Chapter 11: The Uses of Not
“Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not is where it’s useful.
Cut doors and windows to make a room.
Where the room isn’t,
There’s room for you.
So the profit in what is
Is in the use of what isn’t.”
~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)
This inverted idea of emptiness—as useful rather than useless, as value rather than void—is often regarded as a nice lifestyle choice: a little feng shui, a little minimalism, a little simple joy of tidying up. Hardly a principle of macroeconomics. But it may be one of the necessary pillars of the carbon-based economy to come.
The inversion of our economic intuitions is the key to the economy of the future. What we see as full—the vast deposits of coal, oil, and gas underground—we must come to see as empty. What we see as empty—the sky—we must come to see as full.
If the economy is a play, the atmosphere—and the lithosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere—is the stage that makes the play possible. Climate change has broken the fourth wall; from here on out, every play must somehow incorporate the stage into its plot.
Countries that “do nothing”—that do not extract their fossil fuel-based natural resources—must be compensated for leaving it in the ground. Companies that remove carbon dioxide from the air or that make their business operations carbon negative by purchasing carbon credits must be handsomely incentivized to do so. Because we are about to run the industrial revolution in reverse, emptiness is the most valuable commodity.
It’s implied by what the wealthiest men in the world are chasing: space.
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