One of the things that keep coming out of the multitude of environmental related blog posts or news articles is a sort of emphasis of how Carbon is a Bad Thing™. You see a lot of “carbon is to blame”, “carbon is evil”, “carbon is the culprit”, “zero carbon” and so on. Now those people know exactly what they mean by speaking harshly about Carbon, but I wonder if the message comes across as intended.
We need to remember that life on earth is first and foremost, carbon-based. From tiny algae to sequoias, from plancton to humans, carbon is our main building block, it’s within ourselves, in the food we eat and in the air we breathe. Carbon is the 4th most common element in the entire universe.
What needs to be emphasised is the need to regain a balance in the carbon cycle to ensure a healthy prosperity for every living organism on earth… including ourselves. One of the best campaigns currently running who have the message right, in my opinion, is 350.org. Their message is simple: do all we can to have the concentration of carbon dioxyde in the atmosphere to return at 350 parts per million (it currently is at about 385ppm and growing at a rate of about 2ppm per year) which is roughly at concentration levels before 1990.
Carbon is a fantastic element, you can make pencils with it, a diamond is pure carbon, graphite has lots of commercial applications, there’s even research done on carbon nanotubes which are meant to be those super-thin indestructible rods which could be used for all sorts of things (space lifts anyone?). And that’s just scratching the surface.
So while carbon in the component CO2 is the element that is responsible for the main warming trend of oceans and land as well as ocean acidification thus doing no end of damage, it didn’t put itself up there. The real culprit is mankind and its greed for more energy, more power, more money, less care, less attention, less understanding.
I once read a quote from a very wise man who said something like “we always argue about our share of food, we take the lion’s share and leave nothing for our neighbours, we fight for the land to cultivate this food, for the water to gain fishing rights, but once we’ve consumed that food, we’re not concerned about our share of shit that’s produced. No one wants to own the shit” (note: this is heavily paraphrased though I believe the spirit of the quote remains). The same is true about energy. We fight for exploitation of oil reserves (2 gulf wars had nothing to do with human rights or Weapons of Mass Destruction), we spend vasts amounts of money to lobby the public and governments to overexploit already stretched resources and that for what? Spewing rising emissions to a reservoir we all have to share: our atmosphere. No nation can erect fences high enough above its borders to contain its own emissions within its territory. The butterfly effect doesn’t come closer than this.
So let’s consume only what we need, let’s travel responsibly, let’s remember we’re not the only living beings on this planet, but let’s not put the blame on Carbon.
[Wikipedia]