http://reinventors.net/staring-down-the-possibility-of-geoengineering/#sthash.yOege0Aq.dpuf
Staring Down the Possibility of Geoengineering Despite the deliberate framing of this roundtable around broad Climate Management, this conversation was mostly about geoengineering. It’s one of those conversations that most people don’t want to have, but it might be getting to a point where we must.The mega-problem of climate change is a wicked problem, one that is super complex and has many dimensions with no clear or easy solutions. Jamais Cascio, the author of a recent book on geoengineering who set the table (as we say) for this roundtable, pointed out two aspects of this problem that make it particularly hard. There’s the collective action problem: no one nation or actor can make much of a dent on the problem so you have to get almost all nations acting together to make progress – and the incentives for an individual nation is to be a free rider and let others go first.Then there’s the lag time problem: even if we did everything we could do to stop global warming pollution, we might not see the results of those efforts for another couple decades. We already have put so much CO2 in the atmosphere that it’s going to have to play out for a long while. That makes it very hard to build and hold the political will in democratic societies that are used to immediate gratification.Any civilization with foresight would at least have to consider the possibility of failure on those two fronts and begin to search for a backup Plan B. That’s not to say that we don’t try to do everything we can to mitigate our current impact on the climate, but we can’t assume that will work and then end up in a real bind.Enter geoengineering…The geoengineering discussion of this roundtable really needs to be watched (below) to get the full complexity, but here are some of the highlights:Alan Robock, a climate scientist and geoengineering expert from Rutgers University, laid out the the two main options we have, with the pros and cons. One focuses on sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, like trees and oceans naturally do over time. However, the time it takes to do that is slow, very slow.The other approach focuses on blocking a portion of sunlight on its way into the atmosphere, like putting particles in the upper atmosphere like volcanoes naturally do. We know from volcanoes that these effects can be immediate, but there are many possible negative side effects like crop failures and weather disruptions.David Brin, scientist and science-fiction author, made a strong case that we should proceed with experiments in geoengineering. He was particularly interested in how we might artificially stir up ocean bottoms to jumpstart processes that would naturally suck more carbon into the oceans – something he first explored in his novel Earth.Ramez Naam, a computer scientist and author, thought we should proceed with much more research into many different approaches to climate change but be fully prepared that many of them will fail. Meanwhile, he had 3 practical suggestions that anyone can do now to help make progress on the climate change front. (You can see them laid out in a short video below.)Dawn Danby, senior sustainable design program manager at Autodesk, also stuck more to immediate options and championed smaller eco-engineeering projects like reforestation. These are not the grand plan final solutions but can make progress now and teach us much.Gil Friend, CEO of Natural Logic, emphasized the need for much more dramatic efforts at migration to keep more carbon from getting in the atmosphere. He proposed cutting the massive subsidies that currently go to the oil and coal industries and get the costs of carbon fuels to reflect their full and actual costs. He even talked about paying off the energy companies to keep the proven reserves they own in the ground.Oliver Morton, editor at The Economist joining us from Europe, reminded everyone that though the debate on what the United States does on climate change is important, the real issue is what the 5 billion people on the planet not yet living middle class lifestyles will do in the coming decades as they move out of poverty. Cracking the new sustainable middle class lifestyle model for them to live is going to be crucial too. Check out the video of the whole session to get many more ideas and all the nuance of the arguments mentioned above. And we’ve broken out some individual videos on specific ideas that you might want to spread around.- See more at: http://reinventors.net/staring-down-the-possibility-of-geoengineering/#sthash.yOege0Aq.dpuf -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
