RSS Feed MenuPresident Obama’s science adviser has told the Associated Press that the climate situation is so dire that the administration will consider geoengineering to arrest and reverse the planet’s warming.
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.
“It’s got to be looked at,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.”
Holdren outlined several “tipping points” involving global warming that could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of “really intolerable consequences,” he said.
Here’s a question: why are we considering the most radical approaches before even trying the less radical?
Start with reforestation. Here’s from January’s global edition of the New York Times:
The land where Marta Ortega de Wing raised hundreds of pigs until 10 years ago is being overtaken by galloping jungle — palms, lizards and ants.
Instead of farming, she now shops at the supermarket and her grown children and grandchildren live in places like Panama City and New York.
Here, and in other tropical countries around the world, small holdings like Ms. Ortega de Wing’s — and much larger swaths of farmland — are reverting to nature, as people abandon their land and move to the cities in search of better livings.
These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest — an iconic environmental cause — may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.
“There is far more forest here than there was 30 years ago,” said Ms. Ortega de Wing, 64, who remembers fields of mango trees and banana plants.
A tree can be a device for storing carbon dioxide. And with a little new technology, it can be a device for pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The physicist Freeman Dyson made this arresting point in the New York Review of Books last year:
[I]f we can control what the plants do with the carbon, the fate of the carbon in the atmosphere is in our hands. That is what Nordhaus meant when he mentioned “genetically engineered carbon-eating trees” as a low-cost backstop to global warming. The science and technology of genetic engineering are not yet ripe for large-scale use. We do not understand the language of the genome well enough to read and write it fluently. But the science is advancing rapidly, and the technology of reading and writing genomes is advancing even more rapidly. I consider it likely that we shall have “genetically engineered carbon-eating trees” within twenty years, and almost certainly within fifty years.
Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes into its grasp. … [A] big fraction of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes within the grasp of biotechnology every decade. If one quarter of the world’s forests were replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for wildlife, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by half in about fifty years.
It’s a paradox that some of the people most concerned about climate change oppose the two simplest, cheapest, and readiest solutions: nuclear energy and genetic engineering. At some point, they are going to have to make up their mind about which of these causes really does command top priority – because the refusal to consider the best solutions will impede and prevent the resolution of the problem.
krove // Apr 8, 2009 at 11:23 am
Three Mile Island anyone. A recent article by someone who did the cleanup there said the radiation exposure and it’s effects were deliberately understated as a spin to minimise damage to the Nuclear industry. So no thanks.I will go with wind, wave and solar.
dendup // Apr 8, 2009 at 1:52 pm
At least you provided the link to the article the ending of which is the following:”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.”"desparate enough” is the operative phrase. So that leaves nuclear. Our friends at Republicans for Environmental Protection say:http://www.rep.org/policy/energy_climate_full.html”It is in the nations interest to develop promising technologies for improving plant security and economics, managing high-level nuclear wastes, and minimizing risks of theft and diversion of fissile materials. Deployment of reprocessing technologies and of fast reactors is a promising approach. Its important, however, to proceed cautiously, so that cost, technical feasibility, and proliferation risk issues are resolved before widespread deployment begins.”So we are not there yet. Can these issues ever be “resolved”? (Now someone from RFEP will reply that, well while they meant what they said, kind of, what it doesn’t counterdict what you said, knd of.)So your paradox rests of “some people” . I know. Some people will say anything.
sinz54 // Apr 8, 2009 at 4:11 pm
krove: The number of people who died at Three Mile Island is zero. The number of people who die in automobile accidents each year is in the tens of thousands.Yours is an example of irrational risk perception.
sinz54 // Apr 8, 2009 at 4:24 pm
If it takes us 50 years to develop genetically engineered carbon-eating trees (and even more time to seed the world’s lands with them), it will likely be too late.Incidentally, a discussion of how to produce electricity, while important, is not America’s biggest problem. Over 60% of America’s energy needs are for transportation–we’re a big country and a mobile society. And so far at least, no one has developed a practical alternative to fossil fuels for that purpose. (Even the Chevy Volt technology won’t scale up to an 18-wheel tractor-trailer, yet much of America’s cargo is hauled on those trucks.) You can’t run a truck on solar power or wind power.But if the demand were there, you could have trucks with high-mileage hybrid engines.
Rel // Apr 9, 2009 at 9:56 am
David,As noted by another commenter, Holdren explicitly raised genetic engineering as a possible climate solution in his interview. I hope your post was written in haste and that you’ll write a mea culpa. Otherwise, it seems like an example of the sort of partisan hackery that you (usually) avoid.That said, don’t hold your breath waiting for a genetically-engineered white horse. There’s something like 10 gigatons (Gt) of carbon stored in the biosphere. Industrial activity pumps something like 7 Gt into the atmosphere each year, and rising. So we would need to dramatically increase the mass of carbon in the biosphere to sop up a large fraction of what we are putting in. That can’t be done easily, nor quickly (these “super trees” will not grow overnight). There is also the problem of nutrient limitation – plants need more than water and CO2 to grow. They need phosphorus, nitrogen, etc., all of which are in limited supply unless we expend energy to provide them. I don’t know if anyone has run the numbers, but it’s hard to imagine that when all is said-and-done the net gain in C sequestration will be as impressive as you might think.So while genetic engineering may prove to be an important part of the solution it is not going to magically eliminate the problem as your post implies. As for nuclear, the best way to boost nuclear, unless you want to get the gov’t involved in some socialistic scheme to build powerplants itself, is to raise the cost of fossil fuel use, via a carbon tax or other less efficient means (cap-and-trade). I can tell you for a fact that once you get beyond the self-conscious environmentalism of the Greenpeace crowd, and talk instead to people like Holdren who really grapple with this issue in a serious way, nuclear is NEVER off the table. See, for example, this open letter from James Hanson:http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20081229_DearMichelleAndBarack.pdfHanson is often held up by the right as an wild-eyed demon of the envrionmental left. But he doesn’t like cap-and-trade and calls for promotion of nuclear power. I imagine that Holdren and Obama are publicly circumspect about nuclear because they have to worry about the wild-eyed crazies in their constituency, just as Republicans choose discretion over confrontation when dealing with right-wing crazies (like those who want to ignore the science). That doesn’t mean they won’t pursue policies with the “unintended” consequence of boosting nuclear power in coming years.Maybe New Majority could do something useful by forging an alliance between intelligent environmentalists like Hanson and intelligent conservatives. That might create a political space in which the crazies on both sides of this issue would have less leverage. Slamming Holdren undeservedly and trivializing the positions of those on the reasonable left is not a way to accomplish this goal.Just a thought.
Churl // Apr 10, 2009 at 3:34 am
krove,”A recent article by someone who did the cleanup [at Three Mile Island]….”An un-referenced article by an unnamed person. Now that’s the sort of information that should convince anyone that your suspicions of nuclear power are well founded.
Blackaces // Apr 10, 2009 at 10:02 am
I believe that some of the new pebble-bed reactors are far safer than the ones we have now. I believe that the South Africans are attempting to build these reactors. The likelihood of a meltdown with these reactors is practically nil. Why aren’t we building these sort of things here? They’re clean, safe, and provide oodles of cheap energy. I’m somewhat of an environmentalist and I support nuclear energy.
neispace // Apr 14, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Most people oppose nuclear because they don’t want either a nuclear plant or nuclear waste facility in their backyard. Freeman Dyson probably never thinks what might happen to carbon-eating trees as they evolve in the wild because a stray wind carried some seeds over to another’s farm.
chrisbrandow // Apr 22, 2009 at 9:46 am
what is frustrating about this “paradox” is that many of us who are concerned about climate change are not inherently opposed to nuclear energy out of a mindless bias. Nuclear energy is not inexpensive to begin with when construction and design costs are taken into account and it creates a toxic, dangerous waste that will last longer than any human civilization ever has. That is a very large external cost that is not easily accounted for. I am certainly no expert, but many people have looked carefully and have so far concluded that nuclear is not a good alternative for such reasons. as for genetic engineering, there is no magic bullet that has been designed that is even worth the conversation, YET. Perhaps if a magic carbon-sucking/sequestering tree were engineered, then a real conversation about the costs/benefits could be had, but so far it is just a theoretical conversation.