This beautiful evening, I’m by the Medway river, near Rochester, Kent. There’s a little hospitality area near the road bridge and it has been absolutely polluted by big businesses. Concrete and thoughtlessness. I can never really understand why homogenisation sells, but I know it does. People feel safe, perhaps, in unchallenging surroundings.
I’ve been running a workshop today about the properties of gas. Tomorrow it’ll be a different one but one I’ve run before. There are volunteers from the company and today my volunteers were so robust it was wonderful. Both engineers, both young women. One of them is likely on the spectrum and absolutely loves her job. She would inspire ME to be an engineer, the way she talks about authenticity to yourself and why she loves her work. I am lucky to be working alongside her. The other is Slovenian and went to an army school. Her English is perfect with a touch of accent, and she also speaks brilliantly and inspiringly about what it is to work for this absolutely vast natural gas processing plant that is paying my bills. She’s baffled by the bad discipline in a very good school. Christ, I could take her into some of the places I’ve been to with the gangs etc
I’ve run workshops I don’t believe in before many times for very big clients. I’ve run bad workshops with enthusiasm for clients I clash with ethically. I have not yet drawn the line, I’m aware of it. I’m working for the man here within all my woolly ethical noises. Nobody has yet asked me to recruit young people to grow up to be journalists for the Daily Mail. “Have you considered propagating fear and division? Have I got a career for you!!” No. That would be a hard no.
I once turned down an audition for Wonga.com. Sometimes my ethics do get involved. But depressingly rarely. Tiny Tim needs his beefy yum yums.
This company and this workshop? I’m happy to punch my card. We need all sorts of solutions, we need big companies like this who know what it is they are working with and are trying to offset their carbon. I can’t speak for the motives at the very very top, but the people they employ care very deeply about the environmental impact of our hunger for electricity. They work with a contentious fuel, importing it. They know natural gas is a tricky optic. They are doing everything they can to offset. They are using their massive brains to try and do everything better. And they’re employing me for outreach.
“We could use our equipment to freeze CO² but there’s no market or use for liquid carbon dioxide. If there was to be someone who could find a beneficial use that somehow converted it to something harmless in the process…” Naiveté? Or progressive thinking? I like it though. You never know what might become possible.
Everything is driven by the market. Here we are in late stage capitalism.
Tidal snakes. They are too expensive to build. We don’t do things that would be good for us because nobody will foot the bill.
We’ve seen it time and again. Elon Musk could singlehandedly end world hunger. He has no intention of trying.
So the likes of me hang out by rivers and maybe one kid one time somewhere will turn out to be the next Elon and maybe my brush with her will help gently settle her on a different path where she gives a fuck about more than herself. Let’s hope. The future is yet to be written.
Or maybe I’ll just take the money and run eh eh? Eh?
I can’t. Sometimes I wish it was that simple for me.
AlBarclay 