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.