To our astonishment, shortly before our vacation MSN shared a story from “News 18” that “Scientists Create ‘Living’ Material That Sucks Carbon Dioxide From The Air”. We were going to put it in our “Say What” box with the retort “Oh yes? And did they call it ‘wood’?” But then it dawned on us that this display of scientific ignorance in the press deserved rather more extended ridicule. The actual invention may or may not be cool. (Apparently it involves algae.) But the lack of understanding by people paid to inform the public is anything but.

The News 18 piece enthuses that:

“This innovative substance is created using blue-green algae (cyanobacteria), which convert CO₂ into oxygen and sugars through photosynthesis. Under specific nutrient conditions, it can also turn CO₂ into sturdy, eco-friendly construction components and solid minerals such as limestone, providing permanent carbon storage while strengthening the material. This breakthrough could revolutionise how we build our cities, making structures that help fight climate change while standing strong.”

Yay us. Boo “could”. But if we grant for purposes of argument that someone has found a way to make construction material from carbon dioxide using photosynthesis, a key question remains unanswered. Is it, like so much alternative energy and related things, actually a step forward, or just a less efficient way of doing things we already do?

There’s a German word Machbarkeit which means “Here ve do not play Skrabble”. No, sorry. It means the conviction that anything that arises naturally, from the biosphere or spontaneous human cooperation, can be done better by deliberate technocratic expertise. The sort of thing savagely lampooned by C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength in the form of the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (NICE), an acronym that speaking of ignorance was adopted in the UK when a leading government body assumed new responsibilities for social engineering. At least we hope it was ignorance, though it is a fact that after reading Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the head of the East German secret policy deliberately had his office renumbered as Room 101. But we digress.

Or not, because this habit of thinking that you need, say, a life coach or a professional to teach your kid to ride a bike readily extends to the assumption that whatever came out of a lab, including meat, must be better than what grew on some dirty old cow. And hence that this new carbon-eating “innovative substance” must beat the heck out of wood or cement because the latter evolved by trial and error and the former by evolution, followed by trial and error in human construction of furniture and houses and bridges. Have they not read Frankenstein? Or did they miss the point?

You even find this kind of assumption in a news story like:

“The federal government is providing over $100 million to help return unproductive Alberta farmland to its original forested state. Corey Hogan, parliamentary secretary to Canada’s natural resources minister, says the cash is part of the $3.2 billion 2 Billion Trees program and the reforestation will help capture carbon and reduce greenhouse gases. The goal is to support provinces, territories and third-party organizations in planting two billion trees across Canada by 2031. Hogan says cleared farmland will be turned back into thriving forests, providing employment to Indigenous women and youth, and providing economic benefits.”

What’s extraordinary is that the journalist apparently had no more suspicion than the politician, and with less credit-for-handout incentive, that the best entity for planting trees is not the bloated modern state but another tree. It’s a remarkable mindset especially given the evidence. The Canadian government has an exceptional gift for soothing blather that bundles together woke causes. But how often have they promised a thriving this and an Indigenous that and an economic other and left only a big fiscal hole? These are not people you’d want changing a tire let alone a landscape.

Indeed, on this specific file the Canadian government has already demonstrated to many people’s satisfaction that it cannot plant trees, which doesn’t seem that hard especially in the True North Strong and Tree as opposed to, say, Yemen or Mauritania. But here at CDN we’d be happy for a fraction of that $100 million, let alone $3.2 billion, to devise a comprehensive program for returning “unproductive Alberta farmland to its original forested state”. Namely stop farming it. Let the trees grow naturally, as they did in, uh, its “original forested state”. Thank you. Send us the cash here.