Obama Open to Geoengineering As a Solution to Climate Change
The president’s new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air.
John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.
Holdren, a 65-year-old physicist, is far from alone in taking geoengineering more seriously. The National Academy of Science is making climate tinkering the subject of its first workshop in its new multidiscipline climate challenges program. The British parliament has also discussed the idea.
The American Meteorological Society is crafting a policy statement on geoengineering that says “it is prudent to consider geoengineering’s potential, to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment.”
Last week, Princeton scientist Robert Socolow told the National Academy that geoengineering should be an available option in case climate worsens dramatically.
But Holdren noted that shooting particles into the air — making an artificial volcano as one Nobel laureate has suggested — could have grave side effects and would not completely solve all the problems from soaring greenhouse gas emissions. So such actions could not be taken lightly, he said.
Still, “we might get desperate enough to want to use it,” he added.
Another geoengineering option he mentioned was the use of so-called artificial trees to suck carbon dioxide — the chief human-caused greenhouse gas — out of the air and store it. At first that seemed prohibitively expensive, but a re-examination of the approach shows it might be less costly, he said.
More. (HT: Bryan Caplan) In my view, things like this, however “science fiction” they might seem now, stand a much better chance of dealing with the fallout from global warming than does a cap and trade system (which is to say, I think the odds are better than zero).
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The premise of this post, however, is that Obama’s policies bear any relationship to his rhetoric, which often turns out not to be the case. Consider, for example, the by-now numerous occasions on which the Obama administration has agreed with the Bush administration’s policies on executive privilege, or the fact that Obama’s policies on education are completely different from anything that he announced and praised (he had an education speech recently where he was full of praise for charter schools, merit pay, and efforts to fire incompetent teachers, even though his education bill did none of the above).
S.B.,
Fair point.
I only want to note that emission controls enacted by the government in the past were very effective. It’s been done for SOx and NOx emissions. It can be done for carbon as well.
From a technology point of view, if America wanted to maintain jobs and competitive standing in the global economy, leading the way in development of emission controls science, technology and products as an emerging market. It isn’t already because there is no price-tag associated with carbon. As soon as there is, and as long as it’s burdensome enough, it’s a safe bet that the mother of invention is going to be laying the smack-down on a great many carbon producers in this country. (I for one hope it’s also laid down on all those suckers with those four-wheeled emitters as well.) The development requires skilled labor and personnel and potentially new manufacturing.
I’ll second what Mike J. says. I grew up in the Los Angeles basin (San Gabriel valley) in the 60′s and 70′s, and I remember quite well the smog we had back then and having difficulty breathing because of it. Some days you just had to stay indoors. It’s nothing like that now. Emission controls work.
Controls on SOx and NOx aren’t really apt analogies for two reasons. For one thing, the negative effects of SOx and NOx emissions are fairly localized, so that to the extent controls result in polluting factories simply moving to China this counts as a success. The effect of carbon emissions, by contrast, is global. Even if the U.S. reduced its carbon emissions to zero, this wouldn’t stop global warming so long as China and India keep growing.
The scale of carbon emissions also dwarfs the scale of either SOx or NOx. The economic costs of meeting Obama’s emissions goals are so great, that I don’t expect him (or anyone else) to make more than a halfhearted attempt to meet them (other countries have only been able to meet far more modest goals through statistical trickery)
Paul the Other,
I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley too in the 60′s and 70′s. Where did you go to school?
A quibble, but the “local” effects of acid rain, I would say, are more regional in scale.
As for the scale of carbon emission, it does dwarf it and this is part of the reason carbon sequestration methods were made part of the National Academy of Engineering’s “Grand Challenges”. It’s enormous in scale and the energy needs of the world are only increasing. However, there are ready alternatives to fossil fuel base-load power (e.g. nuclear fission) which could replace fossil-based electrical generation in the next half-century. Faster if we’re dedicated.
What isn’t present yet is a viable alternative to fossil-fuel based vehicular transport, which some might say impacts the everyman far more than a power plant 40 miles away. Electric vehicles do not, as yet, have the significant range required to compete with fossil fuels.
-Mike J.