Carbon Conjuring

Misdirection: Its Recognition and Mitigation

As well as showmanship and a few trick mechanisms, the main skill of a magician doing conjuring tricks is misdirection. While your attention is being focussed over there, the key manipulation is happening just here – right in front of you, but you can’t see it. The same is happening with carbon.

Many of us know about BP hiring public relations firm Ogilvy & Mather to sell climate change being not the fault of the oil giants, but that of individuals – they invented the Carbon Footprint - “One of the most successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever”. This misdirection is achieved by moving the focus away from the fossil fuel companies who extract carbon and actually control it, to the end consumers who have very little control, and being divided can never in reality control carbon. Divide and Rule. Concerned carbon activists also waste their efforts trying to promote individual actions instead of the necessary global changes required to fix a global problem. But because our Carbon Footprint makes us feel responsible and guilty we continue to fall for it.

The same shifting of blame happens with COP. The Paris agreement set things up so that each nation was responsible for controlling their own emissions, setting targets and trying to stick to them. This sets country against country since cutting carbon more quickly than rival countries sets then at an economic disadvantage. So the global problem is not tackled globally, and no one is really surprised that the carbon problem is not fixed. Once again Divide and Rule.

Global Warming and Climate Change are terms we take for granted, but they are another form of misdirection. It is little known that there was a massive lobbying effort when the IPCC was created to get the them to use these neutral terms instead of more accurate, but more frightening terms, such as; Global Overheating and Climate Chaos or Climate Catastrophe. This is another form of misdirection by the targeted use of language.

Emissions instead of Extraction. This is arguably the biggest and most successful bit of misdirection. It’s understandable that we concentrate on personal, local or national carbon emissions, but this is a global problem that needs a global solution. So a global perspective gives a better chance of solving the carbon emissions problem. Currently we are pinning our hopes on the Paris Agreement and the COP commitments by separate nations adding up to a solution. But as we know the national commitments don’t come anywhere near adding up to the necessary total. This is no surprise. Any nation committing to their fair share of emissions reduction will be at a competitive disadvantage. This is why this approach will probably never work. The other fundamental flaw is that COP is trying to control emissions, which is far too late in the process. Controlling the global supply of carbon at source would be far more efficient in so many ways. And we’ve done it before. Let’s remember how CFCs were phased out under the Montreal Protocol. It was done by phasing out manufacturing of CFCs – by limiting the supply. We can also look at the example of OPEC where oil supplies were limited by that cartel of nations in order to keep the price of oil high. I say that controlling the global supply of carbon is the most certain way to control carbon emissions.

And, why Net Zero Carbon? It sounds like a good thing to achieve. A ‘what goes up must come down’ balance. But the levels of CO2 in our atmosphere are way out of balance already, so shouldn’t we be pushing for Net Negative Carbon? Climate is already tipped way out of balance so that we need to get back to the historic CO2 range of 280 to 350 ppm instead of the current range of 413 to 420 ppm. There’s another big flaw in Net Zero, it ignores the fact that currently about half the CO2 we add to the atmosphere comes back down again because of natural ecological processes. This shows us that in the short term we don’t need to reduce carbon extraction to zero in order to obtain Net Zero and even Net Negative Carbon.

So having recognised that we need to control the global supply of carbon at source, how can we do it? I think that setting a reducing ration for how much carbon is allowed to be extracted globally is what’s necessary. The only question then is how to fairly distribute the carbon ration? One way would be expand OPEC to include all countries and all fossil fuels, and then let the new universal OPEC decide. I think a better way would be one that also sends that missing COP mitigation funding to developing nations who weren’t responsible for the mess we are in but need to cope with it. So I propose that a tradable global carbon extraction ration or quota is the right of every person equally. Practically distribution of this quota to individuals is impractical, so the quota would be split between all countries proportionally be population. There would be a global market for this quota and no carbon extracting organisation would be allowed to extract carbon without sufficient quota.

Such a system would allow the efficient and totally predictable reduction of carbon fuels in a way that would allow all governments to plan the necessary switch to renewables. It would also give low carbon developing countries a regular income that would fund mitigation measures. I think this would not only give the world a more stable climate, but also more stable politics.