Working in sustainability, there's rarely any good news for me in the morning paper. This morning The Guardian wrote again about carbon bombs - massive fossil fuel extraction projects that can push us to 1.5C many times over. That’s nothing really new, considering the UK government’s stated goal to wring every drop of oil out of the North Sea.
What struck me about the article, though, was the brief mention of the economic incentives that are tangling up the whole system. Meeting the 1.5C targets by abandoning oil and gas extraction creates stranded assets, and apparently risks another financial crisis. Jan Fichtner, a sustainable finance research fellow at the University of Witten-Herdecke, was quoted as saying:
“In a capitalist system, profitability is the most important current. You can try to swim against the current, it’s possible, but it’s very, very difficult.”
As long as oil and gas extraction is profitable, companies will continue to profit from it.
I could veer off here into discussion of complicated financial mechanisms like carbon taxation, or theories of degrowth, but today that all feels too large for me to address as one person. I know that others in the sustainability space (and outside of it!) feel the same way, so this is just to say:
Keep trying.
It’s so easy to descend into despair, conclude the human race is fatally flawed, and tackle something a bit easier than saving the planet—like Squid Game, or a tub of ice cream. But we need optimism, because optimism is how we change things.
If we’re going to move the world forward, we need to believe that the future can be better, if we try hard enough to change it.
So today my question is: where do you find optimism? Is it in learning about new start-ups with amazing technology, or buying a heat pump for your household, or reading solarpunk?
(Please let it be reading solarpunk; I need new book recommendations!)