Four years ago, I wrote in POWER magazine, “Geoengineering: A practical climate work-around or just plan crazy?” At the time, and still today, the mainstream approach to global warming was political and administrative, under the idea that the world could come together and mount a planet-wide plan to cooperatively reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Based on the 1980s Montreal Protocol to reduce gases that harmed the ozone layer, the advocates of addressing global warming believed their soft governmental approach was the only way around the impending warming of the earth. Despite the abject failure of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the advocates of this approach continued to push for a political solution. The 2015 Paris climate accord was their high point.
But some important analysts of the climate landscape felt that chances of a settlement such as the Paris agreement were slim. It might be necessary to look for engineering solutions to global warming: ways to reduce solar radiation, reflect it back into space, or suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Among those analysts was David Keith of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applies Sciences. He wrote at the time, “It’s hard to overstate to importance of geoengineering’s ability to reduce risk for current generations as there are no other methods that can reduce these risks significantly in the next half-century.”
The climate establishment strenuously rejected the very concept of geoengineering. They labeled it “techno-optimism” and just a way for greedy business to make money from climate protection. Some labeled it immoral. Others, impractical. Others, too expensive.
Today, Paris is clearly a failure. The Trump administration has pulled the U.S. out of the accord, but that’s probably irrelevant. Nations are failing to meet their so-called binding targets from greenhouse gas emissions reductions, and the scientific consensus is that the Paris targets won’t achieve the stabilized temperatures they targeted.
And geoengineering is getting new attention. On June 7, The Atlantic reported that a David Keith team from Harvard and his firm, Carbon Engineering, claimed “they have found a method to cheaply and directly pull carbon-dioxide pollution out of the atmosphere.
“If their technique is successfully implemented at scale, it could transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change. It could give people a decisive new tool in the race against a warming planet, but could also unsettle the issue’s delicate politics, making it all the harder for society to adapt.”
The technology relies on well-understood chemistry and engineering to suck CO2 out of the air, combining it with hydrogen to produce a range of hydrocarbons, including transportation fuels, using the Fischer-Tropsch process, a chemical engineering technique used by Germany in World War 2 and South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s to turn coal into gasoline. Keith claims it will be a cheap way to reduce CO2 emissions, at a cost of $94-$232/tonne. Carbon Engineering has had a pilot project operating in British Columbia since 2015.
The journal Nature also reported the Keith claims, noting, “The last comprehensive analysis of the technology, conducted by the American Physical Society in 2011, estimated that it would cost $600/tonne.” The Nature article added, “In the United States, Carbon Engineering is eyeing a recently expanded subsidy for carbon capture and sequestration, which could provide a tax credit of $35 per tonne for atmospheric CO2 that is converted into fuels.”
A Scientific American article commented, “Interest in governing experiments to alter Earth’s climate is growing as scientists increasingly look at geoengineering to slow global warming….But with scientific interest quickly growing, and some high-profile experiments planned in the near future, some experts say the possibility of large-scale geoengineering projects is no longer a fantasy.”
Ken Caldeira at the Carnegie Institution for Science said, “If these costs are real, it is an important result. This opens up the possibility that we could stabilize the climate for affordable amounts of money without changing the entire energy system or changing everyone’s behavior.”
The advocates of the conventional political and administration approach aren’t yet willing to sign on. The New Republic commented, “Meddling with climatic systems we don’t understand, in the service of solving global warming, could just make the crisis worse.”
— Kennedy Maize