Turns out McKibben was right. Or at least he may have been, it is still too soon to say. For some years I have been plinking away at these keys and getting scant results. In my spare time, I design cool labs that will remove carbon from the atmosphere and ocean and, at scale, could bring back the Holocene in as little as 35 years. It is somewhat better than just pontificating, but slower.
I ran that calculation of 35 years out in a little more detail in my interview with Kosha Joubert in the GEN webinar series, Communities for the Future Online Summit, earlier this week but it was moving so fast I am not sure how many of the viewers actually got it. I was trying not to sound hopeful and failing miserably. I also had gone into that interview wanting to say something about the downside of our human tribal tropism and was immediately thrown a question about the etymological origins of ”hippy” that knocked me off that plan. I never got around to saying that hippies, like permies, or greenies, by virtue of their tribalism, risk becoming a death cult just like Republicans and Democrats. But I digress.
In McKibben’s spare time he leads a social movement based on the number 350 that used to be a climate goal, but now is sort of an arcane throwback to an earlier decade, bordering on numerology. Strategy-wise, he was less concerned with carbon dioxide removal than with ramping up street…