Ben's Blog

• – April ‘24

We burn carbon that has been stored for millions of years in a solid form as coal or a liquid form as oil or a gaseous form as…. well, gas. The by-product of this combustion is a mixture of carbon and oxygen, CO². This CO² is very light and floats up into the sky, where it causes problems, very serious problems!

So obviously, we have to stop burning this carbon. But we already have far too much carbon floating around in the sky, so it is imperative that we also set about removing the excess carbon that has built up in the sky over the last 200 years. Fortunately mother nature has provided us with an extremely efficient ‘machine’ for doing this. It is called a tree.  A tree extracts the light and airy CO²  from the sky and returns it to its solid form. Then all we have to do is store that carbon in the form of logs. (Trees are great at storing carbon while they are alive, but they are not so good at extracting carbon from the sky once they are mature. So it seems to be more effective if we cut them down and allow new trees to grow) This course, we will end up with a ginormous pile of logs, that we will have to protect from fire and termites and such. But it is a whole lot easier than trying to store CO² in its gaseous form.

We are burning far too much carbon, but don’t just blame the evil fossil fuel merchants. If you are a drug addict, don’t blame the dealer, he is only giving you what you want. It’s called supply and demand. We humans demand more energy every day. The increase in demand for energy far outstrips the increase in renewable energy, meaning there is no transition to renewable energy. Quite the opposite, the more cheap renewable energy we make the more economic activity we foster. The more economic activity, the more energy we use, both fossil fuel energy and renewable energy. The renewable energy we make is not replacing fossil fuels, it is driving an increase in the use of fossil fuels.

The world economy grows at an annual rate of 4% per year.

Last year it was a staggering $100 trillion. Next year it will be $104 trillion. Every dollar you make generates 350 grams of CO².

So when your income increases by 4%, so do emissions.

That is how capitalism works. There is nothing you can do about it.

The system cannot function unless it is growing!

Every regime in the world exhorts us to work harder, produce more stuff, just so the numbers keep going up. We are in thrall to the numbers! They tell us we are getting more prosperous, but that is not true. A handful of mega rich are getting richer, but we are getting poorer, and so is the rest of life on earth.

This is not a problem we can fix by tweaking. Any drop in growth is a catastrophe for the system, as we have seen in the past.

It is all or nothing. There is no such thing as a ‘steady state’ capitalist system. It does not exist, because it cannot exist.

Climate disasters are already having a devastating effect on the world economy. This will only get worse. It is inevitable that the system will collapse  as the climate collapses. You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see that one coming.

We can sit back and watch this happening, as we have done so far, but that risks society going through a state of chaos when the collapse arrives, and history tells us that bad people rise to power during times of chaos. The sensible thing to do is to dismantle this antiquated system before it implodes. It is not fit-for-purpose. It has completely ruined our beautiful planet. We must replace it with something better planned to suit the world we share with millions of other species who are getting no benefit at all from our self serving arrangement.

Ben Boyang  2024