By Percy Chen, Junior Project Manager Art-Science
On May 21, 2020, we hosted our 17th Café des Sciences webinar titled The New Carbon Consciousness. Ms. Karolina Sobecka went in-depth on the concept of “carbon”, carbon circulation in different forms, and what we as ordinary citizens can do to alleviate the current climate issues.
We trust that everyone has acquired informative insights on the topic. Due to the time constraint, we could only present a limited number of questions. If you have further questions for our speakers regarding design and materials science, please email us at artscience@swissnexchina.org. We will try our best to forward them to the speakers.
The webinar recording is available to view and download here.
Left: Karolina Sobecka; Right: Percy Chen
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Here are some key event takeaways that we would like to share with you.
From Ms. Karolina Sobecka’s speech (starts at 3:56 in the recording):
Karolina is a researcher on the Swiss National Science Foundation project Cycles of Circulation project at Critical Media Lab Basel.
Cycles of Circulation is a four years project that focuses on presenting Ecology through climate governance lenses and creative practices.
Cycles of Circulation starts with ambient air capture, essentially extracting carbon dioxide from the air and turn liquid carbon dioxide into fertilizers.
Through simulations of our current ecological and sustainability practices, scientists do not see a way to bridge the gap between what the world can achieve and the kind of reduction we need in order to stay under the global warming threshold (2 degrees Celsius). Therefore, the emerging CO2 capture/removal technologies have been deemed necessary by scientific assessments to play this vital role and fill in the gap. And as a result, a new industry has been created to utilize the captured CO2 products.
What is carbon and what is a carbon cycle?
Just like how we think about “nature”, we understand “carbon” through metaphors - it is something we do not see in the world, an idea that has to be constructed in some way. It follows that carbon consciousness ought to be a collectively held idea that entails a new mentality of modalities such as sensory perception, memory, and thinking. More importantly carbon consciousness carries value judgements of what is good and what is moral.
How we define the problem influences how we find the solution. For example, if we define climate change as an unfair distributions of carbon, then we want to find a technical solution to displace carbon from one place to another. On the other hand, if we define climate change as a result of the fossil fuel economy, then we ought to focus on a solution that works the social-political aspect of the fossil fuel industries.
Around 1920, CO2 was viewed as a benign substance that could be used as fertilizers. Nowadays, the connotation changes drastically. Measuring how much CO2 content in the air is a job for science whereas what we define good and bad is a job for society and us.
Being carbon conscious entails being environmentally conscious – behavior driven by environmental concerns - but there is an added element of the concern for carbon.
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From the Q&A session (46:00):
We cannot think about carbon without thinking about the products of carbon, such as diamonds and pencils.
Chinese philosophy and culture have traditionally put a lot of emphasis on “nature”. For example, in Taoism, the concept of “Chi”/“Qi”/“Ki” (气) is a mysterious life force that animates the universe, the force that sets the world and everything into motion. Additionally, Chinese have always used diction that contain elements of nature. Chinese emperors addressed their land and people as “Under the sky” (天下).
That being said, with the advent of industrialization and later globalization, the position of nature has shifted in the global discourse. Whereas in the past we considered ourselves to be protected by the sacred nature, nowadays we view nature as resources and currencies that are there for us to exploit.
The current world situation and stay at home policies have made many realize just how much waste they produce every day and week.
However, the trendy lifestyles to go zero waste and zero plastic have very limited impacts on individual levels. One can save all the plastic bottles he or she wants, but they are already produced. The luxury wear brand Burberry, for instance, discards all of its unsold commodities annually, wasting all the materials and manufacturing resources in the process.
Percy during the Q&A session
The team behind the webinar: Cissy Sun on the left and Florian Moeri on the right.
In the end, we would like to express our great appreciation to Ms. Karolina Sobecka for sharing her valuable, expert insights. We would also like to thank our community for your great engagement as always! Please stay tuned for our next event!