EXTRACTS

On carbon sucking machines (published by Penguin):

‘Imagine if the dinosaurs or the dodo had directed their own swansongs,’ Cole writes. ‘We may become the first species to document our own extinction.’

‘People make plays, songs and paintings about the crisis. Look, I’m writing this, a book about the ways in which people are trying to halt the Sixth Mass Extinction. Because another possibility exists – we could become the first species to prevent a mass extinction.

‘Dwell on that.’

Throughout the book, Cole shares the insights of visionary humans around the world who are working on solutions to our biggest challenges. In the passage below she investigates the possibilities of capturing and repurposing one of Planet Earth’s greatest pollutants.

‘The rain didn’t come that year. Later in the year, things began to die. The landscape changed. Big trees became big skeletons. It was droopy, grey and barren, lost and creepy to look at, a burnt-out house, a cinder. I gave up waiting and I mourned. One day I was standing at the back of the house and I looked up at the solar panels. I was still mad, perplexed, and I just thought: why can’t those solar panels also take in carbon dioxide or whatever is causing this problem?’

In the basement of her home-turned-studio in uptown San Francisco, Mary Fernando Conrad is pinning a thick yellow wire to an old drawer. She is getting ready for her upcoming exhibition, titled ‘What is Shakespeare in a Time of Climate Change?’ in which she plans to display a ‘gismo that removes carbon dioxide’ from the environment.

Will the gismo actually work?

Mary has been trying for a few years to engineer something functional – a domestic appliance, tile, surface or paint – that will absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide, but it turns out that is a tall and expensive order.

Instead her sculpture speaks to a nascent boom of interest in machines capable of removing carbon dioxide from the environment. Can technological wizardry save the day? Will robot-run laboratories, Artificial Intelligence or carbon-dioxide-sucking machines fix the problem? Can technology play God?

In their 2018 report, the UN International Panel on Climate Change called for 100 billion to 1000 billion tons of carbon dioxide to be removed from the atmosphere this century. Researchers and entrepreneurs are vying for solutions. This fits into a broader investigation, often called ‘geo-engineering’ – large-scale, technical (but risky) ways to ‘solve’ climate change.

Whilst we were discussing Mary’s ideas, my daughter ran outside and started watering the ferns, which trembled gently in the breeze. ‘It’s a beautiful garden!’ she exclaimed. It was. Moving my attention between her and the gismo, offered an apt metaphor for the paradox techno-utopia finds itself in: whilst it is hugely invigorating (and increasingly necessary) to consider carbon-capturing machines and human-made solutions, are we overlooking the much simpler solutions on our doorsteps: ferns, plants, trees, soil – all the miraculous technology of nature itself?

We are made of carbon; we breathe it, burn it and dream of other carbon beings. As carbon dioxide boils the bath we live in, carbon-sucking machines have lit up the imaginations of environmentalists, capitalists and the fossil fuel hungry alike, and emerged as a foetal reality.

Klaus Lackner at the University of Arizona was the first person to explore the removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from thin air – called ‘direct air capture’ – in the 1990s. He built an ‘Artificial Tree’ out of a resin that absorbs CO2 at one thousand times the rate of nature, and advocates building 100 million of them to match the amount of CO2 the world currently emits annually.

In Switzerland, Climeworks operate the world’s first commercial direct air-capture plants. Their machines use turbine fans, powered by waste heat, to filter thousands of tons of CO2 annually from ordinary air, turning it into a concentrated form sold for commercial use, or pumped underground.

Dan Nocera, a Harvard chemist, has developed an ‘Artificial Leaf’ which replicates photosynthesis with ten times the energy efficiency of nature; and a ‘Bionic Leaf’ which can produce carbon-neutral fuels and fertilizer. He claims his technology can create cheap, off-grid, solar-powered and carbon-neutral fuels from sunlight, water and air, whilst extracting carbon dioxide from the air in the process.

Nocera has had a hard time gaining traction for his products in the West as the ‘trillions of dollars’ that we have already invested in fossil-fuel power technology make it hard for new fuel products to compete economically. Instead he has decided to focus his efforts on the lower-income world, working in partnership with a university in India, where there are fewer ‘sunk costs’ to overcome. ‘People say, it’s nice you are helping poor people,’ Nocera explains, ‘and I say, no, poor people are trying to help me.’

On fashion (published by House Notes & The Guardian):

‘There is a funny photo of me, aged around ten, in a handmade outfit, wearing a misspelt ‘DON’T WER FUR’ sign. Then there are a few photos of me aged fifteen, before I felt bold enough to say no, walking down catwalks with the soft vestiges of a dead animal circling my neck. Eventually saying no to fur cost me work, but it was a fairly straightforward choice to make: a little box on contracts, usually appearing next to ‘No Nudity’.

At seventeen, I found myself caught up in a more complex dilemma, drawn into a controversy regarding a jewelry company I was working with which had been accused of exploitation and persecution of the San – or Bushmen – in Botswana by diamond mining in their historical homeland.

To try to learn more about the situation, I met with Dr James Suzman, an anthropologist who had been living with the San on and off for over twenty years. In the midst of our intense, long conversation, James asked whether I wanted to come out to Botswana and see things for myself. My eyes lit up, and a few weeks later I was on a plane with my older sister, Elvie, headed south.

We spent ten days traveling around Botswana, discussing the impacts of diamond mining with San members, NGOs and politicians, and my mind flipped from one perspective to the next like a fish out of water. The San had been living as gatherer-hunters on the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, the second-largest such reserve in the world, for an estimated 200,000 years. In 1997 the government of Botswana relocated three quarters of them into resettlement camps outside the reserve. Though these evictions were declared illegal in 2006, hunting had also been prohibited nationally, making the San’s traditional gatherer-hunter lifestyle impossible to practice. Successive Botswanan governments have denied it but many advocacy groups believe the reason for the San’s resettlement was to enable diamond mining.

Since independence in 1966, Botswana has been a politically stable multi-party democracy, and has seen decades of economic growth driven mainly by its diamond industry. It went from being one of the poorest countries in the world in the late 1960s, with a GDP per capita of $70, to having the highest GDP per capita in Africa – $18,825 – by 2015. The situation offered a textbook utilitarian dilemma and forced me to consider lots of questions I couldn’t answer. What are the consequences of economic development? Do the potential positives, such as investment in education and healthcare, outweigh the priceless costs of environmental and cultural degradation? Who gets to decide?

On that trip to Botswana, I had discovered extraordinary pieces of jewelry handmade out of ostrich eggshells. The fragility of these objects reflected the fragility of the communities behind them: it would take the San women several months to make each item, then they would typically sell for very low prices, haggled down by the odd passing traveller. It struck me that the San’s jewelry could be exported to the West and bring a good income back into the community, so James Suzman and I enlisted a friend to help set up a trading route in London. A few months later I returned to Africa to model the collection, which began to sell for much higher prices, with all the profit going back to the San. It was, accidentally, my first direct experience of Fairtrade.

This experience in Botswana marked me: compelling me to think more deeply about the impact not just of my own purchasing choices but also of my work. As the poster girl for different products, I felt an enormous responsibility to understand and respect what I was selling. I wasn’t just buying a company’s products, I was asking other people to buy them too.’

….

‘Unless you live in an entirely self-sufficient way, everything we touch, eat and use is connected to a complex web of trade relationships that we are responsible for being part of. When we make a purchase, we are explicitly supporting that way of doing business by giving a company our money; we are funding them keeping going.

Of course, the power of money lies not just in how you spend it, but also in how you earn it, save it and invest it. Many of us want to earn our money working for – or setting up – companies that are looking to solve problems. Employees often have the greatest leverage to change the working practices inside companies, and there has been a boom in social businesses and new legal structures that seek to remodel a new vision of capitalism. My journey in thinking about these issues began when I was plunged head first into the epicentre of consumerism: fashion.

I was always a fairly material girl: I remember trawling Portobello Market from a very young age, begging my mum to buy me a trinket. I had a penchant for dressing up, and second-hand clothes were my palette. Mum’s answer was usually no, met by hysteria. But sometimes she would give in and buy it.

Then a store opened in Kilburn selling new clothes at unbelievably cheap prices: T-shirts for £1, dresses for £3. I saved my Christmas money and would fill up one of their big baskets until it was so heavy I could barely lift it. I never considered how clothes could be made so cheaply. It was as if they had dropped from heaven.

And one day, my life changed. I was walking in Soho with friends when a man approached us, holding a little white card and said something about modelling. I pocketed the card and let my heart spring under a cautious face.

My mum took me into the modelling agency the first time. I was given a big blue book, which would be filled with pictures of me: I was to become my own travelling saleswoman. I had just turned 14 and the blue book was heavy with possibilities.

Fashion offered a fairytale for my inner child, and initially I indulged it without question. I made money and friends, and fulfilled my dream of travelling. Yet it also offered me a surprising gift: an education in capitalism.’