A number of people have argued today that a research budget for geoengineering should be 100% focused on SRM, or nearly so. A few of the reasons given:
"[CDR] is just not at all likely to make an important contribution to limiting climate change until global emissions are brought down a good bit through efficiency. With global C emissions nearing 10 GtC/yr and rising, working on approaches that at maximum might make it up to sequestering 1-2 GtC/yr is just premature--we need to take other steps first." "I think CDR has to be viewed as a medium- to long-term strategy. Second, and related, as currently conceived, the deployment of CDR techniques will depend to a great extent on the policy context, in particular the existence of mandatory and robust carbon markets - as we are all aware, these are not likely to develop in the near future. " Ron says, which I support: "Oliver calls out CDR in the context of some possibilities that are neither CDR or SRM. I would lump these possibilities with CDR and reserve perhaps 15-20% for those. Rationale - need for low cost and speed, but also need buy-in from CDR-folk. Any big activity will suffer politically .if CDR is not coupled with SRM, and if there is not a darn good reason for leaving something out. One option alone would be a disaster, especially if theri effects can be shown to be additive and not duplicative. " Without going in to which CDR techniques should be prioritized, I think its worth a few simple observations: - Just because CDR is "slow-acting" doesn't mean we should be slow to deploy it. In fact, one could make exactly the opposite argument. Remember, we do need to get the carbon out of the atmosphere-- SRM doesn't solve that. - The lack of effective energy and carbon legislation and the policy that they will drive means that there is even less market capital to flow into carbon solutions, either via private equity or venture capital. Government bridge funding into quality research for CDR is even more warranted under the current circumstances--not less. - Funding research into large scale SRM without some funding earmarked for CDR as well seems politically naive, and is sure to reflect the wrong stance towards band-aids that don't address the underlying root causes. Furthermore, dividing the GE community against itself by proposing research budgets which marginalize a large portion of us also seems unwise--we need to be working together. Right? - Lastly-- $10M is a small budget. It's insufficient for the kind of serious research that any of the major techniques in either SRM or CDR will ultimately need. However, it would be invaluable as seed funding for credible research consortia assembled around the key initiatives in various area. $1-2M seed grants for perhaps 4 of the most reputable techniques, heavy on initial modeling work, with additional funding for the social sciences and for geoengineering governance and policy efforts seems sensible. Dan The carbon that goes in the atmosphere -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
