Nothing much to write about the pandemic, mid-term election next week or the weather, but looks like another tainted politician might be poised to again regain leadership in his country. Voting is now over in Israel, but Benjamin Netanyahu, who is embroiled in legal problems, could well again become Prime Minister. A few steps remain, and there are hurdles yet to clear, but don't be shocked to soon seem him at the top.
I've long been an outlier regarding the role geoengineering can play in remediating global climate warming. An issue of Scientific American this year provided a look at this field. I proposed providing a small amount of federal funds to just think about options 40 years ago. My posting of 11May2019 provided a summary.
- One of the courses when I taught at the University of Hawaii was Environmental Engineering. I've been involved with a variety of global climate change efforts, and hosted an international summit in Honolulu on how best to remediate global warming. The group decided to put together a pre-proposal, with an appeal for less than 1% of the future scientific research funds to be allocated.
- As chairman and principal investigator, I visited with Bob Corell, who in the 1990's headed the National Science Foundation program on this field. However, almost everyone in leadership was a scientist, and Bob I knew when he was on the ocean engineering faculty at the University of New Hampshire. His Wikipedia info indicates he was also an oceanographer. I rather doubt that. He was closely linked to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was co-awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
Bob I consider to be a good friend, for he used my Manoa Campus office one year to write a proposal when I was away on sabbatical.
Yes, he agreed that the amount we were seeking was minimal, but his recommendation was to hold back a few years and first see what the scientists learn. There has since then been NO comprehensive program to develop potential technological solutions to global warming. Funding for this field remains miniscule. We've lost almost 40 years of time.
- Last year John Kerry reported at the Glasgow COP26 summit on the climate crisis that solutions will involve technologies that we don't yet have...but are supposedly on the way.
- But this is delusional. It's magical thinking.
- ExxonMobile says that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a mature and proven technology. But their point of view is only that they have pumped carbon dioxide into oil fields to flush more fossil fuel out of the ground. They really don't care that this gas can escape back into the atmosphere.
Pumping CO2 into the ground is not a proven technology unless you can insure that this gas won't return to the atmosphere for centuries.- But, aha, there is that Orca plant in Iceland, the world's largest carbon removal plant. Sorry, but the cost is astronomical: $600 to $1000 per ton. And they only captured 4,000 tons all of last year.
A typical vehicle emits around 5 tons of CO2/year. So all they removed was the emission from 800 cars. There are 1,446,000,000, or 1.4 billion, vehicles.- Yet another tale of ethanol. Archer Daniels Midland's ethanol plant has since 2017 been supposedly containing carbon, at a taxpayer cost of $281 million. They employ eleven people, and when the net removal is calculated, overall emissions have increased.
- MIT closed its Carbon Capture and Sequestration Technology program because the 43 projects it was involved with were cancelled.
- So why do Exxon Mobil and Archer Daniels Midland say all the good things about CCS? Simple, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed last year contains more than $10 billion for CCS...but only $0.42 billion for renewable energy. They want to look good while feeding from the trough.
- How can you quickly reverse global warming? It has been hypothesized that reducing sunlight by only 1% should eliminate this problem, though some of the propositions to do so have been certifiably insane.
- There are those who feel that there is no cause for concern at this time about the increasing amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and if you trace who they are -- as for example by perusing through the comments of postings like this -- organizations like the Advancement of Sound Science Center or the Heartland Institute seem to regularly pop up. Searching further, you see that companies like Exxon Mobil provide supporting funds. Our White House provides encouragement and Republicans more than Democrats side with these detractors.
- For all I know, they might actually be right. However, let's, for the sake of discussion, say that global heating is real and our world leaders are unable to agree on a workable solution in time. What if the situation gets so bad that virtually instant solutions will be required to save our civilization? I provide a wide variety of answers in SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth (seen in the box on the right), but for the purpose of this article, let us look at something called global geoengineering.
- The concept is not new. The industrial revolution, farms, cities, transport systems and remediating the ozone hole can be considered to be forms of geoengineering. The Montreal Protocol actually seems to be working for the latter, but the Kyoto Protocol has been less than successful.
- One I favor (see the chapter on the Blue Revolution in the book mentioned above) has to do with an Apollo Project equivalent of building an armada of open ocean grazing platforms powered by ocean thermal energy conversion to suck up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while providing new habitats, green materials, next generation fisheries and sustainable fuels.
For those familiar with this blog site, that happens to be the Blue Revolution.- I go on further about one of those insane concepts, but you can read the article.
I did close with what I had been saying since the 1980's:
Before anyone gets too irrational, let me underscore that no one, not even the most extreme supporter, is even suggesting that anything of any magnitude be initiated today. It wouldn't hurt, though, to set aside a small amount, perhaps 1% of the global change budget, to comprehensively study the more reasonable suggestions, especially reviewing the environmental implications, so that if that one in a hundred chance that a perfect global heating storm (as, perchance, depicted in The Venus Syndrome chapter of SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth) actually happens, we will have a few rational emergency options worthy of consideration.
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