Morning Tea #8: touching grass, carbon offsets, emails or farm

I spent the weekend touching grass. I went in the sea. I walked on some sand. I looked through some binoculars at things that were far away. I breathed some particulate-free air. As a result, I haven’t done much writing about things on the internet. However, I did have some time to ponder the following.

Carbon offsets are good, actually

Are carbon offsets universally bad? Do they only exist to enable pollution as usual? No, obviously. But sometimes they don’t work as intended. Several commentators (usually talkers, rarely doers) have latched on to this to peddle the idea that we should abandon carbon offsets entirely and stop trying to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Their implied, unstated (because it’s terrible) alternative is to degrade the world’s standard of living in every possible dimension, to opress populations that haven’t yet benefited from plentiful cheap energy, to abandon centuries of technological progress, and to pretend that humans are not able to innovate to solve problems. They want to reduce carbon output to close to zero almost immediately — to stop anyone doing anything. No more eating enough food, no more travelling anywhere, no more wearing clothes, no more heating your house, no more internet, no more having children, no more cows.

Of course, this is ridiculous. We have to keep outputting significant amounts of carbon dioxide to maintain civilisation. A lot of our stuff comes from fossil fuels at some point, and this isn’t going to change overnight. What we can do, is gradually phase in clean energy (nuclear, anyone?), clean hydrocarbons, clean ways for countries to develop. This will take decades (or centuries) and totally transform the world and the way people live in it.

Whilst we do this, we’re still going to be burning dead dinosaur fish, among other things. This produces carbon dioxide, so what can we do about it? Find effective ways to capture it again, of course. This critical mission will involve planting lots of trees, farming enormous amounts of seaweed, growing petrol plants, injecting carbon goo into the ground, and everything in between. We’ll have to do this in a big way and our carbon capture will have to surpass our carbon output, as it gradually decreases, for many years to come.

Emails or farm

As hypothesised by an astute Twitter user, all jobs are either emails or farm. I appreciate this may be hard to grasp. Maybe you instinctively disagree since it profoundly destabilises your understanding of the world. Take a moment.

Interestingly emails often envy farm and farm often envy emails. The farm drive is particularly pervasive in the tech industry (which is emails, mostly). I for one, often think about building large pieces of furniture (clearly farm, in case you were wondering). Others literally dream of buying a farm. Perhaps this has to do with high-level-of-abstraction fatigue and a tendency of those who are experts in building things out of bits to overestimate their ability to make things out of molecules. Perhaps I’m projecting.

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