I’m a bit like Sam Walton. A modest man. He used to say all he owned in the world was a pick-up truck and a few Walmart shares. Probably forgot to mention the shotgun, but then, hey, we all have one of those, don’t we? Or that he actually owned all the Walmart shares.
I imagine you all think I’m just an old geezer living in a quaint half-timbered cottage and keeping a few bees. And that suits me fine. Like Sam W. I’m a modest man, and I keep my money-making operations, like my yacht, at arms’ length. Even the white vans are plain white vans. Nothing to connect them with me. They come, they do the job, they race off to the next job and the office sends the bill.
We used to be able to do the job and scoot off leaving all the mess to be cleared up by someone else. Not cleaning up after ourselves has always been our business model. Can’t afford to waste money on cleaning some customer’s living space, it eats into my profits. I’d never get super-rich like that. If the customer complains that there is mud all over her kitchen floor, we point out the small print on the quote that says we don’t clear up our mess. It isn’t priced in.
Lately rather a lot of them have started complaining. Leaving mud everywhere in their homes is not sustainable, they say. Sooner or later their home environment will not be fit to live in. And what about their children? Luckily the government came up with a plan to shut them up. They called it ‘mud trading’, or ‘mud offsetting.’ And they created a ‘mud market’ so that the money men could trade ‘mud futures’ and ‘mud credits’ until the free market made all the mud go away.
In my company’s version of mud offsetting, the customer is invited to pay a little extra and I offset the mud. As simple as that. I tell them we are going to work towards ‘mud-neutral’. Some of them are naïve enough to think that ‘mud neutral’ means ‘no mud’. I don’t blame them - it’s easy to confuse ‘mud neutral’ with ‘mud zero’, and it suits me if they think that this scheme is actually going to make the mud in their environments go clean away.
I started by using a field I bought in Mid Wales. I select a patch of mud, sow some grass seeds, and as the grass grows I contact the customer to say that their house is on the way to becoming mud neutral, because I am sequestering an area of mud that will eventually be the equivalent of the mud in their house. By 2050 they will be completely mud-neutral, because the mud sequestered on my land will cancel out all the mud in their kitchen. Job done.
The scheme has really caught on, everybody is doing it and I’m finding I have to pay silly money for land in Mid Wales. Some of the locals are whingeing that we are all disrupting their communities, by making offers they can’t refuse for their farms. So I am moving my operations overseas. I’ve found a place in South America where they have already cleared off all the locals and turned the forest into mud. All I have to do is to move in and get ready to sequester all that mud. There’s more of it than you can shake a stick at, though you might have to scratch to find a stick now. And better still, there’s even less regulation there than there is back home, and that’s saying something. There’s nothing to stop you charging for mud sequestration on the same piece of land as many times as you want, because who’s counting? And you can always pay some politician to make it all go away if any journalists come sniffing around, which is unlikely if they know what’s good for them.
The whole world now seems to have caught on to the scheme, and it looks as if no-one will have to clean up any mud for years, because we can all offset our mud. Financial institutions love it, because they can create mud credits, and trade it future mud offsetting units, and create complex financial mud instruments that no one understands – but hey, if they are profitable who cares? And of course the farmers are beside themselves, because they have more mud than they know what to do with. Mud trading and mud offsetting will be so profitable that the language will have to change so that instead of saying ‘I’m in clover’ we will start saying ‘I’m in the mud’ or singing ‘Roll me over, in the mud, roll me over lay me down and do it again’. It probably won’t go on for ever, but who cares? I’ll be so rich that my money will start breeding and I won’t know how to spend it, though I bet my children will.
Inevitably some do-gooders are fussing that we are creating homes that are not fit to live in and that we need to clean up our act. So they’ve now decided that there will be a limit on mud credits. The number available will taper off slowly so that the price will go up, and eventually – like in about 2050 - it might make sense for people to clean up the mud if that is cheaper than buying mud credits from people like me. But I’ll still be alright because the higher price will compensate me. That’s the beauty of the market, you see. If the problem is to do with business as usual and profits as usual, the market will always sort that out. As for living in a mud free world, that’s a problem for the little people. There’ll be no mud on my superyacht.
As someone who cleans up the mud every day after our labrador comes in from his walks I have always known that mud offsetting was a chimera. Thanks Richard for another great essay which had me laughing out loud.
Got friends desperate to do one of those live-on-the-land farms - Lisa Sture, the fiddleplayer and John Hextall [sax]. They're priced out of the market in mid Wales; farms being bought up by... you wrote about it. x.