[#13] 2024. Fear and hope.

[Back to original pieces shortly, for now a few thoughts and links to start the year]

Anyone working in climate balances a fundamental paradox: while climate risk has never looked more frightening, the forces that mitigate it marshal in ways and at a scale we couldn't have hoped for even a few years back. Climate-tech will win the energy space, it just may not be in time.

Back in 2019, Johnathan Franzen wrote a piece that speaks to the topic of this newsletter, with verve and style that only a novelist can bring. I highly recommend his New Yorker piece What if we Stopped Pretending. In it, he makes the crucial link between climate risk and changing social dynamics: "In times of increasing chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and armed force, rather than in the rule of law, and our best defense against this kind of dystopia is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal systems, functioning communities."

My friend (and long-time intellectual influence) Tad Homer-Dixon wrote extensively on this topic in his latest book Commanding Hope, in which he highlights the importance of developing new world views that stand ready to displace the zero sum, isolationist, mean views that tend to dominate in times of scarcity and fear.

To my mind, there's little of greater importance - nor more complex and challenging - than building a social fabric capable of taking us safely through the next few decades as climate risk mitigation meets climate realism head-on. As mind-bending as it is to see America flirting with fascism a la Trump today, absent an attractive alternative, those forces will only gain strength as climate fears and associated insecurities mount. A post on this topic to follow.

My own summary can be found in this Corporate Knights article.

On more optimistic notes:

This year I plan to get my hands dirty experimenting with artisanal biochar production on the farm using a clean-burning Ring of Fire biochar kiln from Wilson Biochar. This is very small-scale: I plan to offset any and all farm-related emissions (mainly diesel) by using biochar as a carbon link between forest, fields and dirt.

However, I'm deeply curious about the logistics and economic viability of multiplying this effect thousands of times over using a fleet of mobile biochar production machines. This is no venture-type opportunity, but a labour-intensive, logistics-heavy and deeply local intervention in carbon cycles. By the end of 2024, I'll decide whether or not it's viable to deploy such a fleet and build province- and national-wide biochar logistic business.

In 2024 Woodland Biofuels should reach FID on its own large-scale carbon-sequestering project as they convert cellulosic waste to massively carbon-negative renewable fuels. For each tonne of H2 produced, they bury 16 tonnes of carbon dioxide. The first two phases will sequester nearly 1 MT of CO2. So, while getting my hands dirty on the farm is fun - Woodland is where the real action is.

I see this as the first stage of the 21st century's great battle of the carbon-reducing titans: DAC vs natural systems! Best of luck to both participants!

There's lots happening at ArcTern, and across climate-tech more broadly: Morgan Solar begins to install their building-integrated solar optics, Hydrostor is crushing utility-scale energy storage. See our full portfolio here - there's a LOT going on.

As the Globe and Mail's editorial page puts it - our Climate Future is Dire. Prospects for Change have Never Been Better.

See you all again shortly as I return to original content.