Correcting our Idea of Genius – Thomas Bernhard’s Correction

I am something of a Thomas Bernhard fanatic. After Woodcutters, the other Bernhard on this blog, I had a break until late 2023, when I read, in quick succession, Concrete, The Loser, Extinction, and Wittgenstein’s Nephew. Bernhard is a writer who is addictive in a quite unique way. His books are propelled by the bile and bitterness of his narrators and are inescapable thanks to their flowing, paragraphless prose, which offers no exit for someone looking to put them down and take a break. Entering Bernhard’s world means a total surrender to his aims and approach.

Correction, which I have now read for the second time, is to my mind the best Bernhard, and one of my favourite books altogether. It has a unique structure for the author, with two narrators, (even though one filters the other,) who take equal sides of the novel for themselves and who have slightly different voices. It also has the most interesting readerly experience, in that the novel’s journey is primarily one where we change our opinion about its central character, the genius scientist Roithamer, rather than one where something happens. All happening takes place before the book begins.

As with all Bernhard, the story itself is simple. Roithamer, a genius of sorts who works at Cambridge, upon the death of his parents inherits a lot of money and decides to use this money to build a Cone in the centre of the Kobernausser Forest in Austria for his sister to live in. Once the Cone is finished his sister dies, probably not of joy, and Roithamer then hangs himself. Our narrator, a friend of Roithamer’s, arrives at the house of a mutual friend, Hoeller, where Roithamer did much of his work on the Cone, to start putting Roithamer’s literary remains in order. The first part of Correction is an almost hagiographic portrayal of Roithamer by this friend; the second is Roithamer’s own literary remains, partly filtered. Chief among them is a manuscript entitled “About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone”.

In the first part of the book Roithamer is presented as a classical genius – what Bertrand Russell said of Wittgenstein is entirely appropriate here: “he was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.” Roithamer is totally focused in a way that few of us ever are: “a topic he took up had to be thought through to the end”. The ultimate end, it turns out, is suicide, but before we get to suicide, this thinking is inspirational. Roithamer builds a Cone for habitation, something nobody has done before, and does so totally professionally, as the result of massive research and effort, and all this in the face of all manner of criticisms and accusations of madness.

He is also totally himself, totally dedicated. Quite frankly, I would rather be like this – more pedantic, more unbearable, more focused, than any of the human qualities those who know me would wish I had in greater quantities to balance out my already well-developed inhuman ones. Almost all I could think as I read these sections was how much I agreed with everything, how much I myself wanted to build my own Cone, or rather in my case a Cube, a white glass cube but also in the centre of a forest or failing that atop a cliff and far away from everything and everybody, my own “thought-chamber” where I would be able to work totally undisturbed and think better, cleaner, wiser thoughts than anywhere else. A place where I would experience the same joy as I had recently in the crypt at the cathedral in Münster, where I was alone beside silent stone.

We see Roithamer’s genius reflected in Bernhard’s prose. It flows, in long sentences, with a focus on choosing the right words. One of the things I love, you’ll have noticed, is Bernhard’s italics. He uses italics to make us read words and phrases we might otherwise pass over. Strangely, simple though it is, it works. But there are also the neologisms, obviously more brilliant in the original German where they can remain a single word, things like the “thought-chamber” above. This sentence-by-sentence genius can also be drawn out to the wider book, where we are constantly becoming more precise, more accurate, more truthful in our various assertions.

Here is an example. On page 1 we learn that Roithamer has killed himself. On page 53 we learn the location, on page 61 we learn the method, on page 81 we learn who found him. The whole book is structured like a spiral, as we constantly correct our initial view to be closer to the reality that once was. Spirals can mean madness, of course, the sense of one being trapped. But they can also be like drill bits, precisely what is needed to make a hole through something – some challenge or problem – otherwise impenetrable. That is the great test of genius and obsession – to fixate upon the right thing, not the wrong. I have a friend whose longtime obsession is Pokémon Pearl. I, fortunately, am more obsessed by books and terrible questions.

Our narrator’s obsession is Roithamer himself. This is, he notes, not exactly healthy. He describes being unable to think his own thoughts, because he is incarcerated “within Roithamer’s thought-prison – or Roithamer’s thought-dungeon.” This, naturally, makes the depiction of Roithamer we receive in the first part of the book slightly suspect. It also provides one of the novel’s mysteries. For the second part is a collection of Roithamer’s thoughts, as filtered through the narrator, yet the narrator is nowhere to be found. Even though he claims they were friends who went to school together, Roithamer doesn’t mention him once. In fact, Roithamer provides information that directly contradicts the narrator’s testimony. (The narrator claims Roithamer visited Stocket to see him, whereas Roithamer claims he visited Stocket to see an uncle).

The result of the narrator’s obsession is that he essentially goes mad, helped by working in quite literally the same room as Roithamer when he worked on the Cone. He is almost subsumed into Roithamer. Arguably, the second part of the book, where Roithamer’s voice is even more dominant, is just an extension of this – the narrator is totally crushed as a human being with any more existence than merely that of a bridge between the dead man’s words and our ears. Yet interestingly, his admiration for Roithamer, his Roithamer-obsession, is quite similar to what I felt.

One of the ways that Correction provides a journey for the reader is that it takes that attitude and forces us to amend it. Once we hear Roithamer’s voice, unvarnished, the genius becomes rather more petty than godly. “That extraordinary talent for life” which the narrator so praises becomes in practice rather pathetic. Roithamer absolutely hated his upbringing on the estate of Altensam. He spends page after page criticising his brothers, his father, his mother in particular. He describes endless squabbles and confrontations in which he himself is the instigator. For example, it was enough for him to return home from abroad and find that a barn had been painted to send him off on a rampage.

Given that, like a lot of people on the spectrum or whatever, Roithamer has a real dislike of hypocrisy, the sheer amount that we find in him soon comes to undermine him. Nobody understands him, yes, but he claims to have been observing his sister for years and years to create the ultimate habitation for her in the form of a Cone. Yet the result of this observation is a home so comically unsuited that she dies pretty much immediately. The repetitions of these problems, Roithamer’s total lack of growth, and indeed the way that his entire personality seems to have come from his upbringing even though he claims to despise it, all makes him look rather ridiculous. He cries about people who “never once seek a single cause of their unhappiness in themselves,” but it is he who is the first person who should consider this.

Bernhard is a hugely funny writer, which I have failed to indicate here thus far, but humour is another way that our thought-image of Roithamer becomes covered in cracks. As Roithamer’s own suicide approaches, he reels off a whole host of family members who have committed suicide, in a way that is too over-the-top to be upsetting. “…They shoot themselves, like my uncle, or they hang themselves, like my other uncle, or they throw themselves in front of a train, like my third uncle. … And didn’t our cousin, the only son of our third uncle, kill himself too, after he got married to a doctor’s daughter from Kirchdorf on the Krems.” When we learn that one of these people literally threw themselves down the air shaft of a cheese factory our sympathy struggles to break through the snort of laughter at these words.

In fact, it is humour that keeps Roithamer alive. At one point he visits the cliff off from which one of his relatives threw himself and finds himself considering following suit, “but suddenly, when this idea was at its most compelling, this idea seemed ridiculous to me, and I took myself out of there.” We laugh, perhaps, but three of Wittgenstein’s own brothers died to suicide, so these numbers are not the mad inflations they might seem. And Austria did, for a long time, have among the highest suicide rates in the world.

By the time Roithamer reaches the idea of suicide, the final “correction” for “our entire existence as a bottomless falsification and misrepresentation of our true nature”, we are already no longer with him, but watching him, rather sadly, as the madman that others did claim he was. One of the key elements of cone-building, as we learn, is “statics”, basically how to keep things from falling over. In the case of Roithamer, this provides a beautiful metaphor. He tips and tips as far as he can into his thoughts, and done well he can make huge advances (as he does by building the Cone) without getting to a point where he loses his balance and falls over. But in the book, he does go too far, and hence falls. We, watching, do not.

Another key idea, understandably, is the idea of correction itself. Roithamer writes his manuscript about his childhood and then corrects it, making it much smaller and completely different, then does so again, then finally kills himself. Correction, when I reflected on it, really has two meanings or uses. It can mean to take something false and replace it with what is true, as in the case of an incorrect mathematical summation, or it can mean to take what is largely true and make it more precise. Correction abounds in the latter, but believes it is a tale of the former. One of the mesmerising beauties of Bernhard’s prose is its precision-fanaticism. Whether it’s denying one word in favour of another, “master builder” instead of “architect”, or its deployment of a huge number of words and phrases to create a more accurate picture than one or two alone could do, Correction aims at precision in a way that others might be willing to stop and say this is “good enough.”

Precision-fanaticism is another phrase for perfectionism. Nowadays, self-help gurus are all about the need to be less of a perfectionist, and Correction provides a dramatization of why we should heed them. Roithamer, finding error and inaccuracy everywhere, ultimately gives up on his connection to the source of all error – existence itself. For us, it need not be so. We can stop at a given sentence, just as I can give up on a given blog post, and say that this is good enough. Could be better, but won’t be. Thus we live to fight another day.

As much as this book ultimately becomes a criticism of Roithamer, indeed even a correction to our idea of genius, it remains mysterious to me because I am unable to shake my love of the ideas it represents and the way it represents them. Much as once upon a time I wanted to be Ivan Karamazov or Levin, I would want to be Roithamer if I could. At least the Roithamer that is represented in the novel’s first half. The Roithamer of the second, with his pettiness and pointless arguments with his family members, I fear I already am.

Where Bernhard is normally so negative and cruel that we normally come out of his books looking for things that might actually be affirmed in life, in Correction I actually heard something truly beautiful and admirable – the sheer, single-minded dedication to an arbitrarily chosen idea that we are willing to stake our entire soul upon. Yes, it’s mad, but I want to build my Cone. Better that than not wanting anything at all, and sinking into the grim mediocrity that Bernhard hates so much.

Uneasy Modernity in D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow

D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow is a frustrating book. I have a suspicion that it was probably supposed to be. Following the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family in Nottinghamshire in the 19th century, it is primarily the story of their struggles to assert themselves and their identities. While the older generations have only limited success, Ursula, the granddaughter of our original Brangwen hero Tom, is able to achieve something closer to what she wants for her (emotional) life.

That she does so is a little ironic. The Brangwens may be progressing financially and socially in the story, but it is clear that for Lawrence the world around them in late 19th and early 20th century England is not. Rather, it’s becoming increasingly more awful as continues to industrialize and modernise. What complicates this situation is that it is precisely the progress Lawrence dislikes – economic, educational, and social – which allows Ursula the chance to be herself in the way she thinks she ought. Otherwise, I think this might have been quite a one-dimensional book.

The Rainbow was my first full-length Lawrence, after a few of his poems and his well-known short story, “The Odour of Chrysanthemums”. The best compliment I can give him, not that I think he’d necessarily care for my feedback even if he weren’t dead almost a hundred years, is that he certainly has his own distinctive approach. The characters of The Rainbow only ever experience strong feelings. The best way to describe them for one who hasn’t read him is that they are like jugs of emotions just sloshing about more than real people. Regularly, the feelings pour over the brim and make a mess on the carpet.

Central to these emotions are love and hate, and the frustration that leads to their regular alternations. Anna Brangwen, the adopted daughter of Tom Brangwen, imagines her premarital life as like a torture cell where she could “neither stand nor lie stretched out, never.” She escapes her home by marrying Will Brangwen, son of one of Tom’s brothers. At first, things are good: “Gradually a low, deep-sounding will in him vibrated to her, tried to set her in accord, tried to bring her gradually to him, to a meeting, till they should be together, till they should meet as the sheaves that swished together.”

Then, just as quickly, things are bad. First, she’s crying, and then he is. They are unable to talk to each other, and Will takes up drinking – the men in The Rainbow are always going up to the village to get drunk alone, and Will quickly joins their number. When they visit a cathedral – Will likes them as a kind of hobby – Anna decides to ruin his faith through mockery and doubt and largely succeeds, leaving him miserable. They then make up just as suddenly, and it almost seems as if Lawrence approves of this destruction because he suggests it leads to better sex. At another point, Will tries to seduce a stranger and when he returns home the result is the same – better sex. Both he and Anna no longer feel obliged to be good or obey or social norms, and their passion for one another reaches a new height. (I lost track of how many babies she has throughout the novel, or how many fallings-out.)

The only child who matters within this book, however, is Ursula, the eldest daughter. On the first page of The Rainbow we learn that the Brangwens are all born with a look of “expectancy” on their faces, and it is with Ursula that we get closest to fulfilment. In the background of the book’s several hundred pages, modernity has crept into the story. By the time of Ursula’s section, we have the occasional motor car and the Boer War to help us date things, while the suffragettes are trying to get women the right to vote. The Brangwen family has also grown. At first, they were reasonably well-off farmers, but the growth of towns nearby thanks to coal mining makes them more money and allows them to climb a little socially.

Most directly for Ursula, this helps her to become a teacher and try to live an independent life. She also then goes to college to actually train to be a teacher, which perhaps she should have done before doing the teaching. In between all this she has her experience of first love with the son of a friend of her mother’s, an extremely homoerotic experience with a female friend, and through her other acquaintances she also comes across such ideas as the cause of the suffragettes.

In general, however, and as I mentioned at the beginning, Lawrence seems very hostile towards the modern world. The corporal punishment Ursula has to mete out to her children at the freshly-built new school seems as demeaning to her as it is to them, while the teaching itself is unstructured and primarily rote-learning. The suffragettes are criticised for thinking about ideas rather than actual human fulfilment, and as for the growth of towns and urban spaces Lawrence memorably describes them as “a red-brick confusion rapidly spreading, like a skin-disease”. People everywhere seem to be turning into machines, and Lawrence is no fan.

His own ideas are much more timeless, or at least timeless-seeming. There’s an emphasis on personal freedom and self-assertion, but mainly through passionate sex rather than upending society. In fact, there’s no real sense of society at all – Lawrence’s characters are all monstrous egotists only brushing against each other when their blood is pumping. The greatest moments are moments of nakedness – Anna dancing in her bedroom nude, or Ursula running on the beach naked. That’s the fulfilment everyone wants here and not the vote. But we might also notice, unsurprisingly, that even if a partner is present, these are moments of self-fulfilment rather than of joint, let alone of collective fulfilment. The men observing feel left out, alienated. (I am not sure Lawrence liked men who were not himself.)

Lawrence uses religious language and symbols to give his work a kind of mythic edge and his ideas the stamp of Truth. Early moments of love are described as “the light of the transfiguration”; at one point Ursula is compared to the serpent in the Garden of Eden; and cathedrals play a reasonably prominent role. The clear delineation between and essentialising of men and women, a sense of cyclicity (Brangwens on their first illicit strolls with lovers always seem to find the same paths to tread), and biblical images like a flood and the rainbow of the novel’s title, all make Lawrence’s narrator seem like someone presenting some timeless discovery, as if he has gone back to the root of things to find their real essence.

It is not so, of course. Lawrence may attempt to cloak himself in the Bible, but his main influences seem to be the classic German thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. When we read that “she felt his will fastening on her and pulling her down, even whilst he was silent and obscure,” we think of Schopenhauer’s idea of a fallen humanity controlled by clashing wills. When we consider Lawrence’s rejection of modernity (“I hate democracy”, Ursula cries embarrassingly) and his love of the body, there’s more than a touch of Nietzsche and his successors in the Lebensphilosophie movement, while Freud is also here in much of the more detailed psychological assessments of the effects of modern society on the individual soul.

One is allowed to be influenced by others, of course, and Lawrence not being a real prophet does not devalue his ideas necessarily and certainly not his book as a whole. In fact, The Rainbow was banned in the UK for some years after its initial publication, which is generally a sign that it did reflect a certain truth. A truth about sex in particular – this is, undoubtedly, the sexiest book I’ve read which does not mention the male member once. Like de Sade, there’s a sense that even if Lawrence has a limited view of female empowerment, it’s one that still undermines the view that women exist only to be caregivers and dolls.

Overall, the ideas are actually reasonable enough; the problem is that, wishing to convince us of their Truth, Lawrence takes the easy option of disallowing debate or counterargument to exist. Characters are either sellouts to modernity who become like machines and are dropped by Ursula, or they are having great sex. I suspect there may be more to the matter than that. Anna has fifty babies, while Ursula gets engaged, goes on a mad one, and then breaks the whole thing off. The life of the body is good and fun, but I dislike the way Lawrence completely devalues the mind. I suppose once we accept he is right about everything we are supposed to stop thinking, if we were supposed to think at all.

One figure I thought of regularly while reading The Rainbow was Dostoevsky. Both he and Lawrence can only write characters whose emotional states are strained so taut you can hear the thrumming as soon as they leap onto the page; both he and Dostoevsky could have done with a better editor; both he and Lawrence have their own visions of how things are. But of the two, only Dostoevsky actually places his ideas against those of his enemies in such a way that even today, many readers can be quite convinced that he wasn’t really a toady old reactionary Christian nationalist. With Lawrence, you’d need to be an idiot to miss what he’s on about. Which altogether just makes him seem naïve and a bit silly, even before we start thinking about the ideas themselves.

Yet this is not a bad book by any stretch. One reason why this is so is the tension I noted at the start on the subject of modernity. Ursula goes to a better school than her parents, she is able to get a job where her mother gets none, and I might even suggest that her willingness to have sex while ultimately backing out of marriage indicates that she was not entirely deaf to some of the more radical ideas her suffragette friends may have been mentioning. In other words, her choices do not come out of nowhere – the world may be getting worse, but it is also opening up new opportunities for achieving the kind of self-realisation that Lawrence definitely loves.

There’s an irony in all that which he may have noticed himself. Such an irony, and the question of how much self-fulfilment Ursula will actually get within that world, makes her part of the novel by far the most interesting. Indeed, it even sustains itself into a sequel, Women in Love, which I will probably read at some point. This, and the occasional richness of the sloshing-about of these characters’ sensual emotions, makes The Rainbow quite the sensual experience. Just one that I will not rush to return to until I have gone outside and first touched the grass. 

Work to Art: Carbon Credits as Literary Material

This is a post about carbon credits and the challenge of turning work-related matters into fiction, so although the topic might seem a bit out there it’s really just as much about stories as everything else on this blog. However, it does have a slightly technical introductory few sections.

I first came across carbon credits properly while working in Russia – there were some Federal initiatives involving trees that might have produced some – but as with a lot of things out there, it went nowhere. A bit later, a friend and I had an abortive mad dash into Paraguayan property to do our own afforestation (tree planting) project. After digging around our connections it turned out we had someone on the Paraguayan supreme court; unfortunately what we didn’t have was a zero in the right place in the financial model my friend put together, and so fortunately I did not end up the proud owner of several thousand acres of field on a continent I’ve never visited.

Somehow, since then carbon credits have continued to come up in my life. Before I can talk about their relationship to narratives I first want to explain how they work in principle:

If you accept that global warming is happening and primarily caused by human activity, and that the consequences for things you care about (animals, people, coastal golf courses) are bad enough to do something, then you want to prevent the bad things from happening. You, an individual, can do whatever you want to combat global warming – stop driving, eat less meat – because you have decision-making rights over your own actions.

As a business, however, one is beholden to one’s shareholders and government regulations. Enough shareholders want money that businesses need to listen to them or face financial consequences in the form of a cratering share price, which means that even if you as a business are doing the right thing, you’ll probably find yourself without the money you need to do it. (This is a simplification as pressure can also go the other way.) Instead, we generally rely on regulations to nudge us to do good things, like not dumping our toxic waste in the nearest body of water, such as the swimming pool at the special needs school.

Forced to do the right thing, a business continues following this profit motive by finding the cheapest way to do it. First, you electrify your operations using renewables; then you make your furnaces more efficient; then you replace your fleet of polluting cars with electric vans; then you replace the natural gas in your furnace with biogas or hydrogen from renewable sources, and so on. You may have seen graphs showing the cost of each of these things or similar – they generally look like a series of steps, because each option is more expensive than the one before. (Here’s one from the World Bank).

Functionally, however, each decarbonisation lever has the same effect – one unit of a greenhouse gas, typically carbon dioxide, is not produced. The only difference is the price. If you want to save the planet, you start with the cheap stuff for the most impact at the lowest cost, then gradually work your way up as the governments increase the regulatory temperature (for example, through a carbon price or cap-and-trade system like the EU’s emissions trading system, or ETS).

Carbon Credits

Whence then carbon credits? Consider this: if the overriding goal is decarbonisation, why should a company do something when they can pay someone else to stop the CO2 emissions for less cost? For example, if my new green vans cost more than your improved insulation, why don’t I pay you to install more of it before I start paying the higher cost for my things?

This is the kind of environment where carbon credits come in. Trees absorb carbon for free, which is a lot cheaper than the fancy new catalytic cracker at my oil refinery. But some trees are under threat from deforestation. Now with my forestry manager’s hat on, if you pay me a dollar, I will gladly not chop these trees down and instead will take care of them for you. (The price essentially replaces the earnings I would get from cutting the trees down). To give another example, renewables displace carbon from a dirty electricity grid, and are pretty cheap too – why don’t you pay me for setting them up too? This idea of paying for making green decisions happen that otherwise would not is the way that carbon credits justify their own existence.

Carbon credits or offsets have had a rough history for a number of reasons, however.

The initial credits were avoidance credits, rather than removals. This means we avoided deforestation or avoided using our coal-fired power plants. The problem was that it was hard to quantify the amount avoided, which meant the system was vulnerable to fraud or things that looked like fraud. BP owns the biggest US offset company, and there’s potential that the offsets sold were not really protecting much of the land because it was too remote to be at any risk to begin with. Certain other oil majors (and not only them) have been criticised in the press (nothing new there) for buying “junk offsets”, which were cheap and of dubious benefit. Occasionally, we hear stories of Uyghur slave labour or other human rights abuses associated with projects.

In theory, credits should be of a “high standard”, letting them also command a relatively high price. Credits are typically verified by registries in a fairly complex process to ensure they are real and have a real impact. Credits that bring co-benefits – like employing local workers or providing a biodiversity boost – can often charge more as a result too. There are audits, site visits, and other costs for developers. But bad projects do slip through the cracks, and given this is very much a nascent market, wrongdoers have a big negative impact on the market’s overall reputation.

What Market?

Carbon credits are not monolithic. The pressure placed upon companies by the EU is not the same that a consumer-facing business might place on itself on behalf of its customers. Hence, we have two market types where carbon is traded. The compliance markets, if they allow credits at all for emissions reductions, set strict quality requirements. The voluntary market, which is where most of the carbon credits that we think of are sold, typically allows much more flexibility. That’s because your credits are your own business – the businesses buying voluntary credits are doing so because they voluntarily want to say they are decarbonising and not because their governments are regulating them to. Yet…

This can be a bit confusing. Especially because, for example, oil and gas companies are largely not forced to decarbonise operations via regulators, whereas other industrial players like steel producers in the EU are part of the ETS, mentioned above and so have to. (Or close down and take their business elsewhere…) Oil and gas give the voluntary market a bad name, but the main players are actually technology companies and other “services” companies – financials, consulting, insurance. Apart from the technology companies, these have tiny emissions and nobody is telling them to do anything about them, except potentially their employees or clients. So, after they turn the lights off in the office and buy renewable electricity, they might chose to get involved with the VCM (voluntary carbon market).

Avoidance or Removals?

As I mentioned, back in the day (and still now in fact), the main type of credits were avoidance credits. They were a mess of fogginess and occasional fraud, so some forward-thinking companies now generally avoid buying them: it’s not often that you see a business boasting of a big purchase of avoidance offsets. But there is another type – removals. Instead of preventing a tree from being felled, you can plant a tree. Or several hundred thousand. This is a much clearer direct impact, and more easily measurable. (One tree absorbs x tonnes of CO2 over y years vs the z tonnes of absorption of whatever was there before).

Trees are pretty cheap still, but there are other ways of helping the world decarbonise. The most obvious comparison with afforestation is direct air capture, or DAC. You might have heard of Climeworks in Iceland, or 1PointFive in the US. Gigantic fans suck carbon out of the air at a gigantic cost in electricity and other resources. (Carbon is a bother, but as it’s not a big percentage of the air we breathe, you need a lot of air going through your fans to extract enough of it to make a difference). DAC is extremely expensive as a result of this, so its credits are too, even though, according to the International Energy Agency, we basically need it in every possible scenario where future generations are not very mad at us.

Now, companies are proud of buying removals credits – it’s easy to find press releases on the topic from companies like Microsoft or Klarna – and so they should be. They may be under pressure from activist investors or want to boost their reputation amongst consumers, but generally, they are doing a good thing they didn’t need to do. In moral terms, they are almost doing a supererogatory action. 

Ways of thinking about removals

We need carbon credits of this sort to decarbonise the world. Removals aren’t greenwashing, and they are fairly rigorous if not perfect. The huge number of avoidance offsets which certain companies, mainly oil majors, have banked up… might be closer to that. As soon as we talk about greenwashing, we get to the standard metaphor by which people explain carbon credits, the one I have deliberately avoided using until now – that of an indulgence.

So, indulgences… In early modern Europe, knights had a problem. They wanted to go on crusades and rape and murder vast numbers of innocent (infidels), but they knew this just might contradict a thing or two written in the Bible. One way out, which became widespread in plenty of other contexts, was through indulgences. Essentially, you are paying for the road to Heaven to be cleared of obstacles a little. It made perfect theological sense because the priests thought it up, and it had the benefit of requiring the knights to do absolutely nothing about their actual behaviour.

Returning to now, carbon credits seem similar because they let companies continue polluting with only a small cost to them. They seem useless and a source of greenwashing in the same way that indulgences were heaven-washing. Hence, the comparison smarmy commentators like to make.

But it is a false one for most credits. Unlike Indulgences, which had no central registry at the Vatican nor any monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) setup, credits do try to do what they say. Nobody can verify the effects of indulgences – which may still have worked – but we can verify the carbon taken from the air by the growth of a tree’s bulk, for example. Most companies buy removals after they have done the cheap and easy stuff, like purchasing renewable energy – not instead of this. Removal purchases are thus an extension of good behaviour, rather than an alternative to it as in the case of the crusaders.

Carbon Credits and Literature

The problem is that the indulgences metaphor is a damn good one, and hard to avoid considering once you’ve first encountered it. It largely prevents us from considering carbon credits as themselves. Rather than simplifying a topic, it blocks it from view and pats itself on the back for it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my work recently, about how I might transform my experience of it into some kind of story if decided I wanted to. (The thought abutting that one is that I should finally read David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King). Nobody wants to read about carbon credits within a story – they need to stand in for something else. My own, mildly technical introduction, is already far too much. If we used them in a narrative, they would need to be part of some human story, and the problem is that most of the human stories I can tell about carbon credits are ones where the credits themselves are the villains.

The indulgences analogy is very easy. A story about credit fraud practically writes itself, especially since you can just use a real story of the sort I linked above and add the details. Aren’t credits a great example of how humanity will never do the right and proper thing (decarbonise industry) and will instead take some stupid, easy option (buying credits)? Another option, one slightly more positive about the credits themselves, would be to have a story about an afforestation project somewhere in the US that then burns down in a wildfire. Man vs nature, anyone? That’s pretty classic. But it also says that we were selling semi-permanent carbon storage, which has, in fact, just gone up in smoke – and hence, again, readers are made to doubt the integrity of carbon markets. (For this kind of situation, a certain percentage of offsets are kept on hand by registries as insurance, but again, that’s not an exciting story, so I leave it in brackets).

The problem with the credits is that if they are done properly there’s no story to them except a good one. A local community given new jobs, biodiversity supported, carbon removed. That’s not the stuff of drama or tragedy; it’s not really the stuff of anything at all except life as people actually live it.

It’s irresponsible to take something which is both necessary and much maligned and continue the slander begun by the (relatively) ignorant. If I wrote one of the stories above, as a writer I would be doing damage, just for a metaphor. What do I do as someone mindful of the meanings that might be read into a story? My company has a sewage sludge project – now there’s another thing ripe for a metaphor. But the metaphor it’s ripe for is a positive one, and hence not worth writing except in a press release – society makes a lot of waste, but companies want to improve (valorise) that waste and bring value back to consumers. In this case, as a type of fertiliser feedstock, I think. All this also fits into general narratives about the circular economy we need to move towards to be more sustainable. (Another option for our story – what my company does is literal shit. Again, a mean image that does nothing.)

Business is generally boring because it has no interest in creating stories, only value. What this means is that the only stories it creates are negative ones, created by mistake and scandal. A story is only ever a hit to the share price. Yet you believe the business or wider industry is doing something good, why should you write such stories or think them up? I like my job, and generally approve of my company’s direction. I spent six months where sustainability decisions were happening and not once did I catch a whiff of greenwashing. That’s not a story.

The general dearth of stories in my present professional existence is a bit of a bother to this budding writer. I hope this brief exploration of the pitfalls of using carbon credits to tell a certain type of story indicated the challenge I keep coming across when I try to turn my work into any kind of engaging story. Still, I have quite a long time left in the workforce, so I’ll keep thinking and see what other stories I may yet find in that place where I am obliged to spend most of my waking hours.