Hugin & Munin Journal

Earth has been warmer than it is now, and its climate changed long before humans began burning fossil fuels. That fact does not settle the modern climate question. It makes the question more precise: what is forcing the present warming, and what follows when the dominant disturbance is the transfer of carbon from geological deposits into the atmosphere? The answer leads to a stricter definition of net zero than political slogans usually provide. Net-zero CO₂ is a balance between human emissions and human removals, but not every way of closing that balance is equally credible. Forest restoration, source capture and atmospheric removal all have legitimate roles. Their usefulness depends on gross emissions first falling far enough for the remainder to become limited, identifiable and matched by storage that lasts. A credible carbon ledger therefore begins with subtraction. Avoid emissions where practical, capture difficult process emissions where appropriate, and reserve atmospheric r...

“Selling permission to pollute” is one of the most effective objections to carbon pricing because it sounds morally obvious. If emissions cause harm, why should anyone be allowed to pay and continue producing them? The objection has force, but it combines two different policy ideas. A fine normally follows the breach of a rule: an act was prohibited, a legal boundary was crossed, and a penalty follows. A carbon tax usually applies to activity that remains lawful. Its purpose is to change the price attached to that activity, not to declare that everyone paying it has committed an offence. This distinction prevents two opposite mistakes. Treating carbon pricing as punishment makes every remaining emission look like tolerated wrongdoing. Treating payment as absolution makes the tax resemble a fee for moral innocence. Neither interpretation fits an economy in which emissions are woven through heating, food, transport, electricity, construction, medicine, industry, and almost every othe...

Desert and sand are so closely joined in the popular imagination that the connection feels almost definitional: dunes, heat shimmer, bare sky, and a horizon made of grains. Yet deserts are defined by dryness, not by their surface material. Some are sandy, but many are dominated by gravel, exposed rock, salt flats, mountains, or hard-packed sediment. Antarctica is a desert too. Sand is no more exclusive to deserts than water is exclusive to oceans. It occurs on beaches, in riverbeds, beneath forests, across agricultural fields, and within ordinary soils. Explaining a sandy desert therefore requires two different answers: where the grains came from, and why they remain exposed or accumulate in that particular place. Aridity matters, but it is not enough. Dry conditions reduce vegetation and surface moisture, making loose sediment easier for wind to move. The sand itself still has to be produced, transported, sorted, and trapped. A dune field is the visible result of that whole sequen...

The most difficult climate negotiation is no longer only about whether human-caused warming is real. It is about development: countries that became wealthy through coal, oil, gas, steel, cement and mass electrification are now asking others to industrialise without following the same path. The atmospheric constraint is real . Repeating the fossil-intensive development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across the entire world would make climate stabilisation impossible. That scientific conclusion does not, by itself, constitute a political offer to countries still trying to expand electricity access, housing, transport, sanitation, cooling and industrial employment. The International Energy Agency estimated that 730 million people still lacked access to electricity in 2024 , with roughly eight in ten living in sub-Saharan Africa. For them, growth is not primarily private jets, fast fashion or oversized cars. It is refrigeration, clean cooking, reliable hospitals, sewage trea...

There is a comforting fiction at the centre of much modern tax politics: that public goods can be funded by someone else. Corporations should pay. Billionaires should pay. Employers should pay. Polluters should pay. Each slogan may contain a legitimate moral argument. Wealth is distributed unequally. Pollution imposes costs upon people who did not create it. Some profits come from monopoly, inheritance, control of scarce land or political privilege rather than fresh productive effort. The fiction begins when the legal recipient of the tax bill is treated as though it were standing outside the economy. Companies are owned by people, employ people, sell to people and invest on behalf of future production. Employer contributions form part of the cost of hiring. Taxes on property affect prices and returns. Carbon charges alter the cost of energy, transport and goods. None of this means that every tax is passed through completely or that redistribution is impossible. A corporate tax m...

The energy transition is moving quickly, but not cleanly. Wind and solar are expanding, their costs have fallen, and electricity grids are being reorganised around variable generation. At the same time, transmission, storage, firm capacity, industrial demand, permitting and system coordination are becoming harder constraints. The argument is no longer only about which technologies can produce low-carbon electricity. It is about which combinations can be built, financed and operated as a dependable system. Nuclear power keeps returning to that debate because it offers firm, low-carbon generation while bringing problems of its own: high capital costs, long construction schedules, waste, political resistance and demands on public trust. In an earlier essay on the energy transition as a system problem , I argued that generation technologies should be judged by the roles they perform together rather than by a contest of preferences. Breeder reactors push the same argument into a less comf...