Net Zero
Once, there was a gang of friends who all went to school together. They lived in the same neighbourhood, one of the nicer ones, and they all hung out at each other’s houses after school and spent their weekends together.
Their parents were friends and had dinner parties, barbecues, and pool parties in the summer. They worked in marketing, tech, law and academia. Although not quite the crème de la crème, they were in the top one or two percent – able to afford luxuries while most people had none. They drove electric cars, wore smart tech and optimised their and their children's lifestyles. Everyone ate kale with salmon and quinoa and shared the latest neuroscience behind childhood development. They believed wholeheartedly in net zero and the green economy. They put up banners in their windows supporting windfarms. They changed energy companies as well as their company pensions, choosing options with carbon neutral or even carbon offsetting portfolios.
The kids learned about the devastating consequences of climate change at school and were encouraged by their teachers to go on marches and write to their MP. The kids loved it. It was fun dressing up like hippies and yelling at police. It felt good after having no conflict in their lives to bring a little danger into the arena, playing cat and mouse with cops, blocking motorways and throwing paint on statues of princesses and kings.
Most of them spent a hot, fun summer doing it then frittered away into other kinds of hobbies. A few of them stayed, however, having found their vocation. They couldn’t understand how their friends played basketball while glaciers were melting and the future of humanity hung in the scales.
The hard core of the hardcores, 2 girls and 2 boys retreated into a tight little posse. They only hung out at each other’s houses and messaged each other on Discord. That’s where they met other radicals, rebels and free thinkers. Other people who'd woken up to the facts and had the courage to stand up and do something about it. They compared themselves to Che, the Navajo and the Mujahideen. They read the latest climate science as well as bin Laden’s Letter to the American People. They watched with raised fists and tears in their eyes as comrades got locked up around the world for spreading the truth. Dozens then hundreds and thousands were silenced for holding the powerful to account for their crimes.
Marching, lobbying, acts of civil disobedience – all to no effect. Politicians were in the pockets of big industry or simply outsourced the problem to countries on the other side of the world, hoping people would forget and move on. And what with the war, recession and outbreak, the friends watched their agenda drop lower and lower on the 6 o'clock news. Then it started getting left out altogether and that, they couldn't abide. Even though it was only the four of them and they weren’t even old enough to vote yet, they knew how disruptive a few willing hands could actually be.
Their first act would remain one of their favourites for its simple audacity. Four screwdrivers and 8 hours was all it took to cripple 1200 SUVs across the city. Slashing tires and smashing reversing cameras = 6,000 metric tons of carbon off the streets.
But that wasn't enough. Tires could be replaced. Cameras swapped out. Combustion engines back on the road. So next time, they went to the airport. Bigger engines = bigger carbon rewards. They figured out how to make TNT and blew up the main runway at the country's third largest airport. Three hundred flights grounded = 1.1 million metric tons of carbon out of the atmosphere. Sure, one of the boys got arrested and two army guys were killed dismantling an unexploded device but you can't make an omelette without – you know what I mean? And anyway, screw the army, those shaved-headed merchants of death.
Their third act was the one that really made waves. They never understood was why the internet got such a free pass. Sure, every search you make mightn’t take up that much energy. But as Stalin said, ‘Quantity has a quality all its own,’ and billions if not trillions of searches a day = 40 billion metric tons of carbon per year = 4% of total global greenhouse emissions. And no one blinked an eye.
So they took some kamikaze drones and FPV’d them into the cooling vents of the largest floating data farm off the west coast of Scotland. They filmed the explosion on their parents’ vintage camcorders and mailed the videotapes to legacy news HQs. From the presenters’ excited voices, scratchy as they were on the old satellite TV, the kids knew they’d just done something big.