“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.”
“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”
“Nobody asked your opinion,” said Alice.”

Let me get this straight.

The EPA says that emissions from petroleum are bad. Landfilling carbon is really bad. Climate change is really, really bad. Recycling is good.

So far, understood.

But now the EPA says that recycling CO2, with which we can make useful materials — and thereby keeping petroleum buried in the ground, that’s bad.

Meanwhile, pumping virgin petroleum out of the ground to make the exact same material, emitting carbon, and then burying that carbon in the ground, that’s good. So long as you bury it in an oil well.

Really?

Carbon Capture and Use

The alternative — doing something with valuable waste carbon — goes by the acronym of CCU – carbon capture and use. But it used to be called, hmmm, reuse. As in reduce, recycle, reuse.

Now we are informed, that’s bad. Actually, it’s worse than bad. It’s unapproved.

Now, CCU went by this symbol:

And we used to have this “waste management hierarchy”, which had “reduce” and “reuse” at the top, and “recycling” in second position. Disposal — that is to say, landfilling — that was at the bottom.

The argument against capturing carbon emissions and recycling them for use is that it does not represent a permanent storage of carbon — it simply represents a deferral of the day when it might be released into the atmosphere. Consequently, it is to be deplored.

Rethinking children and other “useful elements of society” in carbon terms

Of course, on reflection, I realize that children represent a temporary carbon sink, emitting previously stored carbon (as the dread CO2) with every exhale. Those pixies!

So, let’s ban them. Children, that is. Why make them? They are not the permanent carbon storage form we need. While we are at it, consider your house. Or milk. Or bread.

All of them regarded, ridiculously in days gone by, as “useful things”. All of them headed for the waste stream in one way or another. All of them simply representing carbon deferral, not carbon sequester.

Let’s ban them, ban them all, ban them now!

The good things left over

The good thing is, we’d still have petroleum, cars, factories, PlayStation 3, oil wells and robots. And hopefully the robots will enjoy the world we’ve left behind for them. We, these imperfect carbon stores that we are, fit only for the sequestered, recorded, regulated and managed dustbin of history.

Now, I might have foolishly and imperfectly pointed to cities like Edmonton that are now recycling and reusing 90 percent of their waste. As evidence that recycling works — and all that is necessary is to have good ideas about how to use it.

Also might have pointed out that turning waste residue (which in the old days was known as a “surplus”) into a trade good (sold to neighbors experiencing what used to be known as a “shortfall”) was in an earlier time considered a good idea.

I remember reading about “trade”. Upgrading raw materials into higher value products and, er, selling them. For which we received something we used to call “money”.

When we didn’t have a use for the raw material, or the byproduct, we called it a “waste material” and we felt bad until we could think up a use for it. There were books written about this process of “adding value.” A branch of science called “economics” arrived to explain it.

Back to the Stone Age, please

But now we know.

Now we know that the premise for the world economy should be based on digging things out of the ground and burying anything resembling CO2 in what we just dug up.

In foolish days gone by, that was called a “subsistence economy” whose practitioners were described as “hunter-gatherers”, and we thought ourselves lucky if we transformed into something we called “agriculture” and, later on, a practice called “industrialism.”

But now we know.

Re-thinking that Manhattan deal in carbon terms

For example, the $24 worth of beads that bought Manhattan in 1624 ought to have been safely sequestered in a Dutch cavern all these years. Because, as I am not hesitant to point out now that I understand the EPA’s philosophy, we can’t really account for the CO2 sequestered in the beads. No one actually knows where the beads went. They’re probably long ago degraded into waste.

Wait. I think I can faintly hear the phfffffffft of bead-trinket carbon escaping into the atmosphere.

Yes, that’s it. Shame on Peter Minuit for finding a higher use case in a far-off land. Carbon felon! Let’s give Manhattan back to the Indians, in the name of carbon correctness.

Higher value, higher use case, maximizing return. These used to be relatively important ideas. And they might become important again. Who knows?

Environmental opportunities

As Stuart Hart wrote in “beyond Greening” in the Harvard Business Review in 1997, “Those who think that sustainability is only a matter of pollution control are missing the bigger picture. …  However, few executives realize that environmental opportunities might actually become a major source of revenue growth.  Greening has been framed in terms of risk reduction, re-engineering, or cost cutting. Rarely is greening linked to strategy or technology development, and as a result, most companies fail to recognize opportunities of potentially staggering proportions.”

LanzaTech’s Jennifer Holmgren told the Digest:

“I think this is really the transition that we must start to make globally – sustainability isn’t what is going to hurt our economy, sustainability  is what  is going to make our economy, it is what is going to create jobs, it is what is going to create growth, it is what is going to drive the future.  In order for that to happen we need to learn to utilize CO2 and turn it into valuable fuels and chemicals.

“If we can start to think of CO2 as an opportunity, we start to turn the concept of carbon waste on its ear. The process industry and the production of fuels and chemicals from waste carbon can help us create that circular economy that the millennials can’t stop talking about. We shouldn’t simply be thinking of government regulations as a burden but instead drive to a future that we choose to leave our children despite the regulations.

“We conquered space in the last century, in this century we have to conquer carbon. We have to rethink how we use carbon, where we source carbon from, and what we should really be doing with carbon; after all energy generation can be carbon free. Let us rethink the future and I think this work that we are doing with IOC is an example of creating an opportunity from a liability that not only helps the biofuels and chemicals industry but perhaps becomes something which creates a path to giving everyone access to “nutrition”.

In this case, Holmgren is referring to a deal announced elsewhere in the Digest today.

Exhale only into oil wells, please

“Omega-3s being widely available…  think about that.  It isn’t something that makes the economics of an alternate fuel work by providing a valuable co-product but could be something that changes the lives of children everywhere.  Imagine.”

Indeed, imagine. So long as you hold you breath while doing so.

Or, when exhaling, breathing directly into an oil well. That’s good.