Network of Institutions for Future Generations,

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?

“Yes. And of the same empire too. It’s funny how England never seemed to pay too much of a price for its crimes.” “No one does. You pay for being the victim, not the criminal.”

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.

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

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.

Having debunked the tragedy of the commons, they now were trying to direct our attention to what they called the tragedy of the time horizon. Meaning we can’t imagine the suffering of the people of the future, so nothing much gets done on their behalf. What we do now creates damage that hits decades later, so we don’t charge ourselves for it, and

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

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