FROM HEATING TO HEALING
Helena Nordstrom, Chief Marketing Officer, Skymining AB
Carl Pendragon, Chief Executive Officer, Skymining AB
When the world recognizes that CO2 is an asset – not a problem, global warming will be reversed in years – not decades.
In the Skymining age, CO2 is the hero.
It is time for brutal honesty in the climate change debate; despite all efforts to lower emissions and install renewable energy, atmospheric carbon levels increase every year. Still today more than 99 per cent of all human energy production adds CO2 to the sky, and this includes nuclear, hydro, wind and solar power – which all have high carbon footprints during their production and installation phase.
We have come to a point in the history of civilization where our only hope is to remove CO2 from the sky, and it is time the G7 nations embrace this approach and make it their central policy: carbon dioxide removal at a profit. We call it Skymining.
When ecosystems all around the world are facing total failure due to decades of reckless economic development, nothing short of the most radical rethink of all current approaches will suffice. This includes what we think about the culprit: CO2.
In the mainstream media, and therefore in the psyche of society itself, CO2 is viewed as dangerous and bad. But a negative story cannot solve a negative situation; only a positive story can create positive change.
The carbon in CO2 is the basis of all plant and animal life, and the basis of all combustible fuels. By repackaging CO2 from problem to asset, capitalism itself will embrace the mining of atmospheric carbon as the greatest financial opportunity since the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that all of the oil, gas and coal that has been burned has not been ‘used up’ – it has merely been moved to the sky.
Our mission is to couple the pursuit of prosperity, profit and growth to mining CO2, and its many profitable uses once it has been brought back down to earth. The size of the carbon mine in the sky is large enough to entice even the world’s largest corporations and government programmes. In fact, it is large enough to solve all society’s challenges relating to energy, food and fibres.
It has been 30 years since James Hansen warned mankind that we had to reduce emissions to avoid irreversible effects from global warming. Since then, the climate has changed – but the story has not.
Now it is too late to embrace this 30-year-old story. We have since 1988 doubled the amount of CO2 in the sky while Hansen said we had to reduce the amounts already there.
The former Harvard professor David Korten was right when he said: “Change the story, change the future.” Our current story is so wrong that we must be brave enough to discard it completely. Only removing CO2 from the sky and outright replacing fossil fuels (with carbon neutral/negative copies) where they are still burned, can work quickly enough to help avoid catastrophic climate change.
We have long ago lost the window of opportunity where reducing emissions was enough; we now have to reverse the carbon flow in the biosphere. To accomplish that, the solution has to be both scalable and profitable – and in the author’s opinion, it must be possible to couple it to our current way of life, to consumerism, and to all financial transactions that involve a carbon footprint of any kind.
The three greatest challenges facing mankind are:
1) too much CO2 already in the sky
2) burning fossil fuels, wood and charcoal and
3) loss of topsoil.
Skymining removes carbon from the atmosphere, stores parts of it permanently in the soil, thereby restoring its ecosystems, and turns the rest of it into carbon negative fuels, food and fibre. As such, it tackles all three of the above challenges simultaneously while generating land value increases and high profits.
Economic growth in general is currently coupled with the depletion of resources, the degradation of natural systems and CO2 emissions. So far this has destroyed half the planet; half of all virgin forests, more than half of all wildlife, more than half of all wild fisheries and most rivers on earth. The oceans will soon contain more plastic than fish.
It is a self-evident truth that, unless we decouple economic growth from degradation, depletion and emissions, we will lose the other half of our planet as well.
To reverse this human impact on a global scale we will couple the restoration of our planet to existing habitual behaviour of businesses and consumers – and we will make it more profitable to generate the natural world than to harm it.
We want to drive a paradigm shift where any corporation can afford to attach regeneration and negative emissions to their existing business model – because it generates profits. Where consumers can attach Skymining to their habits while generating profits and wealth.
The G7 nations must now do all they can to make removing carbon from the atmosphere as habitual in the future as emitting was in the past. Then we can, together, enter the Skymining age – and relegate global warming to history.
About the Authors
Helena Nordström studied nuclear physics and later went on to become director of marketing strategy for one of Sweden’s largest companies. The wide gap between these two fields, hints at the breadth of her competencies, which in addition to her strong ethics make her a powerful chief marketing officer for Skymining.
Carl Pendragon is an inventor, philosopher and entrepreneur, with 25 years’ experience in energy markets. During the 1990s, Mr Pendragon disrupted electricity markets where competition was slow to take hold after demonopolization. In 2009, he started to search for a solution to permanently stop reverse global warming, which resulted in the concept, technology and platform of Skymining.
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