I was pleased to read Clive Hamilton’s analysis of thepolitics of
geoengineering, since I am one of those right wing technologyadvocates he
usefully but wrongly describes. I would really welcome intensive Republican and
military and big oilinterest in carbon dioxide removal, as that is the only
thing with prospect ofdelivering results on climate security and energy
security.
Multinational companies have to invest in CDRto protect their stock prices,
their reputations and their sources of supply. CDRcan deliver a win-win for the
climate and the economy. Clive’s scientificdreams falsely assume that the
science on warming means the science is also inon workable responses (ie
emission reduction).
Emission reduction will not happen, and would not stabilisethe climate even if
it did, since it would only slow the upward CO2 trajectory.We need commercial
negative emission technology on a scale bigger than totalemissions. Economic
growth powered bycoal is a freight train that no one will stop. Emission
reduction is as likelyas suggesting the French could have stopped Hitler by
reforming their taxsystem. UN emission targets, even if anyare agreed, are
nothing but a mirage that will recede as their datesapproach.
The entire emission reduction strategy is based on falseassumptions about
science, economics and politics. The power of the fossil energy industry will
easilybrush aside carbon taxes and global regulations. So rather than demonise
Newt Gingrich asHamilton suggests, a better strategy is to reach out to the
right wing, to getmoney, political will and ingenuity to identify and deliver
mutual goals onglobal scale. The political reality is that anyone perceived as
hostile to the oil and coal and gas industry cannot gain the trust of the
people who make globally crucial decisions.
As Bjorn Lomborg argues,the priority should be R&D to make CDR commercially
profitable. My view is that we can burn coal and oil and gas and thenmine the
produced carbon using industrial algae farms at sea, deliveringprofitable
commodities to fund scale up.
Clive naïvely asserts that we can’t understand enough abouthow the Earth system
operates in order to take control of it. This is a religious argument that
ignores globalrealities. Nine billion people means achoice between climate
regulation and a runaway greenhouse. Humans have planetary dominion whether
welike it or not. A Gaia Apollo project candeliver negative emission
technology in the next decade to remove more carbonfrom the air than we add.
The best target for the Paris climate conference isto harness private
enterprise to remove twenty billion tonnes of carbon fromthe air each year
within a decade.
Robert Tulip
From: Andrew Lockley <[email protected]>
To: geoengineering <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, 13 February 2015, 10:39
Subject: [geo] The Risks of Climate Engineering - NYTimes.com Hamilton
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/opinion/the-risks-of-climate-engineering.html?referrer=By
CLIVE HAMILTONFEBRUARY 12, 2015THE Republican Party has long resisted action
on climate change, but now that much of the electorate wants something done, it
needs to find a way out of the hole it has dug for itself. A committee
appointed by the National Research Council may just have handed the party a
ladder.In a two-volume report, the council is recommending that the federal
government fund a research program into geoengineering as a response to a
warming globe. The study could be a watershed moment because reports from the
council, an arm of the National Academies that provides advice on science and
technology, are often an impetus for new scientific research programs.Sometimes
known as “Plan B,” geoengineering covers a variety of technologies aimed at
deliberate, large-scale intervention in the climate system to counter global
warming.Despairing at global foot-dragging, some climate scientists now believe
that a turn to Plan B is inevitable. They see it as inscribed in the logic of
the situation. The council’s study begins with the assertion that the
“likelihood of eventually considering last-ditch efforts” to address climate
destabilization grows every year.The report is balanced in its assessment of
the science. Yet by bringing geoengineering from the fringes of the climate
debate into the mainstream, it legitimizes a dangerous approach.Beneath the
identifiable risks is not only a gut reaction to the hubris of it all — the
idea that humans could set out to regulate the Earth system, perhaps in
perpetuity — but also to what it says about where we are today. As the
committee’s chairwoman, Marcia McNutt, told The Associated Press: The public
should read this report “and say, ‘This is downright scary.’ And they should
say, ‘If this is our Hail Mary, what a scary, scary place we are in.’ ”Even
scarier is the fact that, while most geoengineering boosters see these
technologies as a means of buying time for the world to get its act together,
others promote them as a substitute for cutting emissions. In 2008, Newt
Gingrich, the former House speaker, later Republican presidential candidate and
an early backer of geoengineering, said: “Instead of penalizing ordinary
Americans, we would have an option to address global warming by rewarding
scientific invention,” adding: “Bring on the American ingenuity.”The report,
considerably more cautious, describes geoengineering as one element of a
“portfolio of responses” to climate change and examines the prospects of two
approaches — removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and enveloping the
planet in a layer of sulfate particles to reduce the amount of solar radiation
reaching the Earth’s surface.At the same time, the council makes clear that
there is “no substitute for dramatic reductions in the emissions” of greenhouse
gases to slow global warming and acidifying oceans.The lowest-risk strategies
for removing carbon dioxide are “currently limited by cost and at present
cannot achieve the desired result of removing climatically important amounts,”
the report said. On the second approach, the council said that at present it
was “opposed to climate-altering deployment” of technologies to reflect
radiation back into space.Still, the council called for research programs to
fill the gaps in our knowledge on both approaches, evoking a belief that we can
understand enough about how the Earth system operates in order to take control
of it.Expressing interest in geoengineering has been taboo for politicians
worried about climate change for fear they would be accused of shirking their
responsibility to cut carbon emissions. Yet in some congressional offices,
interest in geoengineering is strong. And Congress isn’t the only place where
there is interest. Russia in 2013 unsuccessfully sought to insert a
pro-geoengineering statement into the latest report of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change.Early work on geoengineering has given rise to one of
the strangest paradoxes in American politics: enthusiasm for geoengineering
from some who have attacked the idea of human-caused global warming. The
Heartland Institute, infamous for its billboard comparing those who support
climate science to the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, featured an article in
one of its newsletters from 2007 describing geoengineering as a “practical,
cost-effective global warming strategy.”Some scholars associated with
conservative think tanks like the Hoover Institution and the Hudson Institute
have written optimistically about geoengineering.Oil companies, too, have
dipped their toes into the geoengineering waters with Shell, for instance,
having funded research into a scheme to put lime into seawater so it absorbs
more carbon dioxide.With half of Republican voters favoring government action
to tackle global warming, any Republican administration would be tempted by the
technofix to beat all technofixes.For some, instead of global warming’s being
proof of human failure, engineering the climate would represent the triumph of
human ingenuity. While climate change threatens to destabilize the system,
geoengineering promises to protect it. If there is such a thing as a right-wing
technology, geoengineering is it.President Obama has been working assiduously
to persuade the world that the United States is at last serious about Plan A —
winding back its greenhouse gas emissions. The suspicions of much of the world
would be reignited if the United States were the first major power to invest
heavily in Plan B.Clive Hamilton is a professor of public ethics at Charles
Sturt University in Australia and the author, most recently, of “Earthmasters:
The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering.”--
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