We're talking about carbon all wrong

Burning oil, gas, and coal — literal fossil fuels, made from the compressed remains of ancient plants and plankton — has released carbon into Earth’s atmosphere, where it traps heat and alters the climate. That process has caused massive destruction and loss of life, and it will continue to do so. As a result, carbon came to be seen as something to “fight,” “combat,” and “capture.” 

Paul Hawken, the author of the new book "Carbon: The Book of Life," argues that the climate movement is thinking about its work, and messaging, all wrong. “Those who call carbon a pollutant might want to lay down their word processor,” Hawken writes. Carbon, he notes, is after all the building block of life, the animating force behind trees, rhinos, eyelashes, hormones, bamboo, and so much more. Without it, Earth would just be a lonely, dead rock. So much for decarbonizing. 

Hawken has come to believe that treating carbon as something to tackle, liquefy, and pump into geological formations not only reflects the same mindset that caused climate change in the first place, but also further alienates people from the living world. There is no “climate crisis,” he argues, but a crisis of human thinking and behavior that’s degrading the soil, wiping out entire species, and changing the weather faster than people can adapt. “From a planetary view,” he writes in "Carbon," “the warming atmosphere is a response, an adjustment, a teaching.”