs aside. It was a variant of the Silicon Valley mantra on which Musk’s PayPal fortune was founded—fail fast, fail forward, learn from your failure.
While Musk and Ramaswamy are a few fries short of a Happy Meal when it comes to climate science, they may be onto something when they speedily tank the US economy. Since so much of the world is now indexed to the dollar and tied by trade to the center of Empire, we are really talking about tanking the global economy aren’t we? This is not the economic transition that Minister Muhamed envisioned, but it might have the same effect, and it could be just what the planet needs.
Whether failing fast also takes down Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, and DogeCoin, leaving Elon out of money, we shall see.
So, what is the economic transition the Colombian Minister was speaking of? It is not crypto, fusion reactors, or camp-outs on Mars. It is imagining the better world you’d like to have here on Earth and then using the tools of the Transition Network, the Global Ecovillage Network, and the biodiversity and ecosystem restoration movements to bring that into existence. Engineer that. Do everything you can to create that.
One piece of the economy of the future will be, of necessity, biochar. Sir David King expressed the need when he addressed the final session of UNDP’s #WeDon’tHaveTime side event:
We hear a lot of talk about getting to Net Zero by 2050 and of course, this began through the UK prime minister making that statement way back in time. What do we mean by net zero? There will be 9 billion people on the planet by mid-century. Let's suppose we could get down to one ton per person of levels of carbon dioxide that we cannot avoid emitting, and that's probably possible. That means we have to capture 9 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year by 2050. We have to focus on delivering that, as well as all the other issues. And let me also say we are at a level of carbon dioxide, if all of the methane levels were to drop tomorrow to zero, we still have a problem.
Biochar stands alone among all the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies that can deliver 9 billion tons of removal by mid-century (as well as ticking off several of the UN’s sustainable development goals along the way). It can likely deliver at least double that amount by then, according to best estimates.
Biochar and the pyrolysis oils produced in making it can replace the fossil carbon in the roads you drive on, the tires on your car, your tennis racket, lipstick, refrigerator, antihistamines, anything plastic, your cellphone case, artificial heart valves, any kind of clothing not made with animal or plant fibers, soap, hand lotion, garbage bags, and fishing boats.
The short clip at the top from the Paramount series, Landman (S1E3) encapsulates the dilemma posed by retiring fossil fuels to arrest the existential threat of climate change: normalcy bias. We are attached to our modern way of life and would rather go extinct than do what we need to do, which is to choose biophysical economics over modern monetary theory. Humans will go extinct next century, if not in this one, because they fell for the monkey trap of creature comforts produced by a deadly magic. They decided they just couldn’t live without that, like throwing a coffee cup out of a car window.
For Colombia, and for the rest of the world, there could still be an open path to the transition economy: mining carbon from the sky, producing energy, and returning the carbon to the Earth. Biochar is the new Baku.
Back to the future.
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#RestorationGeneration.
當人類被關在籠内，地球持續美好，所以，給我們的教訓是:
人類毫不重要，空氣，土壤，天空和流水没有你們依然美好。
所以當你們走出籠子的時候，請記得你們是地球的客人，不是主人。
When humans are locked in a cage, the earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is: Human beings are not important. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.
We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the great old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. It is not too late. All of these great works are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.
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