Last Straw

Nat Tork­ing­ton shares Clive Matthew-Wilson’s quick guide to cli­mate change (via Hard News):

I nearly ran an energy con­fer­ence and did I ton of read­ing and learn­ing for it. Loved the Dog and Lemon Guide guy. His final com­ment was fuck­ing bril­liant, and I think he was closest to my opin­ion on the whole subject.

Off­sets are easy to explain: you shit and it goes into your sep­tic tank, but your back­yard can’t take it all the years of your turds. So you pay someone to truck your turds away and empty out the tank. You burn fuel (releas­ing green­house gases) or make things that rot (releas­ing green­house gases) or have some other chem­ical pro­cess that releases green­house gases like CO2. The Earth can’t take it all so you pay someone to take your car­bon away and empty out the atmo­sphere. The only way to do this that we’ve got at the moment is to plant trees. (If someone devel­ops a “sequest­ra­tion” sys­tem, aka bury­ing the car­bon back in the earth and thus out of the atmo­sphere, it’ll qual­ify as an off­set too)

Pol­lut­ing = shit­ting. Atmo­sphere = your back yard sep­tic tank. Off­set = pay­ing someone to truck it away.

Trad­ing is also easy. It’s like fish. Fish quota is really a license to catch a per­cent­age of the fish in the water — if the Min­is­ter finds more fish or less fish in the ocean, your quota goes up or down. If you take a break from fish­ing, you can lease your fish quota to other fish­er­men. Com­pan­ies can emit a cer­tain amount of CO2, and as the government’s oblig­a­tions under treat­ies force the coun­try to let out less total CO2 emis­sion, each com­pany gets its quota dialled back. But some com­pan­ies will be super­green and emit less than their quota per­mits them to. They get to sell their sur­plus pol­lut­ing capa­city to other com­pan­ies in NZ, or overseas.

What off­sets don’t cover is the fact that trees rot. Releas­ing green­house gases. So they’re a tem­por­ary meas­ure. At best we should be replant­ing old growth forests, intend­ing them to be around “forever”. If we try to build off­sets out of pine trees, we’re just push­ing the snooze but­ton on our CO2. The sequest­ra­tion is the hal­le­lu­jah option — turn the crap in the atmo­sphere back into crap in the ground. But nobody’s there yet.

Clean energy is all about not shit­ting in the atmo­sphere in the first place. If you didn’t release CO2, you don’t need to off­set or sequester it. That’s hard though, because the fuel we’re addicted to is really con­veni­ent — oil is a beau­ti­ful stor­age sys­tem for energy. Wind power and solar pro­duce elec­tri­city, which doesn’t lend itself to such con­veni­ent stor­age — bat­ter­ies are quite inef­fi­cient, even in their flash new forms. I’m not sure what that in the sep­tic tank ana­logy: fuel = slow release por­ridge for energy, bat­ter­ies = cheap car­bo­hydrates like McD’s, that give you shits. Hmm, maybe not.

I think my meta­phors just exploded.