Faking Our Way To Net Zero
Detail is no place for the Devil
I suppose we have to ignore announcements about the UK government’s plans to re-open coal mines in light of the energy supply crisis. It’s a blip.
We also have to ignore the ongoing wildfires in Russia that have so far spread over 900,000 hectares of land, estimated to result in over a quarter of a billion tonnes of CO2 being released into the atmosphere and sending smoke clouds as far afield as the US West Coast, which itself has become the annual host of the global wildfire extravaganza, with over 15 million acres of forest in the US and Canada burning in 2021. More blips.
Meanwhile, we congratulate ourselves at having managed to get a little shy of 4,000 LEED Platinum Certified building projects completed around the world — the equivalent of less than 10,000 hectares of overall floor space…significantly less than that in actual land coverage. We almost certainly generated a larger area in newsprint with our celebratory press releases and white papers, but you can’t get hung up on details like that when there’s a good story to tell, can you?
Climate change deniers have such an incredibly easy job. Take even the most superficial fingernail to the majority of carbon reduction strategies and you find beneath the surface a plethora of caveats, conditions and quietly ignored contradictions that turn every one step forward into at least one in the opposite direction.
I get it. I really do. You have to start somewhere, and you can’t boil the ocean…
The science of carbon counting is not all that complex. You look at the materials, how they are extracted and the energy involved in obtaining and processing them into product and you add it all together. But the interrelationships back through the supply chain are incredibly convoluted and there are so many opportunities to throw away every carbon saving baked into your design by accidentally inserting an unfortunate piece of logistics into the process of implementing a product or project that controlling your whole carbon life-cycle turns into the worst-case kind of whack-o-mole you can ever imagine.
It is what it is, though. The answer is not to don your responsibly manufactured organic truth-blinkers and double-down on ignoring the blips while we waste the Earth’s time and resources pretending to do the right thing.
I’ll come clean. I am not one of those who sees a rosy future for this venture. We’ve screwed this.
What the future looks like from here on in is going to depend on the human race’s ability to make like a cockroach and just plain survive. I do think that will happen, but it ain’t gonna be pretty.
LEED and BREEAM and all the other sustainability certification schemes that have popped up around the world have their place when you’re looking to wake people up to the problem of impending environmental catastrophe and you need to establish a level of visibility for issues that need to be understood, but they don’t really make any material difference once the slippery slopes of rapid deterioration are already beneath our collective feet. They involve the collection of vague aspirational concepts at the design stage with only a slither of due diligence when it comes to operational carbon and not even the slightest chance of ever being applied retrospectively to the damage already done.
It’s really hard to make an accurate estimate but there are certainly more than 20 million buildings on the planet, so taking into account the irrelevant 4,000 LEED certified building out there, this means that there are roughly 20 million buildings on the planet that are not LEED certified, and of the ones that are, how many of those do you think squeezed through on a technicality?
We are getting nowhere. LEED and BREEAM rely on a whole lot of broad generalisations that are very hard to prove or disprove in a real world construction project, and whatever each of these projects claims to be achieving in the brochure can easily be debunked if you start to analyse in depth what happens once the contractors hit the ground.
We’re winding up towards the big conclusion here, and you’re wondering what my grand proclamation of change is going to be.
How do we fix this?
Easy.
Invent time travel, head on back to about 1800…
But seriously (DeLorien’s are hard to find these days, and the Global Chip Shortage is playing havoc with Flux Capacitor market), there are simply too many people out there who need to survive one way or another, and will make the decisions that make that happen for them today. Those decisions are going to involve hydrocarbons of one form or another (either directly or as a consequence of the energy they need to use to action their decisions) for the foreseeable future (that is, the future that looks possible), and so the rest of us — those who save our plastic bags and buy an electric car — pale into insignificant nothingness, particularly when set against the realities of a constantly smouldering US West Coast, a war in Ukraine and all the countries that cannot do without burning anthracite.
We need to put every last drop of our ambition and creative endeavour into the pursuit of technologies that can manipulate the earth’s climate despite what we as a species have done to screw up the world’s natural systems, even if all we’re doing is clinging to this planet for a few more years before the tipping point is reached.
Dyson Spheres — or at least a small section of one — that might generate enough clean power to run parts of the planet that pay for it while also shading everyone else from the levels of radiation that will leak through our depleted atmosphere as our poorer brethren continue to pump greenhouse gases into the sky.
Large Scale carbon capture. Not a handful of trees down the central reservations of our highways. I’m talking industrial scale carbon capture using technologies that don’t depend for their operation on rare earth materials we have to rape the planet even more to extract. This is just chemistry, right? Somebody must be able to come up with a process that can make it workable. Can’t our wealthy space-farers build some high altitude variants of these and float them in above the third world nations to give them a dig out?
The thing I find amazing is that you can get Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson to spunk millions putting a handful of their celebrity buddies into near orbit for nothing other than shits and giggles. Where is the spending from the same people when it comes to saving the planet? Sure, they put a bit of spare cash into philanthropic endeavours when it suits them for tax purposes, but that’s really about it. They’ll be dead in a couple more decades, so why should they give a damn? That unfortunately is the position of pretty much everyone. We all need what we need today, and that’s all we care about.
Make some electricity, because I need it.
Put me into orbit, because I need it.
If the richest people here don’t care enough to do something for the people who have not been born yet because they’re going to need it, then I don’t see how anything the rest of us do is going to make any difference.
Governments don’t have the money to spend on science. They have more pressing issues to deal with so that they can remain in power. A government that throws its GDP at saving the planet will be voted out of power at the first opportunity and that would be the end of that. Forget them. They’re never going to help, and unfortunately we and our ancestors built this system and continue to subscribe to it, so just accept that’s how it is and stop complaining.
The rich will do what serves their own self interest in the next couple of decades. Some of it may look philanthropic but there always has to be an angle, so don’t hold your breath. In the long run it’s going to be those with the cockroach disposition that make it through and cling to whatever habitable spots are left on this rock. I don’t think they’ll have a jacuzzi or a cellphone between them. Good luck grandchildren of Earth.
Merton Barracks lives in Hong Kong after a life literally and metaphorically on the road.
He is a security technology expert, an autonomous vehicle expert, a counter-terrorism expert, a writer of fiction, a father, a ranter and an exposer of bullshit.
He is also a victim of childhood sexual abuse, who took half a century to face up to what that did to him and also what it made him. You don’t recover. You don’t repair.
You can find some of his work published on Illumination.
Take a look at some of his fiction
Or read about the process of coping
