Since I was a world literature/creative writing professor, below is a multiple-choice test:
Which one doesn’t fit?
A. Santa Claus
B. Easter Bunny
C. Direct Air Capture (of carbon)
D. Tooth Fairy
E. Sanity
If you chose E, you are correct! Direct Air Capture (of carbon) has been a ridiculous excuse to increase fossil fuel use. I wrote about this in an August 15, 2023 post quoting former Harvard Fellow Ye Tao, “Any form of direct air capture by industrial method will not be able to work at scale, and to make a measurable impact to the climate crisis in less than several centuries of time. The basic reason is the process of demixing the air is a highly energy-intensive process. Just imagine if you had to separate a pile of well-mixed salt and pepper. So to create order out of disorder takes a lot of energy, and that is guaranteed by the laws of thermodynamics. So it doesn’t really matter how much engineering you put onto it. We need an operation the size of the U. S. Military six thousand years [ . . . ] to really achieve what these companies are calling for.”
Andreas Malm gave an excellent explanation in the December 5, 2024 YouTube at The Break Down called “Overshoot w/ Andreas Malm.” This video is in the same league as the deleted May 4th, 2018 Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research) discussion/YouTube quoting a Shell CEO, and more recently, deleted Arctic methane text originating from Dr. Ira Leifer, Chemical Engineering Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, who was “chief mission coordinating scientist for the NASA effort for airborne remote sensing of the Gulf oil spill.” In other words, Malm’s video is powerful truth-telling for anyone interested in climate reality.
Malm notes in the preface to the YouTube, “If we are going to respect limits to global warming, we have to shut down fossil fuel production virtually in its entirety, and as fast as physically possible. A lot of the carbon removal technologies really have the status of magic [ . . . . ]” Near the end of the YouTube, he cites Columbia shutting down fossil fuel production. At 38:11 on the timeline he says, “This means that the oil and gas industry is on track to disappear in that country [ . . . . ] so currently the estimate is that the oil and gas industry in Columbia will be finished anywhere between 7 and 15 years from now if this position holds.” Earlier in the interview, Malm noted at 37:11, “Columbia is the third largest fossil fuel producer in Latin America.”
Bravery and right action in Columbia remind me of the same response of the Hopi Tribe I noted in my October 11, 2014 post “Rivers of a Lost Coast”: “Some men claim there is no way to stop ‘progress’ so these [salmon] must be lost. Whenever I hear this, I recall the Hopi Tribe in Arizona, which as I wrote at The Raven Chronicles, “in 1995 [said] ‘No’ to a casino for reported ‘political, cultural and religious reasons,’ and repeat[ed] ‘No’ to slot machines in 2004. The point is, we have clear choices.”
I’m grateful today’s issue of Unearthed Online Literary Journal (SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry) included my poem “River Reflections” in their Transition & Transformation Fall 2024 Issue.