Fixing the Sky (48 page)

Totally unresolved issues related to all large-scale OIF projects include possible damage to the ocean food web and the world's fishing industry caused by disturbing marine ecosystems, production of biological “dead zones,” pollution of the deep ocean by the buildup of iron compounds, possible destruction of stratospheric ozone, and generation of undesirable greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. OIF projects could be undertaken unilaterally by a rogue state or a group out to make a point; and if the fertilization ever stopped, the carbon dioxide would immediately begin to return to the atmosphere.
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Regarding OIF, chemist Whitney King wrote in 1994,

Klaus Lackner of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, collaborating with Tucson, Arizona–based Global Research Technologies, envisions a world filled with millions of inverse chimneys, some of them more than 300 feet high and 30 feet in diameter, inhaling up to 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year (the world's annual emissions) and sequestering it in underground or undersea storage areas. Picture in your mind's eye Al Gore's
An Inconvenient Truth
movie logo of a smokestack apparently exhaling a Katrinalike hurricane; now run the smokestack in reverse and imagine millions of such giant planetary vacuum cleaners or, more accurately, air filters. Lackner prefers a different, somewhat greener metaphor: a forest of artificial trees covered in CO
₂
absorbing artificial leaves. Note, however, that trees sequester carbon, not carbon
dioxide, and they return oxygen to the atmosphere. Unlike Lackner forests, trees also provide shade, habitat, and food for squirrels, birds, and other living things. Although Lackner says he is not a geoengineer, but merely interested in compensating for current emissions, he envisions his devices being enlisted in the “fight against climate change.”
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Others hope someday to attain negative global carbon dioxide emissions, but this would entail immense storage problems, similar to nuclear waste disposal.
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Lackner has built a demonstration unit in which a filter filled with caustic and energy-intensive sodium hydroxide can absorb the carbon dioxide output of a single car. He admits, however, that this system is not safe or practical, so he is currently looking into proprietary “ion-exchange resins” with undisclosed energetic and environmental properties. Of course, the capture, cooling, liquefaction, and pumping of 30 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide would require an astronomical amount of energy and infrastructure, and it is not at all certain that the Earth has the capacity for safe long-term storage of such a large amount of carbon.

Let us look briefly at the chemical energetics that make air capture of carbon and its sequestration (CCS) such a non-starter (with the possible exception of selected local sites, such as North Sea oil rigs, where pumping carbon dioxide back into the wells makes more sense than venting it). First there is the mass problem. Combustion of coal (mainly carbon-12) results in carbon dioxide waste products of molecular weight 44. Thus a mole of carbon burned yields energy, plus a mole of carbon dioxide waste, a mass gain of 267 percent. Lackner did not acknowledge this mass problem when he wrote, “Ultimately
carbon
extraction must be matched by
carbon dioxide
capture and storage. For every
ton
of carbon pulled from the ground, another
ton
of carbon must be taken out of the mobile carbon pool” (emphasis added).
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In actuality, for every ton of carbon used, 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide have to be captured and stored. There are other problems as well. Liquefying such a huge amount of CO
₂
requires immense pressures, on the order of 80 to 100 atmospheres. We are still not done, since the liquid CO
₂
must be piped to injection sites. Imagine all the pipelines needed for the pipe dream of erecting 3 million large Lackner towers worldwide, or up to 100 million smaller, container-size units.

The image of a Lackner tower, resembling a huge flyswatter, was superimposed over New York's Central Park in a photomontage created by a Canadian film company.
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Left unmentioned was the fact that Manhattan alone would require hundreds of these scrubbers for its resident population of 1.5 million people (not counting visitors), so about one in every ten large structures in the city would resemble a giant flyswatter. The cost of the land to build them, energy to run them, piping to drain them, and makeup and maintenance of their “idealized”
filters were not specified, making Lackner's proposal at present untenable. Oh, by the way—each of the large Lackner towers would cost at least $20 million.

Lackner's dream of carbon sequestration found support from his Columbia University colleague Wallace Broecker and science writer Robert Kunzig in their book,
Fixing Climate
(2008). Their overall thesis is that carbon dioxide capture and storage represents the equivalent of sewage treatment, which modern societies deem a necessity. They quoted Harrison Brown, the Caltech geochemist, eugenicist, futurist, and role model for the current presidential science adviser, John Holdren. In 1954 Brown imagined feeding a hungry world by increasing the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere to stimulate plant growth:

Recall that Nils Ekholm and Svante Arrhenius had suggested in the first decade of the twentieth century that, facing the return of an ice age, atmospheric carbon dioxide might be increased artificially by opening up and burning shallow coal seams—a process that would also fertilize plants. Broecker and Kunzig end their book with just such a fantasy:

Lackner reportedly agreed, adding that capturing, storing, and releasing carbon dioxide may one day be possible. Can you imagine a world in which Lackner's carbon dioxide scrubbers and the Ekholm–Arrhenius/Brown carbon dioxide generators
would operate in tandem as a kind of planetary thermostat? “Trying to see that far into the future is crazy, of course” (232) (Broecker and Kunzig's words, not mine).

How can we comprehend such proposals? It may be common for people living in close proximity to the megalopolis—for example, just off Broadway—to see the sky as an open sewer and try to “fix it.” Bus exhaust, steam vents, fumes, and foul odors serve as constant reminders that something is indeed wrong with the sky. Fly into a major city near or after sunset, and you will see, on approach, streams of red taillights and white headlights of opposing traffic. Stand on the street, perhaps daring to cross, and you will see the grim visages of oncoming drivers or the tailpipes and exhaust plumes of the passing traffic. In such a dense infrastructure, when almost every building is air-conditioned, it is not hard to imagine a future in which every tenth building might in fact be a giant outdoor air filter or an inverse chimney. To put it simply, when you see pipes sticking out everywhere, it is not hard to imagine more pipes—good pipes correcting emissions from the bad pipes.

Today's city dwellers, especially the influential ones, do not choose to spend much time on crowded, dangerous, and uncomfortable streets. Instead, they shuttle between microtopian environments, from air-conditioned vehicles to air-conditioned buildings, and even to air-conditioned shopping malls and sports arenas. Near Washington, D.C., certainly a city known for both its international influence and its need for air-conditioning, the power brokers always wear business suits to signal their status and their unlimited access to HVAC. The tunnels running under Capitol Hill and into the Library of Congress symbolize this, as does Pentagon City, across the Potomac River in nearby Virginia, which is known for its underground warrens where not only can the air be conditioned, but Muzak can be pumped in and the homeless can be kept out. This is the type of “environment” in which most of our decision makers operate.

In the twenty-first century, geoengineers have convened several meetings, regularly exchange views on Google Groups, and continue to hatch, nurture, and recycle their ideas. In September 2001, the U.S. Climate Change Technology Program quietly held an invitational conference on “response options to rapid or severe climate change.” Sponsored by a White House that was officially skeptical about greenhouse warming, the meeting gave new status to the control fantasies of the climate engineers. According to one participant, however, “If they had broadcast that meeting live to people in Europe, there would have been riots”—a
comment indicative of a much more robust green movement in Europe, which at the time still hoped the United States might sign the Kyoto Protocol.

Two years later, the Pentagon released a controversial report titled “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security.” The report explained how global warming might lead to rapid and catastrophic global cooling through mechanisms such as the slowing of North Atlantic deep-water circulation—and recommended that the government “explore geoengineering options that control the climate.”
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Such actions would have to be studied carefully, of course, given their potential to exacerbate conflict among nations. A symposium sponsored in 2004 by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Cambridge, England, set out to “identify, debate, and evaluate” possible but highly controversial options for the design and construction of engineering projects for the management and mitigation of global climate change.

“Russian Scientist Suggests Burning Sulfur in Stratosphere to Fight Global Warming,” read the headlines from Moscow in November 2005. The article referred to a letter from the prominent scientist Yuri Izrael, the head of the Global Climate and Ecology Institute, to President Vladimir Putin warning that global warming required immediate action and suggesting burning thousands of tons of sulfur in the stratosphere as a remedy. Izrael said his plan was based on the idea of putting aerosols into the atmosphere at an altitude of 8 to 12 miles to create a reflective layer that would lower the heating effect of solar radiation: “In order to lower the temperature of the Earth by 1–2 degrees we need to pump about 600,000 tons of aerosol particles. To do that, we need to burn from 100–200,000 tons of sulfur. And we do not have to burn the sulfur there, we can simply use sulfur-rich aircraft fuel.” It seems that Izrael did not make his own calculations, but simply dusted off Penner's 1984 idea and used the exact figures of his countryman Budyko, published in 1974.
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A 2006 editorial on geoengineering by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen contained a proposal that was very similar to Budyko's, although framed by different environmental and policy concerns.
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He came to similar conclusions, too, except his calculations indicated that ten times more sulfur would be needed, between 1 and 2
million
tons per year. Budyko had pegged the geoengineering sulfur input at about one-ten-thousandth of “that due to man's activity,” while Crutzen had it as “
only
2–4 percent of the current input” (emphasis added).
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Crutzen wrote that albedo enhancement was not the best solution to global warming “by far,” but he still recommended that the Budyko/National Academy notions of using artillery guns, balloons, or aircraft to inject sulfates or other particles into the stratosphere “might again be explored and debated.”
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He suggested that the
attack on the upper atmosphere might be conducted from “remote tropical island sites or from ships” (213), but nowhere indicated that he had considered the need to consult residents of the tropics for their opinions on this. Whether from Budyko, Penner, Izrael, or Crutzen, the idea of purposeful stratospheric pollution, for whatever purpose, is extremely grating to modern sensibilities. Nevertheless, there have been several more workshops in recent years. NASA-Ames and the Carnegie Institution convened one in 2006 on the Phaethon-like topic “managing solar radiation.” Participants could not help but laugh when a meeting coordinator apologized for not being able to control the temperature of the room. Ad hoc meetings on climate engineering pop up on a regular basis. In 2007 one was held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, another at MIT in 2009, and a large gathering on “climate intervention” in 2010 at the Asilomar campus in Pacific Grove, California. The topics under discussion at these meetings have been far from mainstream, involving more speculation than science.
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