Made in Orion: Ei’s Carbon Journey

Chapter 1: Sharpening the green pencil

“Dean’s list — Ei. To the stage please.”

Hats-off. If only time could stop in its tracks, we'd spend forever mulling over the next step in our plan to take on the world.

Right in the heart of the floating city, lies Orion’s newly refurbished campus of tomorrow — peering through a state-of-the-art Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV) window pane beneath the parapet, one wouldn’t help but stop to notice the whitewashed walls plastered with esteemed Honour Roll valedictorians of Orion State University from several decades before till now. Orion’s great minds of the century.

Dampening Orion’s generational legacy of churning out cookie-cutter doctors & lawyers exemplary in their field, Ei was always at the edge of her seat determined to cut the paper-chase by greening it, literally. Ei’s light at the end of the tunnel begged to differ; on the contrary of aspiring to climb a ladder of society’s, the worldly vanguard in her sought to climb a ladder for society and the environment.

Professor Jamiko leapt on stage, exhaled, whipped out his EcoZ Keynote Pad and began his celebratory speech,

“As we are all gathered here today, I’d like to begin by sharing Ei Poon’s story-worthy curriculum vitae, punctuated with multifarious milestones and life stories, before all of us at Orion State University come together to close this year’s graduation ceremony.

Being a carbon accountant was so unheard of in the vocabulary of Ei’s ancestors, seniors & past valedictorians of her now-alma mater. Curiosity in the domain of sustainable practices was her own raison d’être and her life journey. Even if it meant ignoring all the sorts of protean pressure inveighing on her and her peers to conform to other tried and tested occupations.

Ei always looked up to the solar PV engineer who retrofitted our new campus on the floating city and was seen by students toiling hard at work under the blazing sun each day, and our Chief Sustainability Officer, Mr Loewen, who conceptualized the whole “clean and smart” blueprint of our new campus roadmap. There were many questions asked, many answered and more left unanswered.

What sort of banality did she crave for?

Back in the day when I was a giggly schoolboy of 22, an offspring of Orion’s Model United Nations club, we were decked out in well-pressed suits as snooty delegates in fake accents standing around and sparring about the threat of climate change, gender inequality and the death penalty… you name it. Those also happened to be the days when the iconic Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) assistance programme first slowly came into action in Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. The pivot to transition away from fossil fuels was gaining momentum at a promising but still very nascent stage.

Fast forward to today, Ei recently completed an apprenticeship stint in the United Nations office, regionally headquartered here in Orion. Being first handedly involved in the rare opportunity to see through the entire process of drafting Article 9.2, a successor of that renowned Paris Agreement Article 6 permitting the international trading of carbon credits, Ei just completed an incredible feat, something I didn’t even come close to achieving back then at Model UN, a club only notorious for where school snobs flocked to.

Okay, enough of relishing the days of my youth.

Being one of my rare students who decided to take the road less travelled and forgo her thesis, I’d say it was an ingenious move on her part to embark on something so challenging yet pertinent to the harsh reality of climate change, where there’s really no place for all talk and no action anymore.

Pioneering the inaugural Green & Liveable Economy scholarship, kudos to Ei who made this her very own brainchild and naturally, the first recipient of such an extraordinary award, setting the tone for many young Orioners to come. As of 2050, many of us were in awe of 70% of our university board members being women, something to be reckoned with in the area of gender diversity. In spite of this milestone and what it meant for our larger society of Orion, Ei was a little impatient and couldn’t wait to see the same action in other fields. The alchemy of one school of thought into another right where the gap needed a plug.

With the currents of today’s climate contingencies, it was instinctive for many to find themselves buoyed along. Ei was no exception.

I still vividly remember the look on her face, flushed, as she dashed straight from her Module 3 class on investment stewardship and leadership. All Ei clasped between her arms were scribbles on her EcoZ Keynote Pad and a fire in her heart as she boldly came forth and proposed this scholarship suggestion to our university management while we were having a typical monthly coffee chat session at The Hub@Orion, an open space indoor concept powered fully by renewable energy.

Zeitgeist. It sure is easy to conjure up an image of the green thumbs of our future, simply because it’s not something we choose to do, it has to happen.

Ushering in the 22nd Century’s playing field for environmental jobs meant a cross-over of the domains of science, technology, engineering & mathematics (STEM). How many women would work hands-on to get to the bottom of what optimum rate of ammonia should be co-blended with coal while firing, whether it being twenty percent or otherwise? And that was the very sort of thing that kept Ei up at night.”

2.30pm. Solar intensity peaked optimum at 1000W/m2. Nobody noticed the nanothin needle of the net meter which sprung backwards abruptly, opening the floodgates for excess electricity to flow back rapidly to Orion’s central grid. At night, this electricity would be channeled straight to power the humble dormitories of Orion State University, especially for students who burned midnight oil the whole night, so to speak.

The facade of Orion State University shone brightly against the picturesque landscape of Orion, a cornucopia of smart city living. Its inhabitants were all thriving within this bountiful interconnected circular ecosystem. Hydrogen fuel cell shuttle buses maneuvered in and out of the lanes of Orion’s city campus, hardly a student with back to back classes lined up catching his or her breath in vain to get to the next venue on time. How so? It was all in the name of ergonomics & the punctuality of urban lite motors.

Sustainable data centers of Orion State University were integrated with immersion cooling technologies — heaps of its servers and relevant equipment were soaked in non-conductive liquids, bringing about hyper-efficient cooling. Every gigabyte used to store student records, academic transcripts and facility blueprints was well-accounted for. This very structure, Orion University Hall #5, however, was powered by offshore combined cycle gas turbines, so sleek such that the building artifice concealed machinery behind this clean energy powerhouse.

Gretha, Ei’s best friend was next, “One of the fondest memories I shared with Ei was whenever she took me for a spin round campus and the surrounding city-center fringe using her dad’s Tesla Model Z12. Guilty pleasures!

On a more serious note, Ei drove a well-received Tiktok movement for sustainable thrift shops, piloting these pop-ups all throughout campus. Smart autonomous robots also known as i-Orions ambled round our blocks, towers, stairways and halls to promote this eco-friendly cause, epitomizing the bastion of modern advertising and marketing which did away with tried and tested flyers and pamphlets. Perhaps the only thing that made a batchmate of hers flinch was at the sight of an i-Orion in the elevator!

I was really glad to be a part of this initiative.

Although Orion as a society has been steadily transitioning away from large fast-fashion moguls, who have floundered over the years since our last recession in 2043, bottom-up action from its local players to actively embrace their own sustainable franchise has been tethered. Some brands were still but an unknown curio.

All I did to help Ei was support the development of an Application Programming Interface(API) using Zephyr as an enabler for iOrions. Zephyr was the next breakthrough software, a descendant of Python language. We both sought to promote Zephyr among the Orion community as a new language to be acquainted with.

And we did the very same for food. Students like you and me would bring our own ECO EXTRA++Tupperware for lunch breaks. In a heartbeat, food would be delivered via i-Orions to wherever and whenever we’d like to have our meal on campus, no matter how snappy we wanted it to be. Simply bring and place your own reusable food cups, cutlery and containers on an i-Orion and it would execute the delivery. For the indecisive and fickle-minded, i-Orions are even able to deliver it to your current location using Find my iPhone X/Find my Android! At the click of a finger, it was akin to the Ubereats of our campus but complied well with the UN member state legally binding treaty that ended the pollution from plastics in 2040. Out with the polyethylene and in with the biodegradable!

Alas, we delve into the modern-day hobbies of the 22nd century’s eco-friendly girl.

Reading was in Ei’s words, too coy and pretentious of a hobby to upkeep, without sparing a thought for the lush canopies sacrificed to synthesize these devils of a page-turner. Of course, with all due diligence, ebooks were something Ei could get by with her Kindle Fire X. Traveling, a hobby of jet-setters would erode her status of a die-hard fan for sustainable aviation fuel given how many airline companies didn’t practise as they preached. I could never comprehend that, just because.

I had to confront my own existential crisis before deciding what career to ultimately pursue, and am now more convinced I should become a project manager in the sustainability field. It was thanks to Ei and the conversations we had, steering me away from fears that I wouldn’t be able to grasp the technical acumen in this field.”

The applause was momentary, but resounding. It was more than a curtain call moment for Ei. Anyone could become a mother, but it took someone special to be a Mum. The latter could be said about Ei, when it came down to her vision for the sustainable development of Orion’s future. There were no big shoes to fill, because there simply weren’t any. Changing times like this call for new shoes to be built.

Who knew where the trajectory for Orion was headed? Under pressure, the green and social movement could prompt a glut of climate psychologists and behavioral scientists in no time. Only time would tell if this goes beyond a mere millennial ennui.

Chapter 2: Out with the bulls and bears

Pitch-dark. 7.30am. Ei’s mother, Lin, gingerly stepped into the alcove, triggering a response from the multi-sensory room. Luminescence instantly filled the space, alongside the brisk humming of the air conditioner. ECOAlphapass was the name of the said sensor, equipping all four walls with conditioned lighting, temperature and almost invisible motion detector probes that provided a shape-shifting experience for any individual passing through. Ephemeral, how a centralized mother system could sense which room was being in use and reflect the joules of energy consumed in one shot, perhaps a kind of augmented perceptiveness that shaped the decisions of higher-ups in their eco-friendly management strategies. Atomizing the constituents, so to speak. Smart aleck, was indeed its nickname coined by many.

This place was utterly unrecognisable, thought Lin as she wandered aimlessly around the room filled with holograms, spick and span to the core.

Whatever happened to the half-eaten cheeseburgers, leftover tandoori chicken wraps and bootleg liquor bottles snuck under desks during after-market hours? Gone were also the heaps of high-stakes trade execution paper bills that were evidence of a labor of love for some, and a rice bowl for others. No room for deep affinities, happy hour respites and retreats to the pantry to talk about the weather, politics and all that jazz… Employees were working from home everyday, owing to the fact that VDIs galore brought down the costs of power and cooling. With the virtualization service of apps, the Covid-19 pandemic of more than half a century ago was well-documented in history books and paved the way for the rapid expansion and amalgamation of various user systems into a centralized cloud interface. The race to net zero, amplified.

Believe it or not, this silence really hit Lin.

Lin used to be a hotshot equities trader at JP Morgan Chase & Co., heading a desk of ten during her prime and every microsecond of trade after trade closed propelled her to stardom. The signature Wall Street trading floor was no longer in vogue, following the crash of New York’s leading stock exchanges — the NYSE, Dow and the S&P. Exuberance was irrational after all. On the other hand, climate change begged to differ.

With data centre emission footprints shooting through the roof, the Cabinet of Orion had unanimously decided that there was no place for the trading floor, which couldn’t even rest on its laurels ultimately. Even Sustainalytics, the best friend, dictionary of ESG ratings for investors fell out of the market the moment many global corporations couldn’t meet their 2050 net-zero ambitions. So much for credibility.

Lin was well-aware, she too was a victim of green-botching. The backfiring of environmentally amiable strategies left many consumers at their wits’ end. Orion once had a glorious system of incentivizing electric vehicle users with generous rewards of carbon credits every instance they utilised the O+ECO nationwide charging system. Lin was disgruntled nine of ten instances she attempted to use the EV chargers in the heart of Orion’s city centre.

A paucity of proper standards dictated the failure of such supposedly clean infrastructure. More often than not, these said chargers would go beeping away with an error message due to its failure to accept many conventional credit cards and left users like Lin to deal with this fix.

Ten years ago, the Ecosperity Recession hit. Oxymoronic in its name, but hit absolutely catastrophic. The boom for all things environmentally friendly and greenflation caused a drag on the rest of the economy — you could smell it everywhere in the air. Treading along the fault lines of the then economy, climate tech startups saw déjà vu, the dot com bubble burst on repeat. With cookie cutter environmental startups mushrooming like there was no tomorrow, confidence in this market peaked and ultimately plummeted to an all-time low level.

Lin ventured further into the premises of her ex trading floor. High-topped desks with monitor screens were nowhere to be seen — at most, apparitions of the bustling floor with its reds and greens drifted in and out of her mind. Instead, holograms of iOrions dictated by artificial intelligence now replaced the scene and were way more compact in nature but simultaneously, reflecting a plenitude of possibilities in a never before way. An impulse, that also fundamentally changed the way we looked at energy consumption.

The departure from Wall Street was distinct with animal spirits lacklustre. Too big to fail. Too small to succeed. Hardly a soul dreamt to become Warren Buffet, they were too preoccupied with the doom and gloom of the state of economy and the looming threat of climate change. The only commodity left traded was carbon. Delving headlong into the labyrinthine state of bifurcation of carbon offset qualities from fragmented regulatory standards in the market was simply perplexing and jarring. With Article 9.2 in place, Orion was a well-established hub for carbon offsets. Orion had pioneered the world’s first taxonomy dictating the usage of carbon credits so as not to stop short of meeting its net zero emissions. Shortly after, this was borrowed and political leaders across the globe unanimously agreed to devise a cohesive taxonomy modelled after that of Orion’s. The strict international purview of carbon credits permeated through society, only a uniform standard was recognised — it was all or nothing.

The veracity of big data was itself an impulse for that. Chunks and chunks of data pertaining to carbon credit projects were visualized and modeled, those meeting the checks and balances would fit the bar for trading on the voluntary market. Almost every nation in the world had their own carbon credit exchange, meeting the global appetite for clamping down on residual emissions.

Ecoverse was an all-encompassing extension of the metaverse established back in the 2010s. Apart from being the pinnacle of virtual social interaction, Ecoverse was a vibrant trading community for carbon credits - savvy buyers and sellers now seamlessly conducted conversations, negotiations and partnerships on the robust platform. It was a vibrant hub, talk about direct air capture and somebody could chime in and say, “hey, we have a keen appetite for this, let’s work towards something meaningful together”, with ever so often a dose of healthy skepticism because a reality check was needed in such a metaverse.

Lin was well aware of her daughter’s pursuits in this arena. This was a well-thought out career path that Ei herself had envisioned it to be, except for the fact that the technological pace was quickening at an unforeseen rate, though more of a boon and less of a bane for herself as a carbon accountant. Nothing was ever indelibly etched.

A day in the life of a carbon accountant hinged largely on Scope 3 emissions reported in the commercial world. By now, Ei was a key expert in the greenhouse gas accounting protocol, securing herself opportunities to audit even the Fortune 500 companies. Perhaps the most memorable for Ei would be her experience examining the crop and plantation sector. Pineapples, even stripped of their crowning glory were ample, if it meant at least 20% of their carbon emissions struck off. These fruit masses were bulky to the core, with cartons after cartons needed to contain the entire shipment. Slashing off these pineapple crowns allowed more efficient cramming into cartons, less trucks and ships en route.

Orion had transitioned gracefully out of its fossil fuelled state, bringing down its mix of coal in energy generation to only 5% from 65% several decades ago. These juicy dollops were more than just the cream of the crop — their empty fruit husks were shredded, dried and pelletized to form sustainable biomass feedstock for the co-blending with coal.

The devil was always in the details, and Ei was fascinated by this sort of exactitude warranted in today’s society to counter endless premises of greenwashing. Orion was a metropolis developing at its best to counter the climate crisis, but therein the edges of its efforts at sustainable best practices would still lie enduring frays. Who is culpable in the end? Only we have the answers to that.

Serena Lum