With scientific reports on climate change getting more and more dire and a major top-to-bottom reorganization of the entire massive global energy system needed to overcome the climate/energy challenge, it may be high time we invest in an insurance policy, including R&D in geoengineering and new carbon capture technologies (like biochar) that may offer new options to help mitigate the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change.
"Geoengineering: Time to get serious?"
By Marc Gunther
Imagine a fleet of 1,500 remote-controlled, wind-powered ships,
sailing the world's oceans, spewing salt water into the air to whiten
clouds, so they block more of the sun and cool an overheating planet.
Or think of trillions of tiny mirrors, sent into orbit, to reflect
the sun's rays. Or artificial trees that suck a ton of carbon a day out
of the atmosphere. Or iron filings, sprinkled on seas, to rapidly grow
phytoplankton, which absorb CO2.
These emergency strategies for curbing global warming aren't crazy schemes. Well, maybe they are
crazy schemes. But serious people say we should start taking them
seriously, as a last-ditch option to deal with the threat of
catastrophic climate disruptions.
The latest to do so is David G. Victor, a professor of law at
Stanford who directs a program on energy and sustainable development at
the university. With four academic colleagues-M. Granger Morgan, Jay
Apt, John Steinbruner and Katherine Ricke-Victor has written an essay
in Foreign Affairs called "The Geoengineering Option" that calls for more scientific research and policy debate about geoengineering.
I ask him by phone why he became interested in geoengineering which,
by his own account, is on fringe of climate science and politics.
"You can't help but look at the politics and the science of global
warming today without becoming extremely pessimistic," Victor says.
"Barely a month goes by without a new report saying that warming is
happening faster," he goes on. "It's a really worrisome picture."
But doesn't the debate that's beginning in Washington over climate-change regulation give him reason for hope?
"The Obama proposals are step in the right direction and they're
better than what we were doing before which was, roughly, nothing," he
replies. But as currently proposed, the cap-and-trade system to
regulate greenhouse gases doesn't go far enough to reduce the use of
fossil fuels and promote renewable energy. Gasoline prices, for
example, would rise an estimated 15 cents a gallon under the plan, not
enough to matter.
And so, the argument goes, when measured against current efforts to
mitigate climate change--which, in truth, require the top-to-bottom
transformation of the global energy economy, despite a mostly-apathetic
populace and over the objections of deeply entrenched
industries--geoengineering doesn't look so crazy.
It's not just Victor and his colleagues who say we should reconsider
geoengineering.. Last fall, Scientific American published a long analysis
of the science and politics of geoengineering, with a focus on pumping
sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, as volcanoes do. Popular
Mechanics described "Five Big Plans to Stop Global Warming," which generated a lot of buzz on the web. Treehugger used the illustration below to consider the topic back in 2007.
Yet, as Victor and his colleagues point out in Foreign Affairs, there's a scarcity of scientific research into the topic:
Despite years of speculation and vague talk,
peer-reviewed research on geoengineering is remarkably scarce. Nearly
the entire community of geoengineering scientists could fit comfortably
in a single university seminar room, and the entire scientific
literature on the subject could be read during the course of a
transatlantic flight. Geoengineering continues to be considered a
fringe topic.
Partly that's because environmentalists have been loathe to talk
about geoengineering, for fear that people will think there's a magic
bullet out there that will enable them to avoid hard choices about the
costs of moving away from fossil fuels and towards for renewable power.
It's also because we have come to understand the limits of science
and engineering, thanks to such events as Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez
oil spill, the space shuttle Challenger disaster. Tinkering with the
earth's climate is no trivial matter. According to Victor and his
co-authors, altering the earth's albedo--that's a term to describe the extent to which an object reflects light from the sun--would also affect
atmospheric circulation, rainfall and other aspects of
the hydrologic cycle...Such changes could increase the risk of major
droughts in some regions and have a major impact on agriculture and the
supply of fresh water.
"This scares the hell out of people, and for good reason," Victor says.
The thing is, any nation fearing the impact of climate change could,
in theory, begin engineering the planet without consulting the rest of
us. Who's going to stop it? The UN? Even in the U.S., it's not clear
who's responsible for geoengineering. NASA? The Pentagon? The National
Science Foundation? Ira Flatow?
"It doesn't logically fit in any one place in government," Victor says.
Some companies think there are profits to be made from geoengineering. Last year, I wrote a column ("Dumping Iron") about Climos, a company that hopes to deploy ocean iron fertilization to generate revenues from carbon offsets.
What's needed, Victor tells me, is government-backed research
carried out by academic scientists. "The science needs to be done in a
way that is open and transparent and involves serious review and
scrutiny," he says. At the same time, governments need to begin talking
about how to manage and regulate geoengineering. As Victor and his
co-authors put it:
"Politicians must take geoengineering seriously because it is cheap,
easy and takes only one government with sufficient hubris or
desperation to set it into motion."
