Last night was dex night, so I spent some time hanging around Twitter. At one point I ended up writing something that I've hinted around at here but have never quite come out and said outright. So let's take care of that.
I've been watching the climate change fight for 20 years now, waiting and waiting for evidence that the public takes it seriously enough to do something about it. Not just say it's important when a pollster calls, but demonstrate a real-world willingness to make lifestyle sacrifices that would make a difference. By chance, Paul Krugman wrote about this today:
It has long been painfully obvious that voters are reluctant to accept even small short-run costs in the interest of averting long-run disaster. This is depressing, but it’s a fact of life, one that no amount of haranguing seems likely to change.... Emission taxes are the Econ 101 solution to pollution, but realistically they just aren’t going to happen in America.
Needless to say, I agree with Krugman. Two years ago I wrote a long piece for Mother Jones based on exactly this observation, and I'd add that it's true of other countries as well. Neither Chinese nor Indian voters have any interest in freezing or lowering their standard of living at a quarter of our level just because we happened to get rich first. And it's hard to blame them. Nevertheless, it just adds to the mountain of evidence—which I outlined in my article—that the public simply can't be counted on to support any serious action.
Not in time, anyway. A decade ago I wrote in Democracy that by 2024:
The fact of climate change will become undeniable. The effects of global warming, discernible today mostly in scary charts and mathematical models, will start to become obvious enough in the real world that even the rightest of right wingers will be forced to acknowledge what’s happening.
I was only half right. The effects of climate change are becoming undeniable, but it hasn't made even a lick of difference. The Republican Party remains unanimously opposed to clean energy because they oppose anything that raises the possibility of corporate regulation. This is very unlikely to change by 2024.
At the time I wrote about all this two years ago, my conclusion was that we needed massive funding of R&D in hopes of finding a miracle technology that would fix our climate problem. Even then I acknowledged that this was a long shot, but at least it was better than nothing.
But the truth is that I always believed it was a real long shot. When you combine the slim possibility of getting the needed funding with the slim possibility of someone inventing a breakthrough, the odds of success are very small. I'd put it at 10%. Maybe 5%.
This leaves us with only one possible solution: geoengineering. This has pros and cons. The main upside is that the most likely version of geoengineering involves seeding the stratosphere with sulfur aerosols. This blocks sunlight and reduces the temperature, in the same way that eruptions of sulfur from large volcanoes do this on a temporary basis (usually a year or two). We pretty much know it would work, and we also know that it's cheap. Current estimates suggest $10 billion per year, but even if that's off by a factor of ten, it's still chicken feed.
The downside is that everyone hates it. Scientists hate it because it's potentially dangerous—and we have no idea how dangerous. Conservatives hate it because it would force them to acknowledge climate change as an actual problem. And liberals hate it because they believe it would reduce support for more conventional solutions (solar and wind buildouts, better insulation, etc.).
But we're running out of time, and we have to acknowledge that before long we may have no choice but to start cooling the planet by force majeure. This means we need to start up massive research projects on a 
few of the most promising approaches to geoengineering so that a decade from now we know a lot more about how likely they are to work, how best to implement them, and what risks we'd be taking if we did.
But by "massive" I'm not talking about the $700 billion I suggested for a sweeping R&D program. I'm talking about a few billion per year. That's nothing.
And it doesn't bind us to anything. It just gives us options. No harm is done if a decade from now we're making real progress and it looks like maybe we can hit zero carbon emissions by the middle of the century. We just keep the research quietly humming along in case we ever need it.
Needless to say, we should continue pushing solar and wind and nuclear and anything else that will reduce our carbon emissions. Maybe it will work! But even if it doesn't, it will make a big difference. And one thing's for sure: if we end up bombing the stratosphere with sulfur, the less the better. If conventional methods get us 50% of the way to carbon neutrality, that means 50% less sulfur to close the rest of the gap. These solutions don't conflict, they complement each other.
Never mind Republicans. I have a feeling liberal Twitter is going to like geoengineering about as much as it likes nuclear power. Anyone on a texting basis with Greta?
I should, add (in the interest of keeping my cynicism at bay): what Kevin proposes is worthwhile, and necessary. We're plainly not going to decarbonize the global economy as rapidly as necessary to stave off catastrophic effects.
In my view, the fossil fuel industry has a stranglehold on the Republican Party, and because ifs electoral advantages, the policy of the US. This is the most salient factor in our current political economy, I think.
However, electric cars could break all that. The power they run on has to come from somewhere, but do people really care where? These days, every time you go to the pump you are reminded "I need gas to do all the stuff I do." Once you start plugging your car in every night and not visiting a gas station - ever - I think the politics will shift.
And that day is definitely coming for lots and lots of Americans. There's lots of rural America where power is cheap, and an electric truck will do better than a gas powered one, except for the rare long trips one has to make.
That's not that I'm saying no to what Kevin proposes. I'm seeing giant upheavals in the future, and the petro powers doing all they can to stay on top as long as possible.
With geo-engineering we can still pump fossil fuels and get paid to keep global warming at bay....
Don't think some CEO's aren't dreaming of that scenario.
In my view, the fossil fuel industry has a stranglehold on the Republican Party,
That's part of it. But I believe it goes beyond that. Opposition to government policies to mitigate the climate crisis is now a right wing cultural totem in the US. They oppose it because the libs support it. It's an important part of their tribal identity, along with gun worship, immigration restrictionism and anti-vax quackery.
It means they were wrong and the libs were right all these years. They'd rather die, or kill the libs than have that.
Fortunately, plenty of them already have died. From COVID.
In the new Harmony Korine update of the Karate Kid ("the MAGArate Kid"), the famous line will be, "Get him a ventilator, yeah!"
What's that Planck paraphrase? 'Science advances one funeral at a time.' Eversomuchmoreso for any other social instutitution.
Nope. Unfortunately it's like +400k on the reds but it's concentrated in super red areas that will not effect electoral consequences except in rare instances. They'll win 65-35 instead of 75-25
Agree - opposition to environmentalism is a “right wing cultural totem”
I keep seeing WSJ articles about the impracticality of electric cars, lack of chargers, range anxiety, etc.
I would guess the resonance with tribal identity among the plebes, where it overlaps with big money interests, like petroleum, make it more powerful.
and I don’t even think electric cars are all that “green.” B/c of the composition of the power grid, rare-earth mining, etc. (could be, one day). Maybe that assessment is outta date now?
ICE locks in fossil fuel burning for 20 years. Electric vehicles may not start with the best grid today, but as the grid improves, electric also improves.
It doesn't have the money. Fossil fuels are globalist personified..
MIT scientists have gone in on Space Bubbles. The plan is to unfold it at Lagrange 1, and it will be the size of Brazil.
https://senseable.mit.edu/space-bubbles/
A giant space parasol. Cool!
The James Webb Telescope was a test run.
Blocking the sun is like closing the barn door after it's already on fire.
That's called a Great White Genocide.
How so? 1.8% blocking undoes it ALL giving us time to switch and carbon capture. Stopping the solar radiation is by far the most effective solution.
Because climate change is like a domino effect, it's going to keep going, and lowering the lowering the sunlight may slow it but won't stop it, and once it slows the impetus to do anything will vanish and still more carbon pollution will be generated and we'll quickly be right back to where we started.
Geoengineering is a global solution to a global problem.
However, in practice how does that work? For example, does the UN Security Panel have to agree to the plan? What if Russia just says no? Or if another country agrees with the concept but not the method or amount?
I think the discourse on Geoengineering misses the material political challenge to this path...
"And liberals hate it because they believe it would reduce support for more conventional solutions"
Is it not possible that a lot of liberals hate it for other reasons? Like that it's dangerous and could backfire spectacularly?
I'm all for researching all options but what nation or group of nations is going to think that they right to geoengineer the planet for everyone else? This could certainly be considered an act of war by any nation that does not agree with whatever whackadoo project is being undertaken.
2 things: one it's easy enough that the guys below Musk and Bezos can do it alone. Can't stop everyone. Two by the time we do it the situation is going to be so desperate the majority of the world will unite to kill any objectors.
Kevin,
Sure, do some geoengineering research. Should the day come that a large government decides to spend money on stopping or slowing climate change, reducing fossil fuel use will still be the cheapest form of geoengineering.
If that day comes so late that world fossil fuel stores have depleted enough that use of them is down due to high costs, then the world will be in very bad state, and the geoengineering needed will be very, very expensive. As they say in geoengineering: good, fast, or cheap, and you can't pick fast.
It would be great if we could do the low hang fruit first.
Restore systems. Wetlands. Whale feeding grounds off Antarctica via iron fertilization until the whales start migrating there again. Salmon spawning streams. Some geo-engineering. Most bang for the buck.
Better farming practices helps soil to store CO2.
Energy efficiency regulations do a great job of cutting emissions.
Renewable energy helps a lot too.
What is not very efficient...direct air capture of CO2, solar shade via space parasol or SO2 in upper atmosphere. The latter two can be especially tricky. They might be needed, but should not be treated and magical or deus ex machina solutions meaning we don't have to deal with green house gasses.
Saw this headline the other day but didn't read it because I can't imagine the big GOP donors allowing anything to happen.
"Republicans want climate solutions — just not from Biden | Americans broadly support action, a Pew poll shows, but partisanship keeps getting in the way"
https://www.salon.com/2022/07/17/want-climate-solutions--just-not-from-biden_partner/
Only Nixon can go to China.
Only De Santis can secure our climate future.
Save, or bar the federal government from ever mentioning it again like Florida did (Does? My google-fu shows it was still happening as of 2017).
I seriously hate they make me long for the "sanity" of Nixon.
De Santis's commitment to pwning the ecoterrorists would be as sturdy as George W. Bush's commitment to reopening Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, if he were to become president.
This. Kevin said that by 2024 even Republicans will acknowledge climate change, and here, two years ahead of schedule, a majority of Republicans are acknowledging climate change. Attitudes are changing.
Maybe those aren't Republiqans but robots.
Our Robot Future is also coming true.
Launching sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere won't solve the problem of ocean acidification or of the gulf stream and jet stream changing.
Agreed it wouldn’t stop the first, but why not the second? Isn’t that heat driven?
I’m more of a fan of ocean seeding anyways
The temperature difference between the poles and the equator is dropping, which affects jet stream. The melting of the ice at the poles (Greenland, too) affects ocean circulation. I don't think there are proposals that can selectively cool the poles.
If a few thousand die in a 10-day heat wave in a WEIRD country, some opinions may change. Meanwhile we'll have smaller innovations in different areas--power generation, storage, distribution, etc. etc. plus some modest geoengineering research.
The turning point will be when climate/geoengineering research becomes a national security issue and we add a few hundred billions to the DOD budget, carefully distributed among 400+ congressional districts and 50 states.
Climate is a national security issue. But only $3B is called out in this year's budget as being directly climate related.
https://climateandsecurity.org/2022/05/unpacking-the-pentagons-3-1-billion-climate-request/
I wonder if there was "intelligent life" on Mars, that waited on geo-engineering.
The longer we wait, the closer to the edge of the cliff we walk. At some point we had better hope for a galactic 9-11.
Large scale carbon sequestration both bioloic and geologic is much preferred to sulfur aerosols because they affect the direct source of the problem and only likely problem is poor efficacy (leaking CO2 storage or poorer than expected biologic take-up. It will be more expensive than aerosol spraying but also less risky. If it was framed as a cost fossil fuel producers have to pay to produce it may even be more acceptable.
By far the most effective geoengineering is plain old weathering. Yes, you heard that right. Rock dust. I don't have the figures for how much that would cost, but it has none of the side-effects associated with, say, sulfur aerosols. It also has the happy side effect of reversing ocean acidification.
https://atalayar.com/en/content/worlds-largest-co2-capture-farm-will-be-morocco
says the cost is projected to be $50/tonne.
That's not geoweathering. Rock dust I said and rock dust I meant. The most significant factor, surface area, being what it is and how it scales with size.
Humanity isn’t worth the effort. That’s why no one will endure the sacrifice. So what if 100s of millions of people are never born? So what if life expectancy drops in some parts of the world? This is inevitable. Why do you want human population to be 10 billion in 2050? Why can’t it stay at 8 billion or drop to 6?
World population was 3 billion in 1960? What was wrong with that? The whole problem here is the increase. 6 billion in 2000. Almost 8 billion in 2022.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/World_Population_Prospects_2019.png
Don’t have kids. And let Africa starve. It can’t support its population anyway.
1.Destroying capitalism is a start. Materialism is a disease.
2.Culling the vast overpopulation in non indo European humans is next
3.converting the remaining population to nonfossil fuel energy
4.invent fusion energy.
"The Republican Party remains unanimously opposed to clean energy because they oppose anything that raises the possibility of corporate regulation." I think you have that largely backwards. They oppose all regulation so that they can't be forced into foregoing grubbing out and selling the last ton of fossil carbon.
America's upper class consumers will not give up their all terrain vehicles or international trips to reduce greenhouse gas exhaust despite knowing they should. Continuing their contribution to the destruction of the natural world with geoengineering saves their ability to consume and provides them with new investment opportunities.
America's?????? Boy it's more than America. It's international.
"America's upper class consumers will not give up their all terrain vehicles or international trips to reduce greenhouse gas exhaust despite knowing they should. Continuing their contribution to the destruction of the natural world with geoengineering saves their ability to consume and provides them with new investment opportunities."
Yes, and uber liberal California just banned gasoline powered landscaping equipment but allowed for continued emissions from gasoline powered Boats, airplanes, 4 wheelers and other recreational motor vehicles
Funny how we choose to forget this.............
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There is no solution to warming.
It is impossible to get cooperation of all the earth's nations.
A perfect example of this is the Senator from West Virginia.
I mean, everyone knows what the actual plan is, right?
Think about the problem from an ecological perspective. A species booms for whatever reason, and eventually exhausts the environmental carrying capacity. Energy pollution is a function of population. Reduce population, and energy pollution goes down.
A significant fraction of the ultra-rich have convinced themselves that doing nothing is the proper course of action. They'll survive, and think they can remake what's left into whatever fantasy gets them off. (Thiel, I suspect, wants to hunt humans on his continent-sized estate, for instance.)
You can also see this from a game theoretic perspective, looking at their actions.
If you want to do something about this, you'll need to take control of the media from them. They own the big shouty boxes.
Incidentally, I had to make a new account, Kevin changed something and my WordPress account no longer works. I'm the mole-rat formerly known as arghasnarg.
'mole-rat formerly known as arghasnarg' does give a an appropriately Dr. Moreau-like vibe.
That is awesome dudeskis, the pravda is out there,
map of The Most Culturally Chauvinistic Europeans, percent agreeing that 'our people are not perfect but our culture is superior to others',
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/w2mvad/the_most_culturally_chauvinistic_europeans/
The winner is --Russia! at 69%, tying with Bulgaria.
Hmm, the source Pew version has Greeks, Georgians and Armenians all north of 80% - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/10/29/eastern-and-western-europeans-differ-on-importance-of-religion-views-of-minorities-and-key-social-issues/
dear god, I have gone blind in service to easy snark.
Kevin's definitely right. Even converting to 100% electric cars will leave a large chunk of transportation burning carbon -- there are no electric container ships, and no electric airplanes.
And transportation is not the majority of CO2 emissions, either. Fertilizer, concrete and steel production all produce large amounts of CO2 as well.
And look at this graph:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region
See how the US carbon emissions peaked in 2002? See how the EU's peaked in 2007? See how little that matters?
We humans simply don't have the technology to decarbonize while Asia and Africa develop economically, and we maintain our economies in the West. And even decarbonizing the US and EU economies is more like a 70-100 year task, not something that's going to happen by 2040.
We can make a lot of progress, and if the Republican party goes a little less crazy, we may be able to fund some good R&D here. But looking at that graph above, it's clear we need some "temporary hacks" to keep the planet cooler over the next century.
Carbon has always been burned. Burning some carbon is necessary. Too much is not.
I bet you hang out on Watts Up With That. According to your graph, the emissions from international transportation are pretty small. Once we deal with the low hanging fruit, we will have more options for dealing with the small stuff.
U.S. carbon emissions peaked in 2007. And the US and European peaks have been hugely impactful in both China and India. An existence proof that carbon emissions can be reduced as economies grow is always nice to have. Meanwhile, carbon emissions in those two large countries are plateauing even as they rapidly grow economically. China and India have many incentives for phasing out coal (like reducing health care costs), and humanity has plenty of technologies that are exponentially being deployed.
Clean Energy is a manufacturing technology which has much different learning curves and deployment curves than the old fashioned mining technologies. And the developing world will mostly leap-frog directly to these new energy technologies as they become increasingly available.
By outsourcing our manufacturing, we outsourced our CO2 emissions. And by peaking, does not by any means mean we're doing better than anyone else. Per capita, US wins by a mile.
Reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the ground would work for temperature control, but at the cost of reduced plant growth rates. A more direct, and probably cheaper, approach involves the fact that much of the world's ocean area is limited in bioactivity by iron scarcity. Fertilizing large areas of ocean with quite small concentrations of water soluble iron compounds will trigger a plankton bloom that will sequester very large amounts of carbon. Much of that will be sequestered for a very long time as the plankton die and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
The reduce sunlight crowd have no future. Just suggesting it should equal public execution.
"Across all these dimensions, the specific SAI deployment, and associated governance, is critical. A well-coordinated use of a small amount of SAI would incur negligible risks, but this is an optimistic scenario. Conversely, larger use of SAI used in an uncoordinated manner poses many potential dangers. We cannot equivocally determine whether SAI will be worse than warming. For now, a heavy reliance on SAI seems an imprudent policy response."
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fclim.2021.720312/full
Who thinks we have until 2040 to hit net zero? 2035?
As I've said for the last few years, we've already gone past the rubicon on holding to 1.5°C rise, that we're left debating whether or not we'll be able to stop the worst-case scenario.
As for geoengineering, you're asking for a global solution at a time when we couldn't even muster the resources to stop SARS-CoV-2. I think the vast majority of humanity is okay with 5% of humanity dying right now.
And geoengineering is a stop-gap at best. At worst, it's an indefinite hack requiring additional capital and resources dedicated to offsetting GHG.
The ultimate solution is always going to be fusion. The speed at which we make fusion a reality is determined by the number of people working on the problems. Boosting research to billions of dollars will do that.
If you honestly think we can stop climate change from hitting the worst-case scenario, look around. How many people are wearing masks indoors?
If people can't even make the simple sacrifice of wearing a mask indoors to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2, then it seems very unlikely that we'll be able to stop climate change.
Fusion still requires electrifying everything.
You can just stick a Mr. Fusion in your car.
This post starts out with a bullshit strawman argument. First, the poll asking what people would pay. (1) Tax the Fucking Rich! (2) How is having more, better jobs and cleaner air and cheaper transportation "paying"?
Then: "Neither Chinese nor Indian voters have any interest in freezing or lowering their standard of living at a quarter of our level". And yet, *no one* is asking the Chinese nor Indians to lower their standard of living. We want them to raise their standard of living. We want them to reduce pollution and breathe cleaner air and be healthier.
The initial meaningful change is not expensive. Agreeing that building codes should stop making the matter worse: new residential buildings can use all electric for heat pumps, water heating, clothes drying, and cooking. If you want to insist that gas prices are and always will be cheap, there are numerous ways to rebate the cost of electricity back to consumers.
Set a date to stop selling Internal Combustion Engine cars. This is in many ways equivalent to engaging in the next round of fuel economy standards.
Create funding to plan for and migrate to better metro area transportation systems. Our current transportation systems are incredibly expensive and congested. We need better transportation options.
We are getting the exponentially growing infrastructure to the point where it is starting to have an impact. Throwing up our hands at this point and claiming it can't grow any further is short-sighted.
India is a semi-tropical country. Very few Indians have the option of freezing; as warming continues, much of the population of India is at risk of cooking.
There are some parts of China that get cold.
Sulfates in the air may reduce the temperature a bit, but it will, as others have pointed out, not reduce ocean acidification. It will reduce plant growth and reduce the effectiveness of solar panels. Might even reduce wind a bit.
The answer is to get carbon out of the air. Get a lot of olivine sand spread around in moist areas. This in addition to protecting forests, growing plants and burying them.
Of course, global warming is just one problem facing us. We are depleting many of the resources we need to be a technological society. Copper is becoming scarce. Building sand is becoming scarce. There is not enough easily accessible stuff for all 8 billion of us to live like Americans and Europeans.
With the exception of some small, isolated societies, we have organized ourselves around the principal of getting more. More food, more wealth, more children, etc.
Unlike in science fiction movies, there is no world order that can direct humanity to behave in a way that is good for our own survival. There are ways we could survive and keep the planet livable for us and all sorts of other species, but we won't implement them.
We are like yeast. We grow and grow and grow till we reach the limits of growth then the population will collapse.
No single raindrop feels responsible for the flood. No single human feels responsible for making the world inhabitable for most people and animals.
Your second last paragraph is probably wrong. Birth rates are dropping all over the world. A steadily increasing number of countries are actually below replacement rate and into negative population growth. Informed extrapolation suggests that, barring catastrophic population reduction, the human population will probably peak before the end of this century at between 10 and 12 billion people, and then slowly decline.
You know, as climate catastrophes occur more frequently, so too will exogenous events affecting inflation at both the core and headline levels.
Supply chain resiliency in the face of adverse climate events is going to be a growing problem.
Adverse climate events are only a problem if they're rare. If they become common, we make preparations. For example, where I live we get several feet of snow in the average winter. A foot of snow in a day is just not a big deal. The plows clear the roads and people carry on about their business. On the other hand, what happens in Houston, or Atlanta, or Miami, if they get a few inches of snow? They're not used to it or prepared for it and it becomes massively disruptive.
The supply chain can handle adverse weather. What it has a problem with is unusual weather.
"The Republican Party remains unanimously opposed to clean energy because they oppose anything that raises the possibility of corporate regulation."
I don't think that is what mainly motivates rank and file Republicans. They think global warming is a minor issue if an issue at all. And they don't like renewable energy technologies because Democrats like them. Republicans today are driven mainly by finding angles to oppose all things Democrats support. Makes sense since they see Democrats leading the country as bad, fully corrupt people - so anything they support must be tainted.
It's funny, Republicans used to say Democrats are driven by ideology - which of course is somewhat true - but now Republicans are the kings and queens of ideology. The ideology is based on finding a simple narrative to oppose each thing Democrats want. Then repeat this narrative over and over a million times with subtle variations. The group think grows strong and impenetrable.
That is the national party line, downstream is not the same. Rural areas and green energy are like old friends.
We are done, although it will be a slow demise. Time for some small species scurrying underfoot to replay the role mammals played some sixty million years ago.