Time for Out of the Box Policy on Climate Change: Geo-Engineering

When I have something published (less common as I age), I normally just tweet it and post something about it on Facebook – like other authors. But not everyone is on social media all that frequently (thank goodness!), and I feel too strongly to let this latest publication --  https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/time-geoengineering-now-climate-change -- just hang out there in the ether (If you’re not a subscriber to Foreign Affairs, I think you can get one time access for an article like this). Hence this short substack essay here to call attention to the Foreign Affairs piece and to amplify the urgency of a similar substack piece I wrote 10 months ago:

Carbon Removal or Sunlight Reflection?

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If anyone had any doubts about the reality of climate change, they should have been dispelled by the rash of severe weather events this summer, widely understood to have been worsened by climate change: drought, torrential rains followed by unprecedented flooding, wildfires, and most recently, Hurricane Ian in the US, and similar heat-related catastrophes in Europe (wildfires in addition to record heat), China (drought), and Pakistan (rains and flooding of Biblical proportions). Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people had their lives severely disrupted. Too many lives have been lost. The economic damage from the US events alone had to exceed $100 billion (Ian by itself may cost that!).

While the inartful and inaptly named Inflation Reduction Act should reduce greenhouse gas (primarily CO2) emissions here in the US over time, it does nothing about global emissions, which will continue to rise. Most importantly, slowing the growth of emissions or having the world hit the magic “net zero” CO2 emissions goal by 2050 (I have a bridge to sell you if you believe that will happen) will do nothing to prevent more extreme climate change-aggravated weather events, summer and winter, from happening year in and year out. That’s because the warming of global temperatures is due to the cumulative CO2 that is already in the atmosphere. Even more slowly growing CO2 emissions will make the severe weather problem even worse.

Sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere – one obvious counter-measure -- is very expensive. Even with the subsidies for carbon capture built into the IRA, given the decades it will take to scale carbon capture to the point where it could make a dent in global temperatures, we cannot count on these technologies to rescue us from many, many more years of climate change-induced severe weather and related consequences.

There’s only other alternative, and it’s time to try it: spray sulfur particles into the high atmosphere to reflect sunrays, thereby cooling the earth, offsetting the rise in global temperatures that is driving these severe weather events. It’s cheap, on the order of $2-3 billion a year, and it’s ready to go, with enough political will.

“Geo-engineering” sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. Something like this idea has been around for over fifty years – even once presented to President Lyndon Johnson. Professor David Keith at Harvard has been in the forefront in the scientific community studying, and yes advocating, the idea. I cite him and his work in the Foreign Affairs piece.

Sure, there are risks, but the potential benefits of introducing a cooling offset to greenhouse gas-driven global temperature increases would swamp them. Nonetheless, given the side-effects of increased acidification of the oceans as the sulfur finds its way back to the earth’s surface, it is critical that deployment of geo-engineering be closely monitored. At the same time, the US government should aggressively expand research into whether other less risky particles or geo-engineering techniques can be developed and rapidly scaled, as well as to how the potential side effects can be minimized (for example, by introducing base chemicals into the ecosystem to offset the acidification). If the risks of spraying sulfur prove too great and/or carbon capture is scaled up more rapidly than expected, the sulfur spraying can be stopped.

To those who worry geo-engineering gives a license to more use of fossil fuels, the Foreign Affairs piece highlights how recent changes in the world give an added national security push to moving away from them.

To those who still recoil at the idea of geo-engineering (and there are plenty of them, they can be found on the Internet), I say this: remember the summer of hell of 2022. No place in the US was immune from some form of climate related catastrophe (let alone the rest of the world). And this will continue to happen every year even if the world hits net zero by 2050 (a generation away), and even after that unless something is done offset continued atmospheric warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions!

I, for one, don’t want to live with such risks, and thus I say, bring on geo-engineering. It’s all we’ve got. How many more horrific summers (or winters) will it take for our body politic to come to the same conclusion?