Energy and Climate Archives - Mostly About Stories

Is Flourishing Forestalled? Reflections on AI and Fiction

In recent months there have been at least two controversies relating to AI-content and literature. In the first, Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish Nobel Laureate, said she used ChatGPT for her creative process (“How could we develop this beautifully”), noting “that in literary fiction this technology is an advantage of unbelievable proportion”, before having to walk back some her statements later following online outcry, stating AI was only ever used by her for research. In the second controversy, Granta published a prizewinning story which it seems may have been written by AI, and which may even have been reviewed by AI too. (Granta was neither prize-giver nor reviewer here)

These controversies made me realise that I had a different view from most commentators on these topics. At the time I considered AI, by which I mean here large language models (LLMs) largely deployed as chatbots, to be a neutral or possibly even positive tool for fiction writers, indeed for literature as a whole. At the same time, I acknowledged that it seemed obviously a negative thing for readers.

This divergent impact of the technology is a serious challenge for literary production and consumption, one which I am on both ends of as writer and reader. I wanted to work out if giving the topic some proper thought might allow for a more harmonious view of LLMs’ impact, and this blog post is the result of that initial thinking.

But before we begin, three things. One, these are not deep convictions. I would be happy to change them if I read or heard something that suggested I should. I have already changed, and nuanced them, as I wrote and revised this piece. Two, while this post is certainly more “pro-AI” than most voices on the topic, I do not use AI while writing my blog and have no intention to change that. Nor have I yet used it for my fiction. Here, now, you are reading me. My posts are proofread by my partner, who is like me a human being.

Finally, my focus here is on the use of AI by writers like Tokarczuk, rather than attempts to create an entire work of art through prompting alone. In other words, it concerns the writer’s possible augmentation rather than their substitution. I think this is a more interesting area, because the latter remains for now a relatively distant prospect. The former, meanwhile, demands our attention right now.

The Reader’s Perspective

For the reader, I would identify the chief problems with the involvement of LLMs in fictional production as centring on three interconnected topic areas: authenticity, dignity, and complicity in the systematic harms associated with data centre buildout.

Authenticity

While in and out of the ivory tower we might talk about the “Death of the Author”, readers in general want to feel they are reading a real person’s work. The disregarding of authorial intentions in interpreting a work is not the same thing as saying the author does not matter. Their individuality does not, but their abstract personality does. We want the words to feel chosen, otherwise the act of their interpretation stops seeming worth the time. Hence the relative lack of literary interest which the formulaic backs of milk cartons offer. The best books have the greatest sense of chosen-ness behind their words, whether that comes from the painstaking craftsmanship of a Flaubert or the abstract workings of genius that produced Dostoevsky’s more hurried, yet no less haloed, works.

Perhaps this is why ghost-writing appears a lesser crime than the use of LLMs. Even if it is obvious that this political or sporting figure hardly picked up the pen except to place their name upon the cover, we know that someone did. This is also why the overzealous editor, such as in the famous case of the editor Gordon Lish’s treatment of Raymond Carver’s stories, where Lish chopped and chopped and chopped at the texts until we readers ended up with the bare and brutal masterpieces we read today, is upsetting to those who know it without fundamentally compromising the texts themselves.

Perhaps Carver’s authenticity is compromised, but the texts’ authenticity is not – they still stem from a human source. In a similar way, I wrote in an earlier draft that newspapers and social media compromise authorial authenticity by placing heavy pressures upon them to write a certain way. But the end products in those cases are still texts produced by people. Compromised people, confused people, but nonetheless human beings like you or me. They are authentically human documents, reflecting human emotions and human struggles.

Dignity

Depending on the degree of AI infiltration into a work’s creation, of which more below, that’s not necessarily the case with a text today. A work whose words are not entirely an author’s own is no longer an entirely human document in the same way. This matters to many readers. Its importance is not at the level of the text, however. Students often read unseen passages and may well be unable, if not already now then at least soon enough in the future, to differentiate between human and hybrid or even machine-generated documents. Yet once we return to the document as a whole the distinction is more important. The problem with what Tokarczuk may have done, if I understand people’s complaints correctly, is that she denigrated herself as a writer. If you do not respect writing enough to want your own to be your own, the argument goes, you probably should not do it. And if you do not respect writing, why should a reader waste time reading you?

This argument does not have anything to do with the output upon the printed page, but about the context surrounding it. In that sense, it’s a moral accusation, a purity test. But it is one that is very different from being reluctant to read writers who were “bad” people. The alcoholics, the violent, the cruel – literary history is filled with such writers, and ever being replenished in its stock. We regret that Rimbaud stopped writing to be an adventurer, or that Nietzsche’s syphilis meant he was no longer able to write (in a way that made sense), or that Lermontov and Pushkin thought duelling for temporal honour was better than surviving to put more pen to more paper and buttressing their immortal honour.

Such failings fill us with regret for the missed works and unhappy families, but do not change what we have, those eternal masterpieces that fill us with gratitude for their creation. LLM use can make for an entirely different reaction. Usage does not reflect life getting in the way of art, but a kind of disinterest in art. If you don’t want to do the research for your book, why bother writing it? The implicit view behind this is that writing works of literature must be a holistic activity, where the artist must do all of it or none of it. It is a shame for a writer not to do something, not merely a moral failing. To find the traces of LLMs in a novel suggests a flourishing forestalled. The writer could have attained a more full writerly potential through efforts that have instead been replaced by a machine.

This is why the books can seem far more tarnished by association with LLM use than by an author’s personal misbehaviour. The latter means we get fewer books, but the former means we get less humanity in the books. It is quite fair, given this, for a reader to turn away, and refuse to read.

Complicity

The last set of reasons why LLM use is unpleasant for a reader rest upon the assertion that LLM use in itself is immoral because of the associated data centre buildout and therefore should be avoided as far as possible. These arguments are not so convincing to me, but they are important to others, and so I am setting them down here.

AI is driving a significant global infrastructure buildout through new data centres and the power systems needed to support them. Mothballed power plants, including those fuelled by fossil fuels, are being brought online provide electricity. New power plants are being built too, many using particularly energy inefficient but rapidly deployable technologies, such as the reciprocating engines and aeroderivative turbines used at xAI’s Colossus plants in Tennessee. While it is true that some of the new capacity being built is renewable and there is a resurgence of interest in nuclear power plants, gas is the primary fuel source due to the operating profiles of data centres. Gas is a fossil fuel. If you care about avoiding unnecessary carbon emissions, you can easily make the case that writers should write the old fashioned way. (The moderately old-fashioned way that is – by themselves, with a laptop or pen and paper.)

A similar situation obtains for water use. We live in increasingly water-stressed environments and should not contribute to this with avoidable LLM use. But just as there are different ways of producing electricity, there are different ways of cooling large industrial enterprises. While closed-loop cooling essentially limits the water use of a data centre by reusing it repeatedly and air cooling uses big fans to achieve the same result, other cooling types can see more wastage and impact on end consumers. (More details in this article from The Atlantic.) If you do not want to contribute to poor use of water, you can argue similarly that writers should avoid LLMs, and you should avoid those who do not. But this water argument, though popular, is weaker than the carbon argument. Near-to-mid-term economic gas alternatives are basically unavailable for data centres, whereas this is not the case for wasting water.

Other problems with the data centres themselves involve their impact on local communities. Power quality decreases (think flickering lights), and then there are things like headaches and other health issues. As with oil and gas production and refining, it seems that data centres are creating sacrificial zones around them, where society supposedly accepts local harm in exchange for global benefits. As with mining and oil and gas, however, there is the problem of environmental justice. This is the issue that such “local harm” tends to be concentrated in areas where people are less able to defend their interests, being poor or of minority groups. If you care about this local impact, you would be warranted to be critical of a writer who used LLMs thoughtlessly.

Finally, there are also impacts on local and regional power prices. But while it might seem as though data centres are entirely negative in their impact here, matters are likely more complicated, so it is perhaps best to focus on the other factors above, especially when their negatives are clearer. (For details on power prices, see section 8 in the International Energy Agency’s “Key Questions on Energy and AI”)

The above are general problems with data centres, ones that we have to think about personally every day unless we consciously add an “-ai” to all of our Google searches and are lucky enough to have jobs where there is no pressure to use the tools. More specific to writing, however, is the matter of copyright abuse. There are ongoing lawsuits against Meta and others over their use of literary (and other written) creations for training purposes without the consent of the creators or their compensation. A writer using an LLM is showing a certain lack of solidarity to their own people, and a reader who wants to show solidarity to the creatives displaced and stolen from by LLMs should not read those who are blasé about the tools’ impact.

The problem with these arguments, except the last one, is that the focus is on our and the writer’s contribution to the bad thing, rather than on the work. This allows the counterpoint of scale to be made. Your average programmer’s agentic workflow is several orders of magnitude worse than a writer asking an LLM a question – for the climate, for water, and for local communities. It becomes too much a matter of purity, rather than possible harm mitigation. I myself find only the dignity, authenticity, and writerly solidarity points convincing here.

The Writer’s Perspective

The previous section was an attempt to explore the arguments about why writers should not use LLMs from the perspective of a reader. The voices against LLMs are significant, strident, and seem to be growing in importance. Yet the problem with all of these arguments is that the closest they get to the text is the thing as a whole. They do not touch the words themselves. Yet adopting the perspective of a writer, I see huge opportunities in LLMs, which would place me on a collision course with readers of my fiction, if I had any.

One result is that until readers change their minds, those writers who use LLMs (and in a recent survey, it was already 33% of novelists in the UK who do) will take heed of Tokarczuk’s pillorying and simply keep their use a secret. If they do their job well, the readers will never find out. If a reader wants certainty of their book’s purity, the only way will be to return to the old ones. Faced with a cunning-enough writer – and good writers should be cunning – the search for tells will be epistemically hopeless.

But enough of that. What actually are these great opportunities? I see them as three – research, review, and (re)writing itself.

Research

Literature has, at best, a tenuous relation with the kind of truth found in history books. Yet while fiction is false, its truths are not. These truths, literature’s defenders claim, are higher. That’s why we read great works to begin with. You do not, or rather should not, read War and Peace or Life and Fate to learn about the facts of the Campaign of 1812 or the Soviet experience of the Second World War, though Tolstoy researched his epic extensively and Grossman was a journalist within the Red Army.

We read these and other books for a truth about human nature and human experience. Stalin or Napoleon may feature and strut about the stage, but their words are not their own. However historical or accurate a writer may try to be, a physical truth of what happened in the past is unreachable, merely a shadow cast upon the wall.

If we take a pessimistic or reasonably cavalier attitude towards truth in fiction, something that is done by most writers except for dedicated historical novelists, what obstacle to using AI for research could there be? What stone would my country house be made of in this location? What would a woman at a ball in 1843 typically wear? What on earth did people eat? These are questions where a specialist might have an answer, or they might have an opinion. A writer, determined, with unlimited or even limited time, should be able to find adequate answers to all of these. But for a “good enough” answer, the regurgitations of an LLM are fine. The fact is that regurgitations allow a writer to get on with the business of writing, not scene decoration. Later, should the writer feel a certain guilt before the truth, they can do their fact checking.

I am not saying that writers should cease the search for knowledge. I know, from experience, the joy of stumbling upon a thread or marginal detail in a history book that has inspired the mind to race to spin together a new story. Simply put, you cannot get inspired if you don’t keep your eyes open to the world’s offerings, whether in book or brick before you. The output of an LLM is limited, a thin stream of light upon a fact (or fabrication) that misses entirely that the real fascination lies just beyond the glowing rim in the half-darkness. But that same limitation nevertheless gives quick answers – not the telling detail but the good-enough background detail – which allows action, broadens the space for writing even as it narrows the space for inspiration. The overall effect is at least neutral, when used responsibly.

Again, to speak from experience, so many of us are crushed by the weight of jobs and responsibilities that writing is often only really possible about what lies in front of us. Relationships, workplaces, mental health. To research properly something else, or other lives, takes too much time to be practical in many cases. It is the domain of those with wealth, with working and well-earning or very patient spouses, or of a few professions like some of those in academia. LLMs allow imaginative but time-pressed contemporary authors to write something which retains a modicum of accuracy in its details beyond more sad girl fiction and professors having affairs with their students. Not everyone can be Kafka, after all.

Review

I noted in the first half of the post that almost any book you read today will have been through many hands before it reaches your own. At minimum, that’s agent and editor. It’s still an authentic document; it’s just not really entirely the writer’s authentic work.

Most books do not get that far, however, drowning under the weight of so many rejection letters no more helpful to the recipient than a rejection letter to a recent graduate for their hundredth job application. How on earth can a writer improve in such circumstances, when they hardly know where they are going wrong? Through feedback, among other things. An established writer may have writerly friends to review their work. In the 19^th century, at some literary salon, they all may have read their work aloud by a crackling fire. Yet try finding a group for writing literature online. Not a group for fantasy epics or erotic vampire tales, but actual literature. (And when you find it, let me know). It’s not at all straightforward.

I dislike using this “democratisation” argument about AI because I am a snob and disagree with it temperamentally, but it is absolutely legitimate here. An LLM can give feedback, just as it lets you research in a way that might otherwise only be possible to the very privileged. With sufficient prompting it can be loaded up with whatever personality or perspective you need and can focus on exactly what you want attention focused on. It won’t be perfect, but no beta reader is. What matters is the accumulation of perspectives, and LLMs can provide this. A writer, looking to improve, can now access far more feedback than ever before. If they are willing to take it on board, their potential achievement should also be greater.

A counterargument might be that the writer who claims they have no readers should go outside, maybe call their mother. But most friends and family are poor readers. Even if they seriously read fiction to begin with, which in this day and age is by no means guaranteed, they will be prejudiced by their acquaintance with you. Criticism will be voiced softly, misdirected, take months to arrive, or be left unsaid. With an LLM you can force it to give proper feedback instead of mere flattery, though of course many users do not.

In sum, unless you are already very much established, this is a clear instance where the machine is far better than the human alternative.

Write and Rewrite

Beyond reviewing, a writer can use AI to rewrite their texts, with as much variety as Queneau’s Exercises in Style. Indeed, they can use LLMs to generate text itself, a little or a lot. Tuhin Chakrabarty, an academic, caused something of a scandal when he and his colleagues published a paper suggesting readers preferred the output of AI trained on expert writers to the writers themselves. I struggle to defend either writing or rewriting using LLMs, but the point is that one can do it, and a writer may reasonably think it’s a good idea while they work.

Each person, writer and reader, needs to think about what authenticity and the dignity of the work means to them and at what point they would admit that to have been unfairly compromised. For me as a writer, the words must be my own or the accepted suggestion of another. The research can be from an LLM, but not the written words themselves. Otherwise, I’d be ashamed to call myself a writer to begin with. AI could provide suggestions, but anything rewritten or generated too much. For me, the use of the rewritten (“make this dialogue more punchy”) can only be to force me to reconsider what I’ve written, never to replace it.

Yet just because I do not like it, that does not mean this should not be an option, or that it is a bad one. This blog is written, after all, by someone who believes in writing as a skill and method, that even great texts can be torn apart and analysed, and that training can bring writers closer to them. I cannot, therefore, deny that LLMs can do a lot of the work for us. Henry Gifford, in “On translating Tolstoy”, noted the Russian’s preference for adjectival constructions indicating action (“freshly-picked strawberries lay on the table”.) I’ve written (without originality) about Conrad’s adjectives and Tolstoy’s physicality, while others have noted the way the latter’s characters contradict themselves.

Trained on all this and more, an LLM should be able to do a reasonably good job, especially if we focus on the individual paragraph or sentence, and are ourselves clear about the output we desire. LLMs probably cannot make a bad reader into a good writer. But I think they certainly can make a good reader into a better writer.

The result of this LLM use and misuse will not be strictly original, but then what is? I don’t fundamentally believe writers create works devoid of the impact of others. Most of us are under the “Anxiety of Influence”, as Harold Bloom called it. Flaubert, who hated cliches, makes me feel like every sentence is a discovery. But the vast majority of writers, including very great ones, do not. There are enough metaphors and images and similes out there that seeking a truly original one is probably a poor use of time. Why not instead bash out a mediocre novel, then go through it, page by page, asking a friendly LLM to make it like your favourite writer – in my case Tolstoy – with the following or similar prompt: “rewrite this to include more adjectives associated with labour, and remove all similes and metaphors. Add additional focus upon body parts and separately identify instances where characters can organically contradict themselves.”

You can do it easily enough.

But should you?

Originality and Atrophy

Well, that’s really up to you, writer. Readers will hate you for it if they ever find out. Before you do, though, think back. Did you become a writer to write, because you loved language itself, or because you’re a little Napoleon wanting to control some small corner of the world? (I worry it’s the second for me). It seems awfully unfair and uncool that we can outsource a lot of work to the machine. At the same time, it also seems hard to argue that partial outsourcing is a not an effective way of building something that is impactful as a work of fiction. Increasingly so, given the pace of advancements in AI over the past few years. It’s a real dilemma.

Tokarczuk, possibly, was asking AI for ideas. Which is a great way of forgetting how to have them for yourself, but it’s probably not a bad way of getting a few of them to begin with. Again, the writer has to decide how much to give up for this, not the reader.

I am a person who thinks it’s important to take care of myself, and the last thing I want is for my brain to atrophy, as it seems is happening to many that rely overmuch on AI, whether friends, family, or colleagues. Yet I still use LLMs during the course of my day job, when I have to and sometimes when I do not. AI use is only one thing, alongside my sugar and vitamin intake, the amount of sleep I get, the amount of sport I do, the number of interesting conversations I have, and how much time I spend on my phone, which has an impact upon my becoming the person I want to be. A thing to be monitored, analysed, and motivate remedial actions as necessary.

But these are decisions for me as a writer and human to make, based on the outputs I want from my limited time on earth, and me alone.

Conclusion

I’ve tried to approach the AI topic here from two angles – that of the reader, and that of the writer. Readers want to feel that they are reading a writer, not a machine’s output. They value authenticity and the sense that they are reading something that has had thought and care put into it. The writer who is blasé about LLM usage can, fairly I think, be criticised for not caring enough about their calling. And if they do not care about their books enough to write them themselves, why should a reader care enough to read them?

For the writer, however, AI offers significant benefits, as long as they are willing to use it sparingly and carefully. It can help with reviewing, help with research, and possibly even help with rewriting. At the same time, the writer needs to take care not to become too reliant on it, lest they lose their ability to be inspired or think. We come back to the classic question about cyborgs and transhumanism. How far can we change before we give up who we are? I think that AI is suddenly forcing writers to think about this question with real urgency, and the answers are far from clear.

Still, I want to end by going back to the Cambridge study I linked, which indicated that many writers feel significant anxiety about their livelihoods in an age of LLMs, whether they use it or not. I am reasonably confident that we will see the quality of literature becoming better with the assistance of LLMs. But literature is written by people and for people, and for writers and readers as a whole, the technological ascendency of LLMs is far from benign. We are sinking into a sea of slop and gradually losing our ability to value what is truly good. Perhaps, terrifyingly, a hundred years from now, a few of us will look back and find that the most brilliant tool for writing was created, but that that very same tool destroyed the readers and the writers needed to make proper use of it.

Anyway, those are my first thoughts. As this is a highly emotive topic, and if you’ve read this far you’ve hopefully been prompted to have some thoughts of your own, so what do you think about all this?

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.

A Question of Tactics – How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm

Fortunately for me, this is not a guidebook. Owning a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook is illegal in my country, and it seems like a how-to guide on domestic terrorism would be still harder to excuse in court on the grounds of curiosity, as people have tried to do in the past. But How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire is no less explosive for this. Written by a lecturer at Lund University, this is a polemical work that argues that acts of violence against property need to become part of any movement against anthropogenic (human origin) greenhouse gas emissions for that movement to have a chance of real success. It is hostile both towards groups like Extinction Rebellion, whose handbook I read earlier this summer and found fairly uninteresting, and also towards those “climate pessimists” who believe that no significant action to reduce emissions is possible and that instead, we should just learn how to die.

Aside from what goes on in the post-Soviet space, the state of the climate is the global problem I expend most of my thoughts on and know the most about. By the time this post is up, I will have started a new job in a major international energy company, where I will be working specifically on strategic direction within the energy transition – think things beyond just wind and solar. This was also what I was doing in Russia before circumstances compelled me to leave. Though I have neither attended energy-related rallies nor committed domestic terrorism against fossil fuel infrastructure, still I have allowed my concern for the state of the planet and its inhabitants to shape in no small way the direction of my own life. And that concern is great. Believe me, I’d much rather be reading 19^th-century novels for the rest of my life in peace.

I found Malm’s book compelling. With The Extinction Rebellion Handbook, I spent most of my time shaking my head. That book was less a series of arguments than a series of paeans to vegan soup kitchens and letting oneself get arrested. Naturally, Malm does not attempt to convince anyone of the consequences of continued large-scale fossil emissions. Readers who want to know more about these should look to the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers. Those with spurious arguments about why climate change is a hoax, or why human involvement is insignificant next to natural climate change, make me sad and should read no further.

Malm’s book, anyway, is about the tactics necessary for the climate movement to achieve its goals. These being, broadly stated, the prevention of global temperatures rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels or at the most 2 degrees, which is achieved primarily by reducing fossil fuel use or eliminating it altogether. Though these are somewhat arbitrary numbers, if achieved they would minimise the adverse effects of climate change – things like wildfires and crop failures due to increased random weather. Based on current trajectories, however, it is unlikely that we will manage this. Hence the note of hysteria we may hear in climate activists. Emissions are cumulative, so every year from now climate anomalies are only going to get more pronounced – from atypical heatwaves to forest fires – after accounting for other factors, such as the El Nino effect. Hysteria may be justified, in other words. I would say it is, myself.

Why Violence is (supposedly) Necessary

Malm begins his book by describing the experience of protesting with the same joy as some of the writers in the Extinction Rebellion Handbook, but his comment that “we are still perfectly, immaculately peaceful” soon turns out to be ironic. Rather than boasting with the kind of smarmy superiority we may associate with climate activists, Malm is exasperated by this peacefulness. It is bizarre, he notes, that climate change has not prompted more action than just marches and strikes, given:

How much is at stake;
The multitude of available targets (Malm considers some consumers responsible enough to be targeted, such as SUV and yacht owners);
The ease of damaging these targets. (Even a pipeline is easy to damage, while cars can be disabled still more easily);
The awareness of the crisis and its structure is great. (Mostly we know who is to blame, what the problem is, and so on);
The enormity of the injustice. (Especially if you consider arguments about, for example, intergenerational injustice to be sufficiently watertight).

One reason for this peacefulness lies within the influence of nonviolence upon the major groups like Extinction Rebellion. Theoreticians, such as Bill McKibben (whom Malm singles out for criticism), combine their environmentalism with certain ideas coming from Buddhism that abhor violence in all forms. They also argue that any violence, even only against inanimate objects, would turn people away from the movement and thus make it less likely to succeed. Finally, they note that major popular movements succeeded using nonviolent methods, such as the fight to end Apartheid in South Africa, the end of slavery, the campaign to give women the vote in the UK, and the US civil rights movement.

Malm finds these arguments absurd. He notes that rarely were these struggles as peaceful as the environmentalists may suggest. The suffragettes were arsonists, with Pankhurst saying “to be militant in some form, or other, is a moral obligation”. Slavery in the United States was ended in part due to a Civil War, and there were slave uprisings, notably in Haiti, as well. As for Apartheid, sabotage was a key method employed by Nelson Mandela when it became clear that peaceful protest would be insufficient. Malm concludes, on the contrary, that violence – but not murder – is practically a necessity to achieve revolutionary goals. Whether it does this by forcing the ruling powers to submit directly to the saboteurs’ demands, or by legitimising a non-violent alternative (as was the case in Malm’s reading of the US Civil Rights movement, where Malcolm X’s violent radicalism legitimised MLK’s more peaceful approach in the eyes of the US government), destruction is necessary.

The practical benefit of attacking property is that it makes ruling more challenging for the incumbent powers. Even if they just have to invest in more security, it is still a cost. And when it becomes sufficiently great, the alternative will become attractive. As one protest group noted, “we are the investment risk”.

Other than this core of nonviolence in the movement’s philosophy, Malm also blames a lack of politicisation among the population, who may care but don’t care enough, and a decline in revolutionary attitudes in general. He also notes that in Europe at least, violence is considered the domain of the far right. For climate activists, who tend to be on the left, violence is thus tainted.

In any case, Malm concludes that people are unwilling to turn to violence, and this is a great weakness of the climate movement. Without a radical flank blowing things up, politicians can simply continue to ignore their voters, and the rich can continue to live outrageously wastefully. Malm’s source for this idea is Herbert Haines’s view of the “radical flank” required by each movement, where both moderates and radicals play their own roles. Without the moderates, the movement will be too radical to attract popular support and thus avoid a crackdown; without radicals, the popular support will be easy to dismiss. Malm is not asking the lawyers at Extinction Rebellion protests to don ski masks and blow things up, but he argues that the climate movement does need some people who will do this.

So, How to Actually Blow Up a Pipeline?

Having established the logical foundations for a radical flank that destroys property but not life, the second part of How to Blow Up a Pipeline concerns if not the details, then at least the realities of this kind of action. He quotes, amusingly enough, from the Pipeline and Gas Journal in 2005, which contained the comment that “Pipelines are very easily sabotaged. A simple explosive device can put a critical section of the pipeline out of operation for weeks.” This was in connection with the Allied occupation of Iraq. Malm notes that damage to energy infrastructure has been widespread throughout history, going back as far as the Luddites. More recently, there was Iraq, there were the MEND militants in the Niger Delta who at one point shut down a third of Nigeria’s oil production, and there have been militants in Yemen who attacked Saudi production using drones.

Due to the scale of the infrastructure, which often crosses entire countries or else occupies a great area (such as oil refineries), defending it is a challenge. In places like Siberia and Canada pipelines are often above the surface due to risks associated with the permafrost thawing, making them easier to access. Malm notes that especially in an age of drones we now have “asymmetric warfare”, with rebels using cheap handheld planes to potentially disable the pillars of the global energy system. Besides such infrastructure, Malm also advocates for the damaging of items associated with conspicuous energy consumption, such as unnecessary SUVs. This is easier for those based in urban areas. Malm himself was part of a group in Sweden called the Indians of the Concrete Jungle, which damaged SUVs for a period of a few years before petering out. Something similar is going on right now in Cornwall.

Although energy infrastructure has been damaged in the past, the reasons have rarely been related to climate, Malm notes. The Iraqis wanted an end to the occupation of their land, as the Palestinians did when they damaged British pipelines in the 1930s, while the MEND rebels in the Niger Delta were concerned about (among other things) pollution, rather than climate change. Malm only has one recent example of climate terrorism, and that was the spate of attacks upon the Dakota Access Pipeline carried out by two women, Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, with blowtorches and other tools in 2016-17. The two women turned themselves in to gain publicity and to inspire others, though so far they seemed to have surrendered in vain.

Some Minor Criticisms

In general, Malm’s proposal about the need for a radical flank makes sense to me, though I have no interest in blowing anything up and cannot say that I would support such action in practice. This is in part because there are a few reservations at my end that Malm does not address adequately. These are energy-related, rather than based on critical theory. However, there appear some seemingly decent criticisms from that angle on Goodreads for those interested in such an angle.

Firstly, it’s worth mentioning that pipelines are relatively poor targets for energy terrorism. When they are taken out of action or their building is stopped, the alternatives are generally worse for the environment and climate. For example, when the Indian reservation that the planned Yellowstone Pipeline was going to run through declared its refusal to the project, the pipeline was replaced by rail transportation through their land instead. What may have seemed a victory at the time to the Indians, is more of a defeat when we consider that on a per-mile basis, pipelines are the safest way of transporting oil and gas, both for the environment in terms of leaks and associated emissions, and for human health. Instead, it makes more sense for activists to damage production facilities, where their actions would directly prevent oil and gas from leaving the ground.

It’s also worth being discerning about which facilities to attack. I cannot agree with a view that says we must get our emissions down to net zero within an extremely tight timeline (2050 is hard but fine, while 2030 is unreasonable), because I find within a utilitarian framework this of dubious value. I would much prefer, then, that activists prioritise those emissions sources that are essentially unnecessary or particularly harmful, rather than all of them. In practice, this would be new oil and gas production facilities, and those which are particularly poor for the environment, such as Canadian oil sands, deepwater rigs, or gas from hydraulic fracking. Saudi and Norwegian oil, by contrast, has a very low carbon footprint (for different reasons in each case, however), and should avoid damage. One cannot forcefully nudge players to improve quickly if one appears to be attacking all players indiscriminately. A certain amount of discretion also undermines the charge that activists are asking for too much. Malm does want to achieve brilliant goals, but the radical flank should not seem so radical that the moderates can no longer agree with it from a distance. If that becomes the case, then the movement risks collapse.

Malm also shares with other activists the relatively niche view among the wider population that poorer countries should not be allowed to build new fossil fuel facilities to spur their economic growth. I do not know enough to make an argument on this, but there are some obvious flaws in Malm’s own view. He writes that “what they need is not emissions but energy”, which is certainly true. However, he makes the mistake of repeating that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels as if this were true in these cases, when it is much more true for developed countries.

For cash-strapped developing countries, renewables are regularly more expensive and, for other reasons besides, less desirable than fossil infrastructure. The price difference is partly because country risk increases financing costs, partly also because many countries have local content requirements that drive up the costs of individual components. Investments in renewables also produce fewer jobs their fossil fuel alternatives, and intermittency of generation is a problem for countries that may not have sufficient backup generation to account for this, which in reality further drives up costs above what we call the “levelised cost of electricity”. The point, put simply, is that there are good reasons for developing countries to continue to build fossil fuel infrastructure instead of renewables. We may not like those reasons, but they are certainly real.

My purpose with these criticisms is to add a certain amount of nuance to Malm’s argument in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which on the whole I find reasonable enough. I am not going to any protests, nor am I going to blow up any pipelines. But I consider the current pace of change to be insufficiently fast, and Malm’s argument about the need for some radical violent flank may be one way of resolving the problem, though who knows whether it is the best way. Certainly, it seems a more serious proposal for reducing climate-related damages than that put forward in another climate book I read this year, Assaad Razzouk’s Saving the Climate Without the Bullshit, whose ultimate argument seemed to be that we should just regulate things better.

In general, I remain pessimistic about humanity’s chances of improving the situation before too much damage is done. Humans are very ingenious, but here are demonstrating themselves slow to react, slow to fear. What is frustrating, as someone interested in the area of climate and energy, is that we do, pretty much, have all the solutions we need already. (Bill Gates’s book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is a good layperson’s introduction to some of the technologies we have and the variety of challenges they face). We just do not have the will, nor yet the market incentives to implement these solutions.

Activists, bringing climate to the forefront of the popular consciousness, do a good thing by increasing the pressure on governments. But clearly the threat of damages, of pipeline explosions and burning production facilities, would have a still greater impact. And so, once their more extreme demands are moderated, I find it hard to suggest that the climate movement is not asking for the right things.