We are not a project that exists to promote ‘engineering solutions’ to anything. There are plenty of people doing that. Neither are we a project that feels a ‘responsibility’ to suggest ‘answers’ that you might consider useful or comfortable. It’s not what we are here for. But if you do want ‘alternatives’ and the like, you should feel free to come to the festival in May, where you will find visions aplenty. And do feel free to bring your own.

Please can we be clear on which bits are the cynicism and which bits are suggesting alternatives to the status quo that it is so easy to be cynical about.

Thanks

However, the ‘collapse scenario’ is the most likely outcome of our current dilemma. However, one never knows what life has in store – and remember, David (as it is written) nailed Goliath with just a sling and a stone! It therefore makes much sense for us all to engage ourselves in the David v Goliath confrontation of our times. Try to stop the vagabonds wiping us out BUT simultaneously engage in positive and life engendering activities that build the arks for the time to come.

Its through engaging in both these actions that we become whole and uncompromised. This sends positive microvita into the collective energy fields upon which we all draw. And that which happens at unseen levels has repercussions on that which appears fixed beyond redemption.

It seems to me that it is a minority, in the order of perhaps 2% of the UK public. The other 98% are too dumbed down to either think or care. However many of those love to play around with technical fixes…

So, the next real question is: how can the 2% that do care influence the 98% that don’t?

When they’ve taken the carbon out of the atmosphere, of course, we then need to find somewhere to store it. Pumping it under the ocean floor seems to be a popular idea. I can’t see why this would be less hazardous than the storage of nuclear waste.

But the main point here, surely, is that these things, and other such techno-fixes, are presented and would be used not as a first step towards a new world but as an excuse to carry on with the old one.

Anyway, I acknowledge the moral hazard risk that they would let people continue in their ecologically harmful ways. But global warming will be ecologically harmful as well, or at least to the ecology as used by us (I think nature will eventually survive alright, on a long enough timescale).

Given that current levels of warming don’t seem to be pressuring people to do much to change their lifestyles, I’d be fine with using fake trees if they made things easier for us, even if we’d still be left with all sorts of bad things. I don’t think there are only two options, A: Useless and B: panacea.

These trees MIGHT fall under option C: useful, but leaves many things unfixed. I don’t know. But I’d like to know more about them before I can say I’d be for or against.