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  • The Ceremony: A Blueprint for the Future We Actually Want

    The Ceremony: A Blueprint for the Future We Actually Want

    *On the overview effect, DMT, and the non-catastrophic path to a solarpunk civilisation.*

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    "One thought ever at the fore—
    That at the Divine Ship, the World, breasting Time and Space,
    All peoples of the globe together sail, sail the same voyage, are bound to the same destination."     - Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892).


    *A thesis of speculative philosophy.*
    —

    There is a version of the future that does not require catastrophe first.

    It is not guaranteed. It is not even, given current trajectories, particularly probable. But it is possible in a way that matters – not as fantasy, but as a set of principles and practices already being tested in fragments all over the world. Getting there, however, requires something unprecedented: a civilisational shift in consciousness, achieved deliberately, before the alternative makes it unavoidable.

    This is an attempt to think seriously about what that shift might look like, and how it might be designed.

    —

    The Two Roads

    Gene Roddenberry was honest about it, even if *Star Trek* usually glossed over the details. The United Federation of Planets – that vision of humanity curious rather than acquisitive, diverse rather than tribal, oriented toward contribution rather than accumulation – does not emerge from gradual enlightened progress. It emerges from the Eugenics Wars, then the Atomic Horror. A period of such comprehensive devastation that the survivors were, in a sense, selected for and radicalised toward cooperation simply because the alternative had been made undeniably, inescapably visible.

    The uncomfortable truth embedded in Trek’s own mythology is that civilisations tend to change at the scale required only when the cost of *not* changing becomes viscerally, personally real.

    Climate change has a particularly cruel relationship with this dynamic. Most historical crises that produced genuine civilisational change had a quality of sharpness – a moment when the before and after were unmistakable. A war ends. A bomb drops. The catastrophe is legible. You can point to it and say: *that. Never again that.*

    Climate change is different in almost every way that makes collective response difficult. It is slow relative to a human attention span but fast relative to civilisational adaptation rate(s). The worst consequences are unevenly distributed – the people with the most power to act face the mildest early consequences, while those facing existential threat right now have the least leverage over global systems. It is causally diffuse; you cannot point to a hurricane and say *that specific molecule of CO2 from that specific decision caused this*. And it interacts with everything else – a climate-driven war wouldn’t announce itself as a climate war. It would look like a water war, a food war, a migration crisis, a failing state. The climate signal buried under layers of proximate causes, each one attracting its own political narrative and its own blame.

    This is a crisis specifically designed by its nature to defeat the cognitive and institutional tools humans have developed for responding to crises.

    The most plausible bad road isn’t a sudden nuclear exchange over abstract principles. It’s something more gradual and more total: sustained drought across multiple arable farmland bread-baskets simultaneously, food price shocks rippling into political instability, fragile states failing, refugee flows stressing receiving countries into their own crises, nationalist movements taking power in enough places to break the international cooperation that climate response requires – while the feedback loops continue regardless. Not one war but a long, grinding, multi-theatre catastrophe with no clear end because the underlying driver is still operating.

    This is not a fringe scenario. It sits somewhere in the central range of projections if current trajectories hold.

    And so the question that haunts any honest thinking about the future is whether the non-catastrophic road remains open, and if so, what would have to happen for humanity to take it.

    —

    A Thought Experiment

    Imagine two experiences, offered to every person on Earth within a few years of their twenty-first birthday, as a kind of global coming-of-age ceremony.

    The first is the overview effect.

    When astronauts see Earth from space for the first time, something happens to them that is remarkably consistent across individuals regardless of nationality, religion, or political belief. The planet below appears as it is – borderless, fragile, impossibly beautiful against the void. The tribal distinctions that seemed so urgent and so natural dissolve not through argument but through *seeing*. Edgar Mitchell described it as an instant global consciousness. Ron Garan called it the orbital perspective. What they all seem to be pointing at is the same thing: a felt understanding, not merely an intellectual one, that we share one home, that the lines are fictions, that the whole thing is at once vast and terrifyingly small.

    This experience doesn’t require going to space. The images exist. The testimony of hundreds of astronauts exists. Immersive technology has advanced to the point where something close to the cognitive shift can be induced in people who have never left the ground. The effect, when achieved, is neurologically consistent – it hits conservatives and progressives alike, the religious and the secular, the young and the old.

    The second experience is DMT.

    Or more precisely, a form of it – most likely ayahuasca, or an oral DMT formulation with an MAOI, to allow a longer window and the possibility of integration within the experience itself. Whatever the precise pharmacology, what researchers and participants consistently describe is: encounters with something that feels vastly larger than the self, a dissolution of the ego-boundary between self and world, a sense not of going somewhere new but of *returning* somewhere deeply familiar, and an aftermath of burning questions about the nature of consciousness and reality that can last years or a lifetime.

    DMT doesn’t produce a single unified experience – it’s notoriously personal – but there are statistical regularities in what people bring back: a felt sense of radical interconnection, a loosening of defensive ego structures, an expanded temporal horizon, a tendency to find other humans more fascinating and less threatening, and something that functions like a direct encounter with the fact of one’s own mortality and the inexplicable gift of being alive at all.

    The hypothesis of the thought experiment is this: if the overview effect is administered first – at, say, eighteen – and several months later the DMT ceremony follows, into a psyche already softened toward interconnection, the combination might produce something culturally unprecedented. A shared, ineffable reference point that almost everyone has but nobody can fully articulate. The thing that mystic traditions across all cultures have always pointed at – the experiential core beneath the dogma, the place where the boundaries of self turn out to be more permeable than advertised – made democratically available, not just to monks and shamans and the neurologically fortunate.

    What kind of world might that produce?

    —

    The Ceremony (Initial Ideas):

    Before speculating about the world it produces, the ceremony itself deserves serious design attention. Because how it’s done matters at least as much as whether it’s done – a badly designed mandatory ceremony would be an instrument of harm or worse, of control.

    A few non-negotiable principles first.

    The ceremony must serve the participant, not the state. The moment it becomes propaganda – even well-intentioned propaganda – it poisons the well. The design must actively resist co-option. Preparation is half the ceremony; psychedelic research consistently shows that expectation and context shape experience as much as the molecule itself. Integration is the other half – what happens in the months after is where transformation either takes root or dissipates. Most ceremonial design ignores this. It is the most important part. And the ceremony must feel like a gift, not a test – coercion and transcendence are enemies.

    The Preparation: Six Weeks

    The ceremony begins weeks before any medicine is taken.

    The first two weeks involve a gradual stepping-out from habitual life – a reduction in digital noise, attention to sleep and physical preparation, and a question given to carry rather than to answer: *What am I, beneath everything I’ve been told I am?*

    Weeks three and four involve experiential education in small groups deliberately mixed across class, background, and belief. Not lectures – genuine encounter. The actual story of the universe, told not as a science class but as a creation myth that happens to be true. Death education: real, unflinching engagement with mortality, drawn from Buddhist, Stoic, Pragmatic, Secular Humanist, and Indigenous traditions. The recognition that everyone in the room will ‘die’ (they will temporarily become detached from both id and ego, & their sense of self-hood), and that this is the precondition for taking life seriously. A breath-work session – holotropic breathing or similar – to give the participant their first taste of the altered-state terrain and surface anything that might need attention before the ceremony itself.

    Week five is a three-to-five day retreat at a dedicated site – ideally natural, human-scaled, beautiful, acoustically rich, with no clocks visible. Long periods of genuine silence. A one-on-one conversation with the guide whose only purpose is witnessing: *What are you carrying into this?* And something made by hand over these days – carved, woven, assembled – not for the object but for the making. It will come with the participant into the ceremony.

    The Ceremony: Two Nights, Three Days

    Night zero: not space itself, but the closest available analogue. A darkened dome. The participant lies on their back as an immersive recreation of the orbital view unfolds around them – not a video but something more total. Earth rotating below. Blackness above. Silence, then breathing, then the sound of the participant’s own heartbeat played back through the space. A guide speaks occasionally, not narrating but offering a phrase and leaving it to resonate: “There are no lines down there. Every war ever fought happened on that. You came from this. You will return to this…”


    Day one: a long walk, several hours, without phones or conversation for the first two hours. The instruction is simply to pay attention to what is actually here. In the afternoon, the group shares – not how they feel, but what they noticed that they usually walk past. In the evening, each person shares the object they made and says something about what it is. The first time in the ceremony the participant is truly witnessed by the group.

    Day two is the ceremony itself.

    The ceremonial space has been designed with care: warm, fragrant with something that will never be used outside this room (scent is the fastest route to associative memory – this smell will trigger recall of this room for the rest of the participant’s life), lit with candles or firelight, with live music – strings or voice, something organic and breathing.

    The guide speaks briefly before the medicine is administered. Not with hype, not with minimisation, but with plain precision: *You may encounter things that feel more real than anything you have encountered before. You may feel fear. You may feel joy beyond what you thought was possible. Both are welcome here. We will be with you throughout. You are safe.*

    The medicine is given individually, by the guide, with eye contact and a simple gesture. Not clinical, not theatrical. A moment of genuine recognition between two humans.

    During the experience, guides move quietly. Music continues, evolving – beginning with structure and gradually dissolving into something ambient and spacious as participants go deeper, then gently reassembling as they begin to return. No one is rushed. No one is intervened with unless in genuine distress.

    The return is not an end but a threshold. Warm drinks, simple food, rest. The ceremony space remains open through the night.

    That evening, when everyone has returned, the group gathers one last time. A fire if possible. The instruction: *You don’t have to say anything. But if something wants to be said, this is the place for it.*

    Day three is slow. Good food. Bodywork if wanted. One final group session looking not back but forward – not a plan, not goals, but an image: *What does the life you return to look like, in light of what happened here?*

    Before leaving, each participant receives two things: a letter they wrote to themselves during preparation, sealed and held until now; and the name of their integration companion – the person they will check in with monthly for the following year.

    Integration: One Year

    Monthly check-ins, not therapy but structured companionship with someone who has themselves been through the ceremony. A six-month gathering of the original group. At twelve months, a letter written to the person they were before and to a person who hasn’t yet gone through – both archived, some anonymised and shared with future cohorts as testimony.

    What the Ceremony Does Not Do

    Equally important: the ceremony contains no political content. None. No environmental message, no national identity, no ideology. It goes deliberately beneath the level at which politics operates. No prescribed interpretation – guides are trained to reflect questions back rather than answer them. No hierarchy of experience – the person who saw nothing but darkness for four hours is not a failure. No performance expected – transformation, if it comes, arrives in its own time, often sideways, months later, noticed in retrospect.

    And the governance of the ceremony itself must be constitutionally independent – ungovernable by any single state, corporation, or ideology. Built with radical transparency and an explicit adversarial function: a body whose sole job is to look for ways the ceremony is being corrupted and to say so loudly.

    The ceremony should, if well designed, produce people who are harder to manipulate – including by the ceremony itself.

    —

    The World It Makes

    What kind of civilisation emerges from a generation that has, at the threshold of adulthood, encountered both the overview perspective and the dissolution of ego?

    Consider what the Federation’s humans are actually like, when you look carefully. They are curious as a primary drive – not acquisitive. The hunger is to understand and encounter, not to own or dominate. They carry almost no xenophobia despite being surrounded by radical otherness – not as a moral achievement they’re constantly working at, but as something that has become natural. They are comfortable with uncertainty and mystery. They have a complex relationship with ego – ambition exists, conflict exists, but the defensive, fearful, zero-sum quality of ego has been largely metabolised. They find meaning through contribution rather than accumulation.

    These are, almost precisely, the consistent psychological outputs of well-integrated psychedelic experience and the overview effect. Roddenberry intuited something real.

    The ceremony wouldn’t produce the Federation immediately. But it might produce the generation that builds the generation that builds it.

    More specifically:

    **The dissolution of scarcity thinking** – not economic scarcity necessarily, but the psychological scarcity that makes people hoard, dominate, and fear. Both experiences tend to produce a felt sense of abundance at some fundamental level – not naively, but as a background orientation. The zero-sum game becomes harder to believe in viscerally.

    **Genuine curiosity about otherness** – after an experience that radically defamiliarises your own consciousness, other humans stop being threatening and start being fascinating. The demagogue’s playbook, which depends on enemy construction and dehumanisation, would find much harder soil.

    **A longer now** – both experiences tend to expand temporal perception. The present moment becomes richer and more real, and simultaneously the long arc of time becomes more personally felt. A civilisation that thinks in centuries, that plants trees it won’t sit under – that shift begins here.

    **Post-heroic courage** – the best characters in Trek are brave not from ego or ideology but from something quieter and more durable. A kind of settled-ness about mortality and meaning that the ceremony, at its best, can catalyse.

    None of this is guaranteed. The ceremony is not a conversion. It’s the best possible soil preparation. What grows still depends on the seed and the weather. Some people will integrate their experience into a framework of superiority rather than humility. Some will use transcendence to avoid engaging with the world – “everything is one” as a reason not to fight injustice. The design must anticipate this and build counter-pressures.

    But the capacity for the shift is already present in the species. It doesn’t need to be invented. It needs to be activated – at a scale and speed that has no historical precedent but is not, in principle, impossible.

    —

    Solarpunk: The Aesthetic of the World That Follows

    If the ceremony works on the interior – dissolving the psychological structures that make ecological destruction feel acceptable or inevitable – then solarpunk is what the exterior might look like when built by people with that different interior.

    Solarpunk is frequently misunderstood as simply green aesthetics: solar panels and vertical gardens and linen clothing. The aesthetic is real and matters. But underneath it are deeper commitments.

    Decentralisation as a value – not just of energy production but of decision-making, food production, knowledge, and care. Technology as appropriate and embedded – chosen carefully, with the question always being whether it serves life and community or extracts from them. High-tech and low-tech coexisting without hierarchy, because a mesh network and a seed library are equally sophisticated responses to real needs. The repair and maintenance ethic – the recognition that the most sustainable technology is the one you can fix yourself, that you understand, that connects you to material reality rather than abstracting you from it. Genuine pluralism – not a monoculture of linen and bicycles but a federated diversity of communities, approaches, and aesthetics, held together by shared values around care and ecological embeddedness. And joy as a political category – perhaps the most radical element – the insistence that the transition to a sustainable civilisation should be *desirable*, not merely necessary.

    Morning in a solarpunk city feels like a market town that has absorbed the best of urban density without the alienation. There is noise – the noise of people and birds and water and wind in photovoltaic canopies, not engines. Buildings are covered in things that grow: not as decoration but as food, insulation, habitat, air. The boundary between indoors and outdoors is genuinely porous.

    Food is local enough that you know, roughly, where it came from and who tended it. Not because of political commitment but because the system is designed so that this is simply true. Eating is understood as a relationship with land and season rather than a transaction.

    Work has been reorganised around contribution rather than employment. Automation has eliminated drudgery without the fruits being captured entirely by capital, because the governance structures – built by the post-ceremony generation – managed the transition differently than pure market logic would have. People work fewer hours in the sense of obligated toil and many more hours in the sense of purposeful making. The boundary between work and craft, work and care, work and art has blurred in ways that feel like freedom.

    Conflict still exists. Communities disagree. Resources are contested. People fail each other. But the register of conflict has changed – it tends to be about genuine competing goods rather than zero-sum domination. The tools for working through it are more sophisticated, more embedded in daily life, more practised.

    Children grow up with a completely different relationship to the natural world – not as background to human activity but as the medium in which human life is embedded. A generation that has caught insects, grown food, watched seasons, understood weather as the breath of the living system they’re part of – that generation doesn’t need to be convinced of ecological values. They are ecologically literate in a way that genuinely changes behaviour.

    And night in this city is darker than we’re used to. The light pollution has been dramatically reduced – partly for ecological reasons and partly because someone, at some point, made the political case that being able to see the stars is not a luxury. It is, in fact, precisely what the ceremony’s first movement was designed to invoke. A civilisation that can see the Milky Way from its cities is a civilisation that is regularly reminded of its context.

    —

    The Aesthetic as Ethics

    One of solarpunk’s deepest insights is that beauty is not frivolous – it is structural.

    Ugly environments produce alienated people. Disposable aesthetics produce disposable ethics. When nothing around you is made with care, it becomes harder to practise care. When everything is designed for efficiency over beauty, the message encoded in the built environment is that beauty is not worth the cost – and that message is absorbed below the level of argument.

    Solarpunk insists on beauty not as luxury but as moral infrastructure. The mosaic on the water recycling building, the hand-carved details on the community hall, the way the park was designed so that it’s glorious in February not just in July – these are not decorations. They are the environment continuously telling its inhabitants: *you are worth beauty. This place is worth care. The future is worth building well.*

    This is very close to what the ceremony is doing at the individual level – giving people a felt experience of being worth care, of being embedded in something worth cherishing. The solarpunk built environment is the ceremony’s values made permanent and public.

    —

    The Honest Difficulty

    The distance between here and there is real and should not be romanticised.

    The timing problem is perhaps the most painful. The ceremony works on the young – people at the threshold of adulthood. The cohort that goes through it in its first decade of operation is not the cohort currently making decisions about coal plants, deforestation, carbon pricing, and international climate agreements. Those decisions are being made right now by people in their fifties, sixties, seventies, shaped by entirely different formative experiences in a world with different stakes. The ceremony is a generational intervention. Its fruits come in thirty or forty years. Whether thirty or forty years is soon enough is not comfortable to sit with.

    There are genuine tensions within the solarpunk vision too. Decentralisation can produce parochialism. Community can produce conformity. The emphasis on local and craft can slide into exclusivity. And the infrastructure of the current world – physical, economic, psychological – has enormous inertia. The people who profit from that inertia are not going to release it gracefully. The transition, even in the optimistic version, involves loss, disruption, and genuine sacrifice.

    And the deepest tension: enforced transcendence may be a contradiction in terms. Both experiences tend to produce genuine freedom – freedom from the small, anxious, defended self. But mandating them introduces an element of control that might undercut exactly what makes them transformative. The Zen tradition has a phrase for forced enlightenment: it doesn’t exist.

    And yet. We already have mandatory education, mandatory military service in many countries, mandatory vaccines. We already shape citizens. The question is only *toward what*. This ceremony says: toward a direct encounter with the fact that you are small, temporary, connected, and inexplicably here.

    There are, perhaps, worse things to mandate.

    —

    What the Ceremony Is Really For

    The Federation’s humans didn’t get there through legislation or ideology. In Trek’s mythology it took First Contact – the shock of genuine otherness dissolving remaining tribalism almost overnight. The experience of suddenly knowing, viscerally, that you are not alone in the universe, that you are small, that you are part of something vast.

    The ceremony is trying to engineer that shift without requiring the catastrophe first. To give people the cognitive and emotional equivalent of First Contact – with the cosmos, with their own consciousness, with the radical contingency of being alive – while they’re still young and plastic enough to build their lives around what they encounter.

    What climate change demands of humanity is genuinely unprecedented: delayed gratification at civilisational scale; genuine identification with strangers across geography, culture, and time; systemic thinking over narrative thinking; willingness to be wrong and update quickly. These are not impossible human capacities. They exist. They show up in individuals, in communities, in moments of genuine crisis and solidarity. But they are not currently the default – they require effort, education, and usually some precipitating experience that makes them feel necessary.

    The overview effect and well-integrated psychedelic experience are, among the limited tools available, probably the most reliable known methods for installing these capacities as a default orientation rather than an effortful achievement.

    Which means the ceremony isn’t just a nice idea about human flourishing. It might be – or something like it might be – among the more serious proposals for whether the non-catastrophic path remains open at all.

    —

    Still Available

    The most realistic thing to hope the ceremony produces is not enlightened beings but people for whom the *attempt at goodness* feels natural and worth making. People who, when they fall short of their own ideals, recognise it as falling short rather than rationalising it as inevitable.

    That is, perhaps surprisingly, not far from where we already have access to. There are already young people – more than the headlines suggest, because conflict and outrage make better copy than patient construction – who seem to have arrived at something like this orientation without any ceremony. Who feel the planetary crisis personally. Who think in longer timescales. Who find tribalism not just wrong but boring. Who are building things quietly.

    The solarpunk future is less a destination to arrive at than a direction to move in. And movement in a direction, sustained and intelligent and honest about obstacles, is how all the futures that ever got built actually got built.

    The beautiful version – the one with the dark nights full of stars, and the buildings breathing with green, and the children who know where their food comes from, and the elders who are genuinely valued, and the work that feels like craft, and the conflicts that are about real competing goods rather than manufactured fear – that version is not guaranteed.

    But it is still available.

    And sometimes that is enough –

    Enough people, sufficiently awake to what is at stake and what is possible, who cannot quite bring themselves to let the beautiful version go.

    The ceremony, in the end, is just a way of making enough people that kind of awake.

    The rest, as it has always been, is up to us.

    Towards a brighter, healthier, compassionate future…

    *This essay emerged from a conversation about consciousness, ceremony, Star Trek, and the future we might still choose. It is an attempt to think seriously about non-catastrophic paths to civilisational change – and about the tools, both ancient and modern, that might help us find one.*

  • Jevons Paradox And Direct Air Capture

    Jevons Paradox And Direct Air Capture


    How an obscure Victorian economic observation might be one of the most important ideas in climate policy 🌍 – and what it would take to overcome it. 👩🏻‍🔬👩🏻‍🔧👩🏻‍💻🌍🧩

    Yet more, and more…

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    We tend to assume that doing something more efficiently is, by definition, a good thing. Use less energy per mile driven. Extract more crop per acre farmed. Capture more carbon per kilowatt-hour spent. Efficiency is progress. Efficiency is the goal.

    But there is a paradox lurking at the heart of this assumption — one identified not by a climate scientist or a systems theorist, but by a Victorian-era economist writing about coal in 1865. His name was William Stanley Jevons, and what he noticed then has never been more relevant than it is today, as the world begins to deploy one of its most ambitious technological bets against the climate crisis: direct air capture of greenhouse gases.

    Understanding Jevons paradox — what it is, why it happens, and crucially, how it might be overcome — is essential to understanding whether the technologies we’re placing so much hope in will actually save us, or quietly make things worse.



    Part One: The Paradox That Bears His Name

    William Stanley Jevons was watching the Industrial Revolution unfold around him when he noticed something that didn’t quite make sense. Engineers were getting dramatically better at building steam engines. Each new generation of engine extracted more work from the same amount of coal. By any intuitive measure, this should have meant that Britain’s appetite for coal would slow – or at least stop growing so fast. Instead, the opposite was happening. Coal consumption was exploding.

    Jevons realised why. When steam engines became more fuel-efficient, they became cheaper to run. And when they became cheaper to run, they became economical to deploy in more places, at greater scale, for more purposes. The efficiency gains didn’t reduce demand for coal — they *expanded* the universe of things it was worth using coal for. More mills. More ships. More railways. More factories. Each one burning coal that, without the efficiency improvement, would never have been burned at all.

    He published this observation in his 1865 book *The Coal Question*, and it has carried his name ever since.

    The mechanism at the heart of Jevons paradox is what economists call the **rebound effect**. It works at multiple levels simultaneously. At the most direct level, if your car becomes more fuel-efficient and costs less per mile to run, you might simply drive more — longer commutes, more weekend trips, perhaps a house farther from work than you would otherwise have chosen. That’s the direct rebound: the efficiency gain is partly consumed by increased use.

    At a second level, the money you save on fuel doesn’t vanish — you spend it on something else, and that something else has its own resource footprint. This is the indirect rebound. And at the broadest level, efficiency improvements ripple through the entire economy, enabling new industries, new behaviours, new patterns of consumption that collectively dwarf whatever savings the original efficiency gain was supposed to deliver. This is the economy-wide rebound, and it’s the most powerful of the three.

    The paradox has appeared throughout economic history. Airline fuel efficiency has improved dramatically over the past fifty years — and global aviation has grown by orders of magnitude, with total emissions rising steadily. LED lighting uses a fraction of the energy of incandescent bulbs — and buildings now contain far more light fittings than they once did, often running longer hours, with total electricity consumption for lighting barely changed in many countries. More efficient data centres helped power an explosion in data consumption that now makes the internet one of the world’s largest energy consumers.

    The pattern is remarkably consistent: efficiency lowers the cost of something, lower cost drives greater use, and greater use consumes more of the resource than the efficiency gain saved. The improvement in *intensity* is overwhelmed by growth in *scale*.

    Part Two: Enter Direct Air Capture

    Direct air capture — DAC — is one of the more audacious technologies humanity has ever attempted to scale. The basic idea is straightforward: giant machines that pull carbon dioxide directly from the ambient air, then either store it underground in geological formations or convert it into synthetic fuels or materials. Unlike carbon capture at the point of emission (a smokestack, say), DAC works on the atmosphere itself. In principle, it can undo historical emissions, not just prevent future ones.

    This matters enormously because the climate problem we now face isn’t just about stopping future emissions. We have already loaded the atmosphere with more CO₂ than is compatible with a stable climate. Even if every country met its current pledges — which most are not on track to do — we would still overshoot the warming targets set at Paris. The IPCC’s pathways to limiting warming to 1.5°C or 2°C almost all rely on removing billions of tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere in the second half of this century. DAC, alongside other approaches like enhanced rock weathering, soil carbon sequestration, and reforestation, is one of the tools expected to do that work.

    The technology works. Facilities already operate in Iceland, the United States, and elsewhere. The company Climeworks has built a plant in Iceland called Mammoth that can capture tens of thousands of tonnes of CO₂ per year and store it in basaltic rock, where it mineralises into stone within a couple of years. Costs have been falling.

    But today’s capacity is almost laughably small relative to the task. We need to reach **gigaton scale** — billions of tonnes of removal per year — by the middle of this century to meaningfully affect atmospheric concentrations. Current global DAC capacity is in the tens of thousands of tonnes annually. The gap between where we are and where we need to be is roughly five orders of magnitude. It is an engineering, economic, and political challenge of extraordinary proportions.

    And into this challenge walks Jevons, paradox in hand.

    Part Three: Five Ways the Paradox Threatens to Undermine DAC

    The relationship between Jevons paradox and direct air capture isn’t straightforward — it doesn’t map onto the classical template of fuel efficiency and consumption. But the underlying dynamic, efficiency enabling and encouraging greater resource use, appears in several distinct and troubling forms.

    The Moral Licensing Problem

    The first and perhaps most insidious risk is moral licensing. When a credible technological solution to a problem exists, people’s sense of urgency about that problem tends to diminish. We’ve already seen a version of this play out with carbon offsets. Corporations buy credits from tree-planting projects or methane capture schemes and use them to declare themselves “carbon neutral” — while continuing to operate fossil-fuel-intensive businesses more or less unchanged. The offset doesn’t reduce emissions; it *licenses* them.

    DAC, at scale, could trigger the same dynamic at a far greater magnitude. If governments, industries, and citizens come to believe that the carbon will be cleaned up later by machines, the political and social pressure to restructure economies away from fossil fuels will weaken. Why accept the disruption and cost of decarbonising heavy industry, aviation, or agriculture if the atmosphere can be remediated technologically? The efficiency of the cure becomes an argument against the urgency of prevention.

    Extending the Fossil Fuel Era

    A closely related risk is that cheap, scalable DAC could remove one of the central arguments for leaving fossil fuels in the ground. Today, climate advocates argue that the carbon budget is finite and shrinking — that every tonne burned now is a tonne that cannot be burned later. DAC complicates that arithmetic. If carbon can be removed from the atmosphere at reasonable cost, the fossil fuel industry gains a powerful counter-argument: burn now, capture later.

    This is not a hypothetical concern. Oil and gas companies have already begun investing in carbon capture technologies, in part because it offers them a credible narrative of continued operation alongside climate action. A more efficient DAC sector doesn’t just make capture cheaper — it makes the *case* for continued extraction stronger.

    The Energy Hunger of the Technology Itself

    DAC is extraordinarily energy-intensive. Current systems require somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 kilowatt-hours of energy per tonne of CO₂ captured. To put that in perspective, capturing a single tonne of CO₂ requires roughly the same energy as the average European household consumes in three to four months. Scaling to gigatons annually would require energy inputs comparable to significant fractions of today’s entire global electricity supply.

    If that energy comes from fossil fuels — even partially — DAC generates its own substantial emissions, potentially capturing one tonne of CO₂ while emitting nearly as much in the process. And here Jevons reasserts himself: as DAC becomes more energy-efficient, it becomes cheaper to operate at scale, which drives deployment, which drives total energy demand higher. The efficiency improvement in the capture process could, paradoxically, increase total energy consumption — and with it, total emissions — if the energy system hasn’t fully decarbonised.

    The ‘Technofix’ Displacement Effect

    There is a broader version of the rebound that operates at the level of political imagination. When a technological fix is available, it crowds out systemic solutions. The existence of DAC as a viable-seeming option makes it easier for politicians to avoid the harder, more disruptive, more politically costly work of restructuring economies. Why redesign cities around public transport when you can just capture the emissions from cars? Why transform agricultural systems when industrial carbon removal can offset the methane from livestock?

    This isn’t irrationality. It’s a predictable response to the availability of a less disruptive option. But it means that DAC’s efficiency as a removal technology could, paradoxically, slow the rate of change in the systems that generate emissions in the first place.

    Cheapening the Cost of Carbon:

    Finally, if DAC scales and generates a large supply of carbon credits, it risks driving down the price of carbon in trading markets. And a lower carbon price means it’s cheaper to emit. Cheaper emissions stimulate more activity in carbon-intensive sectors — more flights, more cement, more industrial production. The supply of removal credits becomes a subsidy for continued pollution, and total emissions may rise even as the capture industry grows.

    Part Four: The Stakes Are Different This Time

    Jevons paradox has played out many times throughout industrial history, and the consequences have generally been economic — more consumption, higher costs, depleted resources. Serious, but recoverable. Countries have adapted, innovated, found substitutes.

    With climate, the stakes are categorically different. Several of the tipping points that climate scientists have long warned about — the thresholds beyond which self-reinforcing feedbacks take over regardless of what humans do — appear to have already been crossed, or are being crossed now.

    The West Antarctic Ice Sheet’s long-term destabilisation is now considered effectively locked in at current warming levels. Even if atmospheric CO₂ were drawn back down, the dynamics already set in motion in that ice sheet are likely to play out over centuries. Greenland is losing ice at accelerating rates, contributing to sea level rise that will eventually reshape coastlines and displace hundreds of millions of people.

    Coral reef systems are collapsing at scale. The Great Barrier Reef has experienced repeated mass bleaching events that have killed large portions of the reef structure. At 1.5°C of global warming, which we are approaching, models suggest that 70–90% of the world’s coral reefs will be severely degraded. Above 2°C, the figure approaches 99%.

    In Siberia and northern Canada, permafrost – ground that has been frozen for thousands of years – is thawing. As it does, it releases methane and CO₂ that were locked inside, creating a feedback loop: warming thaws permafrost, which releases greenhouse gases, which cause further warming, which thaws more permafrost. This feedback was not fully captured in earlier IPCC models, and it represents a significant source of additional warming that operates largely independently of human emissions choices.

    This context is critical. It means that the goal of climate action is no longer simply to reach net-zero and stabilise the climate at current temperatures. It means we need to **draw atmospheric CO₂ down below current levels** – to achieve what scientists call net-negative emissions – to slow or partially reverse these dynamics. Many researchers argue that the target we should be aiming for is a return to roughly 350 parts per million of atmospheric CO₂, a level we passed in the late 1980s. We are currently above 420 ppm and rising.

    The Future is in our hands.


    The asymmetry of timescales makes Jevons paradox particularly dangerous in this context. With coal or electricity, a rebound in consumption can be corrected over years or decades as policy catches up. With climate, a rebound in emissions driven by DAC complacency could push the system further past tipping points in ways that are irreversible on any human timescale. There is no policy correction available for a collapsed ice sheet or an extinct coral ecosystem. The margin for error is essentially zero.

    Part Five: The Ideal Scenario – What Good Looks Like

    Against this backdrop, it’s worth asking: what does the best credible version of this future look like? Not the utopian version; the version where everything goes right by magic – but the scenario where all the serious counter-arguments to Jevons paradox are actually applied, where the policy architecture is right, and where the renewable energy transition continues at something like its current extraordinary pace.

    It turns out that such a scenario is technically coherent and physically possible. Here’s what it looks like, piece by piece.

    Renewables Provide the Energy Foundation:

    Solar energy has followed a learning curve that has beaten virtually every mainstream projection made over the past two decades. Costs have fallen by around 90% since 2010. Wind energy has followed a similar trajectory. Both technologies are now the cheapest source of new electricity generation in most of the world, and deployment is accelerating.

    In the ideal scenario, this trajectory continues and even steepens. By the mid-2030s, many regions of the world are generating surplus clean electricity during peak production periods — more power than the grid can immediately use. This surplus is currently wasted through a process called curtailment, where generating capacity is deliberately idled because the grid can’t absorb the output.

    DAC facilities, in this scenario, are designed and sited specifically to consume this surplus clean power. They run hardest when electricity is abundant and cheap, and throttle back when the grid is stressed. Rather than creating new demand for energy — and the emissions that might accompany it — DAC becomes a productive use of power that would otherwise be wasted. This essentially sidesteps the energy problem at the heart of Jevons paradox. The carbon intensity of each tonne of CO₂ captured falls toward zero, because the energy powering the capture comes from generators that would have been running anyway.

    This isn’t purely speculative. Regions including Texas, parts of Europe, and Chile are already experiencing significant curtailment as renewable capacity outpaces grid and storage development. The infrastructure challenge is real, but so is the opportunity.

    Emissions Caps Remain Binding and Are Tightened:

    The single most important policy mechanism for containing the Jevons rebound is a hard cap on emissions — one that does not move because DAC exists. In the ideal scenario, governments maintain legally binding emissions reduction schedules that decline regardless of how much carbon is being captured.

    DAC credits, in this framework, cannot be used by oil companies or airlines or steelmakers to offset emissions they could eliminate through structural change. They are reserved exclusively for genuinely hard-to-abate sectors: the small residual emissions from agriculture, from certain chemical processes, from aviation routes where electric aircraft aren’t yet viable. The cap on the rest of the economy remains fixed.

    This is the governance equivalent of building flood defences while simultaneously managing the river better. You need both, but the flood defences don’t give you permission to stop managing the river.

    A global or near-global carbon price, set high enough to make fossil fuels genuinely uncompetitive, reinforces this framework. Not a nudge — a structural shift. When carbon is priced at the level of its true social cost, the economics of the entire energy system change, and the market does much of the work of decarbonisation without requiring every decision to be made by regulators.

    DAC Is Governed as Remediation, Not Absolution:

    International governance frameworks — ideally through a strengthened and better-resourced UNFCCC or a dedicated new body — establish clear accounting rules that keep removal and reduction in separate columns.

    Carbon removed by DAC is tracked in transparent public registries, audited independently, and reported separately from emissions reductions. A country cannot count tonnes of DAC removal against its obligations to reduce emissions from power, transport, or industry. The two activities are parallel tracks, not substitutes for each other. This preserves the political and social pressure to decarbonise at source. Companies and governments that are cleaning up their own emissions receive the credit for doing so. Companies and governments that are using DAC as a fig leaf receive no such credit.

    This framing matters enormously for public trust. One of the risks of carbon markets is that they become opaque and gameable, generating cynicism that undermines the entire framework. Clear, simple, honest accounting — removal is removal, reduction is reduction, and neither substitutes for the other — is essential to maintaining legitimacy over the decades this will require.

    The Fossil Fuel Economy Unravels Structurally:

    In parallel with DAC deployment and renewable expansion, the fossil fuel economy reaches a point of structural decline, not just policy-induced suppression. Electric vehicles approach dominance in new car sales across major markets. Heat pumps largely replace gas boilers in the building stock of the developed world, with parallel transitions in the developing world supported by international finance. Green hydrogen and direct electrification penetrate heavy industry.

    At some point in the late 2030s or 2040s, the economics of new fossil fuel investment collapse not because carbon prices make it unprofitable, but because the demand trajectory is so clearly downward that the business case evaporates. Fields that would once have been worth developing are stranded assets before a barrel is pumped. The industry contracts not because it is beaten by regulation, but because it is displaced by a superior and cheaper alternative.

    In this context, DAC isn’t propping up fossil fuels by providing them with a cleanup narrative. The fuels are declining under their own economic momentum. DAC is instead cleaning up the accumulated legacy of two centuries of industrial emissions — a remediation project for a problem that is no longer being actively worsened.

    The Trajectory of Drawdown:

    If these conditions cohere, the broad shape of the future looks something like this.

    Through the 2020s and into the 2030s, global emissions peak and then fall sharply, driven by the renewable energy transition, the electrification of transport and heating, and the combination of policy pressure and market dynamics. DAC begins scaling during this period, initially as a niche technology powered by surplus renewable electricity, then as a growing industry as costs fall along a learning curve analogous to solar.

    By the late 2030s or early 2040s, the world approaches net-zero emissions. Atmospheric CO₂ concentrations stabilise. The tipping point dynamics that are already in motion continue to play out — ice continues to melt, permafrost continues to thaw — but the feedbacks that depend on continued warming begin to slow.

    Through the 2040s and 2050s, DAC at gigaton scale begins achieving genuinely net-negative outcomes. More carbon is being removed from the atmosphere each year than is being added to it. Atmospheric CO₂ concentrations begin, slowly, to fall.

    Over the following decades, sustained net-negative emissions bring CO₂ levels down from their peak — currently above 420 ppm — toward the 350 ppm that many scientists consider a safer long-term target. This process takes generations. But it is underway, and it is working.

    Part Six: What Remains Genuinely Hard

    Even in the best case, intellectual honesty requires acknowledging what doesn’t resolve cleanly.

    Tipping points that have already been triggered will continue to play out. There are lag times and feedback loops now in motion that no policy can immediately halt. Sea levels will continue to rise for centuries regardless of what happens to atmospheric CO₂ in the near term. Some ecosystems will not recover on any human timescale. The ideal scenario doesn’t undo the past; it limits how bad the future becomes.

    Political continuity over the 30–50 year timeframe required is historically very difficult to sustain. Every election cycle is a potential reversal. The institutions that need to maintain binding emissions caps and stable carbon prices need to do so across governments of radically different political complexions, across economic crises and geopolitical upheavals, for decades. That is a test that few human institutions have passed.

    Justice and equity raise questions that technology alone cannot answer. DAC is expensive, and the costs and benefits of its deployment will not fall evenly across the world. The countries most vulnerable to climate impacts — low-lying nations, tropical regions, communities already under stress — are often least able to fund or benefit from expensive carbon removal infrastructure. If the burden of paying for DAC falls on those least responsible for the problem, it will generate conflict, resentment, and political instability that could undermine the entire framework.

    And at true gigaton scale, DAC creates its own resource pressures. The sorbents and chemical processes involved require materials. Some designs consume significant quantities of water. The land and infrastructure required is substantial. Solving one resource problem at scale tends to create others, and careful accounting will be needed to ensure that the cure doesn’t generate hidden costs.

    Conclusion: A Question of Institutional Will

    The most striking thing about the ideal scenario described here is that none of it requires technologies that don’t exist, or physics that isn’t real. The renewable energy transition is already underway at remarkable speed. DAC technology works and is improving. The policy frameworks — carbon pricing, emissions caps, international accounting rules — are understood and in many cases partially implemented.

    What the ideal scenario requires, more than anything else, is **governance that is smarter than our historical average**. It requires maintaining the discipline to treat DAC as a remediation tool rather than a licence to emit. It requires the political courage to keep caps binding even when the costs of doing so are high. It requires the international cooperation to sustain a shared framework across decades of changing governments, shifting interests, and unforeseen crises.

    Jevons paradox is not a law of physics. It is a description of what happens in the *absence* of adequate governance — when efficiency improvements are allowed to run free in unregulated markets without countervailing constraints. The rebound is not inevitable; it is a policy failure. And policy failures are, at least in principle, correctable.

    The honest summary is this: we are in a race between the speed of technological progress and the adequacy of our institutions to govern that progress wisely. The renewable energy transition is giving us the energy foundation we need. DAC is giving us tools to address the overshoot we’ve already committed to. Whether those tools help us or become another entry in the long list of efficiency gains that made things worse is not a question of engineering. It is a question of whether we can build institutions capable of constraining our own worst tendencies over the timescale that the planet requires.

    The paradox Jevons identified a hundred and sixty years ago, watching coal burn in Victorian England, turns out to be one of the central challenges of the twenty-first century. We know what it is. We know how it works. We even know, in broad terms, how to overcome it.

    The question is whether we will, and the monumental global effort that it will surely require.

    For the good of all on planet Earth, and the continuity of viable human civilisation into the 22nd century, and beyond. 🌍🧩


    *Further reading: Jevons, W.S. (1865), The Coal Question; IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (2021–2022); Fajardy, M. & Mac Dowell, N. (2017), “Can BECCS deliver sustainable and resource efficient negative emissions?”, Energy & Environmental Science.*

  • Dequestration Explained: GHG’s & You.

    Dequestration Explained: GHG’s & You.

    What exactly is ‘dequestration’?

    And our 2025/2026 Prospectus for Investor(s) & Interested Stakeholders.

    Copying from the sun’s bag of tricks…

    admin

    (c) Cydonis 2025

    ➡️⚛️🌍 www.cydonis.co.uk/blog/2025/07…Dequestration as part of a hybrid power solution mix is NOT optional; it is essential to our current civilisation and way of life, and for it to continue to function past ~2050 > onwards. For the UK to meet even our current GHG deficit, we need 3x more 🌳 land.🟩

    — Amolain (@cydonis.co.uk) 2025-08-16T00:25:17.807Z

    Project: Ratatosk IS that solution; ready and raring to go.cydonis.co.uk/All that we lack is the investment, interest, and public/political will. Past 2030, there will be no reversal from an encroaching climate *red-line*🌍🔥🆘 which no matter the tech or intervention, there is NO coming back from.🌍🔥

    — Amolain (@cydonis.co.uk) 2025-08-16T00:30:51.141Z
  • Clearing the Air: A Beginner’s Guide to Direct Air Capture.

    Clearing the Air: A Beginner’s Guide to Direct Air Capture.

    By Cydonis Heavy Industries.

    Climate change is one of the biggest challenges we face, and a big part of that challenge is the excess carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere. While reducing emissions is crucial, what about the CO2 that’s already there? That’s where Direct Air Capture (DAC) comes in.

    Think of DAC as a giant vacuum cleaner for the sky, sucking CO2 directly out of the ambient air. It’s a technology that’s gaining attention as a potential tool to help us combat climate change. But what exactly is it, and what does it mean for industries like yours?

    The Upside: Why DAC is Promising

    Direct Air Capture offers several compelling benefits:

    • Removing Past Emissions: Unlike technologies that capture emissions at the source (like a factory smokestack), DAC can remove CO2 that has been accumulating in the atmosphere for years. This makes it a unique tool for tackling “legacy” emissions.
    • Location Flexibility: DAC plants can theoretically be built almost anywhere there’s a power source and a place to store or use the captured CO2. This is a big advantage over solutions tied to specific geographies.
    • Measurable & Verifiable: The amount of CO2 captured by DAC is directly measurable and can be verified, which is important for carbon accounting and markets.
    • Potential for Permanent Removal: When combined with geological storage (where CO2 is injected deep underground and mineralises into rock), DAC can offer a permanent way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
    • Scalability: While still in its early stages, DAC technology has the potential to be scaled up to remove significant amounts of CO2.
    • A Source of CO2: Captured CO2 isn’t just waste. It can be used as a raw material for various products, including synthetic fuels (e-fuels), building materials, and in industries like food and beverage.

    The Hurdles: Downsides & Technological Limitations

    Despite its promise, DAC faces significant challenges:

    • High Cost: Currently, capturing CO2 from the air is expensive. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is very low (around 0.04%), so moving vast amounts of air and separating the CO2 requires a lot of energy and sophisticated technology.
    • Energy Intensive: DAC processes require substantial energy. For DAC to be truly beneficial for the climate, this energy must come from low-carbon or renewable sources. If fossil fuels are used, it could negate the climate benefits.
    • Technological Maturity & Scale: DAC is still a relatively young technology. While there are operational pilot and demonstration plants, widespread, large-scale deployment is still some way off. Significant innovation and investment are needed to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
    • Land Use: Large-scale DAC facilities will require land, though generally less than some nature-based solutions for equivalent carbon removal.
    • Storage Security: Ensuring that captured CO2, if stored geologically, remains permanently locked away is crucial. This requires careful site selection and monitoring.
    • Moral Hazard Concerns: Some critics worry that focusing on DAC could distract from the urgent need to reduce emissions at their source, potentially giving polluting industries a perceived license to continue emitting.

    Who’s Leading the Way? Key Players in DAC.

    Several companies are pioneering DAC technology research and development. Some of the major names include:

    • Climeworks (Switzerland): Known for its modular DAC systems and projects like “Orca” and “Mammoth” in Iceland, which store CO2 geologically.
    • Carbon Engineering (Canada, acquired by Occidental Petroleum): Developing large-scale DAC technology, often with a view to using captured CO2 for synthetic fuels or permanent sequestration.
    • Global Thermostat (USA): Focuses on DAC solutions that can be integrated with industrial processes or powered by waste heat.
    • Heirloom Carbon Technologies (USA): Developing a process that uses minerals to pull CO2 from the air, aiming for lower costs.
    • 1PointFive (USA, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum): Focused on commercializing DAC technology, including building large-scale DAC plants.
    • Verdox (USA): Working on an electrically driven DAC system aimed at improving energy efficiency.

    Cydonis Heavy Industries, Ltd. & The DAC Opportunity

    For a company like Cydonis Heavy Industries, Ltd., the rise of DAC presents several potential avenues for engagement and benefit:

    1. Strategic Partnerships & Investment:
      • Collaborate with DAC technology developers or project implementers. This could involve direct investment, joint ventures, or providing industrial expertise for scaling up DAC facilities.
      • If Cydonis has access to low-cost renewable energy or waste heat, it could partner to power DAC operations, reducing a key cost component for DAC companies.
    1. Carbon Credit Trading & Offsetting:
      • Purchasing High-Quality Credits: As pressure mounts for companies to decarbonize, Cydonis can purchase carbon removal credits generated by DAC projects to offset its own hard-to-abate emissions. DAC credits are often considered high-quality due to their permanence and measurability.
      • Investing in Credit-Generating Projects: By investing in or co-developing DAC projects, Cydonis could secure a future supply of carbon credits or even become a seller of these credits in the growing voluntary carbon market, potentially creating a new revenue stream.
    2. Supply Chain & Infrastructure Development:
      • Heavy industries often have expertise in large-scale engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC), as well as manufacturing complex components. This expertise could be valuable in building and deploying DAC plants.
      • Cydonis could explore opportunities in developing or supplying specialized materials or equipment needed for DAC systems. The possibility of capturing other GHG’s (greenhouse gases, such as methane) for device feedstock also exists, (though our preliminary goal will be just CO2 as a starting point).
    3. Utilizing Captured CO2:
      • Depending on Cydonis’s specific industrial processes, there might be opportunities to utilize captured CO2 as a feedstock.
    4. Enhancing Corporate Sustainability & Reputation:
      • Engaging with DAC technology can significantly enhance Cydonis’s environmental credentials and demonstrate a proactive approach to climate change, appealing to investors, customers, and employees.
    5. Pioneering CO2 Disposal and Energy Regeneration (A Cydonis Specialty):
      • Beyond conventional storage or utilization, Cydonis Heavy Industries, Ltd. is at the forefront of developing a revolutionary approach to carbon management. We are working on a patent-pending technology (details available under a Non-Disclosure Agreement) that utilizes a controlled nuclear fusion/micro-singularity process. This device is designed to take captured CO2, processed into large cylindrical pellets, and effectively annihilate it.
      • This groundbreaking technology offers a potential game-changer for the DAC industry by providing a novel and potentially highly efficient way to deal with the “waste” CO2 captured by DAC companies, moving beyond long-term storage concerns for a portion of captured carbon.
      • Furthermore, the process is designed to be regenerative. The significant waste heat generated by the device could be harnessed to drive steam turbines for electricity generation or be used for district heating, creating a closed-loop system that not only disposes of CO2 but also produces valuable energy. This positions Cydonis as a potential key partner for DAC facilities looking for innovative and comprehensive carbon management solutions.

    The Path Forward

    Direct Air Capture is not a silver bullet for climate change, but it’s a promising technology that can play an important role alongside aggressive emissions reductions. For forward-thinking companies like Cydonis Heavy Industries, Ltd., understanding and strategically engaging with the DAC sector now—especially with innovative, proprietary solutions—could offer both environmental benefits and significant long-term competitive advantages. Exploring partnerships, understanding the carbon markets, and identifying synergies with existing operations are key first steps.