DWill wrote:Probably this isn't the New Yorker's first entry in the climate discussion.
Or even in the apocalypse discussion. But it is interesting that Franzen headlines his story by mentioning climate and apocalypse together.
I vividly remember from when my parents subscribed to the New Yorker reading
Jonathan Schell’s 1982 essays on the fate of the earth, (
wiki) about the risk of nuclear war, which led me to become very active at that time in campaigning for nuclear disarmament, a political movement that I now wonder may have been counter-productive in its contribution to ending the Cold War.
Just on that point of the nuclear apocalypse, Franzen says the climate situation differs from religious, nuclear and asteroidal apocalypses in being slow rather than instant. A sudden last trumpet is certainly the main religious myth, but I prefer to argue the climate apocalypse we are now entering is compatible with the Biblical vision, seen as entirely symbolic not literal.
DWill wrote:But to your point about effective approaches to cooling us off, I think that "looking beyond emission reduction" needs inevitably to be defined as achieving stringent reduction while also getting serious about other direct means of reducing warming.
I know I am a heretic on this, as on many other things, but my reading of the numbers is that emission reduction will make little difference, since if we don’t work out how to regulate the planetary climate we are cooked. And climate regulation means geoengineering, via carbon mining and albedo enhancement.
DWill wrote: (Emissions reduction may be insufficient, but it is a direct means of lowering temperature.)
No, not true. For a start, cutting emissions only slows the warming rate of increase, and can never actually lower temperature. And furthermore, its effects are often indirect and uncertain. When we switch from carbon to renewable energy, we assume that will cause a reduction of carbon energy use, whereas in reality it often only adds to the total energy stock, driven by aggregate demand.
As Franzen notes, all the world’s efforts in recent years have only seen the growth rate of emissions increase, illustrating how devilishly difficult it is to actually cut emissions, let alone temperature. Europeans pat themselves on the back for shipping their factories off to China, when all that does in net global terms is add both the transport emission and the inefficiency emission to their previous local CO2 output.
The only direct means of lowering temperature are reflecting more sunlight and physically removing carbon from the air. Emission reduction is marginal and worse, since it gives the impression of action without the reality.
DWill wrote:You say that ER is only 10% of the solution, but it seems you want to skip it rather than undergo the pain of achieving it.
Yes, skip the pain, and only cut emissions when there is direct economic and environmental gain. Just like poor countries are leapfrogging twentieth century technologies in telecoms and power, not in order to cut emissions but because solar is more efficient than a coal grid for villages in Bangladesh, and mobile phones are better than wires.
DWill wrote: It might seem to make sense to go for the 90% solution, but as strictly logical as that might be, insisting on it could be in effect nothing more than delaying action.
The existential situation is that if geoengineering works we can achieve stable growth for centuries to come, but if it doesn’t work then we face a rapid spiral into conflict and collapse. So geoengineering is the only real climate action, while emission reduction is like phlogiston theory, a false paradigm that seemed plausible for a while but actually lacked any real scientific basis. Emission reduction is not fit for purpose to achieve its stated goal of preventing dangerous warming.
DWill wrote:It's as though the world needs to step onto the board--reduce emissions--before it can make the dive of geoengineering.
Nice diving metaphor, but completely wrong. A more apt image is that the world is now walking the plank towards decision on geoengineering, prompted by a pack of pirates with swords encouraging us to make the jump. Refusing to jump means we get run through, but luckily in this case the water is probably benign, and once we jump we can swim to safety.
DWill wrote:And I come back to the need to replace fossil fuels with renewables on the basis of dwindling supplies of fossils.
Not true. If we work out how to use ten million square km of the world ocean (3% of the total sea surface area) to grow algae biofuels, we can constantly recycle carbon between CO2 and hydrocarbons using photosynthesis, a genuine circular economy, while also converting enough CO2 into stable products to restore and maintain a stable climate.
DWill wrote: There can be no doubt that this replacement will come from many sources, perhaps including ocean-based algae, but what currently are working are solar, wind, and geothermal. These have become part of the capitalistic solution you promote.
Sure these are good, but at the moment fossil fuels deliver 80% of world energy, with no prospect of that share rapidly falling. The best path is to accept that an energy transition is impossible, so instead we must mine more carbon from the air than we use, while also preventing the poles from melting.
DWill wrote:Geoengineering, on the other hand, has not attracted investment and probably won't.
Ho ho, just like planes and cars were impossible in the nineteenth century. Geoengineering is absolutely necessary if we want a planetary civilization to be sustained, so the question is whether we want to be or not to be.
DWill wrote:There may be a by-product of some climate-control geoengineering that could be marketed, but it's hard to imagine a company wanting to put its capital into such a tenuous venture. We'll have to pay for geoengineering through taxation, I reckon.
Government role is to create the regulatory environment to enable business investment. With geoengineering that means government has an initial grant role in supporting innovative technology, but in the medium term there will have to be tax incentives, not to stop emissions, but only so emitters gain a tax offset through investment in carbon removal and direct cooling, calculated on the basis of radiative forcing.
DWill wrote:
As for the vision of using fossil fuels as feedstocks for algae production (if I have that right), well, even coal will run out, and a more destructive industry can hardly be imagined anyway. Is there even any scientific support for your idea? With respect, you are not a professional in a relevant field, so back-up from the science/engineering community is essential.
The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory did initial feasibility work on Algae Biofuel in the 1990s, but that led to a biofuel bubble about ten years ago when venture startups could not work out how to make it profitable.
The algae sector is very active, as the current
NREL site shows. The difficulties appear due to the combination of the low price of fossil fuels and the problem that algae biofuel may only become profitable on a massive scale, creating a barrier to entry.
My suggestion is that the NASA OMEGA technology should be deployed in rivers to grow algae in bags to recycle nutrient pollution, proving the bag technology so it can then be deployed at sea. I also think that sea floor hydrothermal liquefaction will prove the best way to turn algae into fuel, but again that faces many technological hurdles to proof of concept.
DWill wrote:I credit you with persuading me that removing carbon, increasing albedo, or possibly other measures will be needed, but those are in addition to drastically reducing the carbon we put into the atmosphere in the first place. We don't have a hopeful scenario, I admit.
Honestly, drastically reducing the amount of carbon we put in the air is as useful for climate repair as drastically reducing the quantity of turds we flush down the toilet – completely impossible, futile and harmful when considered in terms of systemic impacts and life cycle analysis. The only workable climate sanitation methods address the problem at the end of the pipe, transforming CO2 into useful products.
That is why the UN pipe dreams were rejected at Copenhagen, and why the Paris Accord is such a deceptive pile of hot air. The despair on climate is due to this unworkable plan for emission reduction being so aggressively foisted as the only possible solution, and the unwillingness to even discuss alternatives. I am supremely optimistic that we will see a rapid shift in this paradigm.
Here is an interesting commentary on Franzen -
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/09/ ... nd-useless
It toes the orthodox lie that “To keep warming below 1.5 C, which is the target of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global greenhouse gas emissions will have to fall by about 45 percent by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.” Really we need net zero by 2030, but that needs geoengineering, not emission reduction.
As for its assertions about “the political possibilities of a powerful social movement”, people really need to see that fixing the climate is a security problem for governments, business, scientists and the military to sort out, and emotional kids have nothing useful to contribute except their emotion.
Dumb just gets dumber with the assertion that Green New Deal wealth redistribution will reduce the political backlash from its assault on the established energy sector. The article links to a push-poll purporting to show strong public support for the Green New Deal, but its questions are laughably biased.
Speaking of a novel he wrote, Franzen told the Guardian “Walter comes to feel that coal is maybe not so bad. He sees that we aren’t going to stop using coal in this country, and he asks, “Why don’t we talk about how to do it better, how to do it right, rather than taking extreme positions that feel good but have no realistic alternative solutions to offer?””
That is exactly what people should do, and it is not gloom and doom. The article crows about how the US is using less coal now than in the 70s, but says nothing about how these emissions have just been offshored.