Imagine a mobile pavilion in a city centre giving ordinary people a real insight into the causes and effects of the climate crisis: A pavilion that links the human suffering and environmental damage caused by wildfires, flooding and heatwaves with actual amounts of greenhouse gases emitted in the past and today. It will do this by bringing our concept of the Carbon Quilt to life.
The Carbon Quilt is a new way of understanding how we are changing the atmosphere. Burning fossil fuels adds another 100 million tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere every day. If this were a single layer of the pure gas at sea level it would cover the entire Earth with a blanket 100 microns deep - the thickness of a piece of paper. One Gigatonnne of CO2 would be almost exactly 1mm thick. And the ‘natural’ thickness of the Carbon Quilt would be XXX mm, while human society has added another YYY to that - the reason that the planet is now overheating.
We want to create a mobile pavilion , topped by a roof thatmatches the Carbon Quilt. This is an animation ’sketch' showing the idea. The structure would be a rigid frame with translucent architectural fabric stretched over the top. Projectors inside the frames pointing outwards could project explanatory text (as illustrated).
The pavilion would incorporate interactive video displays explaining the emissions stories, directly linking to images of wildfires, flooding and other climate effects. We would also show how the Carbon Quilt thickness can be dramatically reduced by scaling up natural sequestration effects -
One additional idea is to incorporate performance art by every day unfurling another thin layer over the roof. The layer could be pre-printed with imagery showing the respective current contributions by fossil fuel companies.
So we are looking for anyone who would be interested in helping us take this project forward. You might be an architect, an engineer, an activist or a funder. If you are interested please get in touch.