AI-assisted design was continuously working up better ships, as with everything, and solutions were sometimes as counterintuitive as could be (kites? masts curving forward?), but of course human intuition was so often wrong. Foxing their own cognitive errors might be one of the greatest accomplishments of contemporary science, if they could really

DIY DAC became a vibrant side activity, like growing a truck garden for food; and sometimes the two were even the same thing.

Meanwhile, we’re working with CCCB to list all ways carbon drawdown could be quantified and confirmed, in ways that would allow for carbon coins to be created and paid to individuals. All geoengineering, all good. The word itself needs to be rehabilitated.

This was the world’s current reigning religion, it had to be admitted: growth. It was a kind of existential assumption, as if civilization were a kind of cancer and them all therefore committed to growth as their particular deadly form of life. But this time, growth might be reconfiguring itself as the growth of some kind of safety. Call it

And the central banks could always adjust upward the amount of carbon saved that would be required to earn a coin, creating derivative complications of all kinds and giving them more control knobs. Getting the certification teams for the sequestrations up and running was going to be a crazy effort.

They would issue together a single new currency, coordinated through the BIS: one coin per ton of carbon-dioxide-equivalent sequestered from the atmosphere, either by not burning what would have been burned in the ordinary course of things, or by pulling it back out of the air.

Bob said, “Set increasingly stringent standards for carbon emissions across the six biggest emitting sectors, and pretty soon you’re in carbon-negative territory and working your way back to 350.”

If we don’t fund a rapid carbon drawdown, if we don’t take the immense amount of capital that flows around the world looking for the highest rate of return and redirect it into decarbonizing work, civilization could crash.

Not profit, but biosphere health, should be the function solved for; and this would change many things. It means moving the inquiry from economics to political economy, but that would be the necessary step to get the economics right. Why do we do things? What do we want? What would be fair? How can we best arrange our lives together on this planet?