The 2023 UN Climate Change Conference (“COP28”) finished last month with many promises that obscure a key fact: We could easily stop climate change right now if we wanted. If we don't do it, it's just because we don't really want to. Here's how we could do it, in 3 steps:
Interesting read. A UN-approved report last year said that geoengineering by injecting sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere may be necessary, but would come with major uncertainties. Releasing S02 is not without risks which we don't fully understand, and some regions might 'lose' in terms of greater climate impacts as a result. 'The primary challenges of geoengineering are conducting field experiments to accurately assess potential consequences and developing international agreements to safely deploy and monitor geoengineering technologies.'
Also, as mentioned by others, climate change is only one of the many planetary boundaries we are exceeding; others include novel entities, biosphere integrity, land-system and freshwater change, and biochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen). The debts are mounting up as our environment (water, land, air, oceans) degrade and can support less. Surely we need a more fundamental systems change from our current economic growth model at all cost to something more sustainable.
I'm amazed that conservation is rarely mentioned in much of what I read. It must be more efficient in many cases, at least up to a point. Do we ignore it because it is just 'too hard' in our current economic system?
Thanks a million for writing this. I am retired, but up to late in 2021, I worked over 20 years in patent portfolio management for a Fortune 500 company, after having been trained as a research scientist and practiced as one (for that same company) for 15 years. One of my internal client groups, as a patent portfolio manager, was the huge, sprawling Engineering team - the folks who did the very serious work of designing, building, maintaining, troubleshooting, and improving all the "must work" hardware that goes into factories that are actually making stuff for the company to sell to people and other companies. The folks I had regular contact with were SERIOUS engineers. No "pie in the sky" for these folks. They worked on things that needed to be worked on in order for the company to make money in the short, medium, and long terms, and the things they toiled on had to work. Not just theoretically. When someone threw a switch, stuff had to work.
I was always taken, when "chewing the fat" with these folks, by how many of them dismissed as "solutions" most every thing in your "Part 1" that is commonly put forward as being responsive to the threat of climate change - ESPECIALLY the things put forward most avidly by experts in environmental sciences. The common complaint was that they were good ideas, but "drops in the bucket". The most common explanation for why they were always the things that "experts" (with educations equal to their own) were putting forward, was that the experts are "too close to the problem" and "dependent for employment on companies and agencies tied to those approaches". Almost to a person, these engineers believed that - eventually - the world will do your "Part 3", but likely, not until the pain of climate change is very, very great. Because... politics...
We need more folks like you making The Big Picture clear - or at least clearer. Just because something is good to do, does not make it a solution to a problem. We need to approach this from a standpoint of "If the plan NEEDS to WORK (and it does...), what does the plan NEED to include?" My experience is that many, many well-educated engineers already "get" what you're saying here - and we need to get it better communicated to the rest of the culture.
Tomas, interesting as always. I understand that nuclear fission seems attractive now because it doesn't release CO2, but the problem of how to safely transport and dispose of highly radioactive waste has still not been solved. Also, once countries adopt nuclear fission at scale, it seems unlikely that it will be used only as a transition to renewable sources after large expenditures on infrastructure. There is the potential that the nuclear "patch" will become permanent, returning us to same problems that led to abandonment of fission in the first place. Fusion is the pipe dream, but still far from being practical. There is much room for exploitation of solar, wind, and geothermal, along with new battery technology, before going to fission.
"We can stop global warming with $700M." Where are the sane voices advocating for this, and how can it become more prominent in the media?
That would be a worthwhile group on the planned social graph (or how it was called)!
As the intermediate solution (3) is simple and cheap, it looks like it's kept in the dark so businesses can better run EV /PV etc. campaigns while the climate doomsday is lurking around the corner. But as that cooling off the planet solution is kept at bay, biodiversity is suffering every day and this cannot be reverted. Pondering over it, the great article sparked some sad thoughts I wish my brain did not produce.
By the way, the chemistry interlude does make very much sense, I would not want to miss it.
I'm impressed by Making Sunsets: I just offset (the forcing of) my projected emissions for the year (based on a WWF calculator that didn't seem great but gave a plausible answer (8 tonnes) that I think is usable for this purpose) for just £72 (I was a little disappointed it converted at £1/$ but it's still mad cheap). I read their FAQ and they seemed on top enough of things for me to be happy to do that, as the worst plausible case scenario I see is they're being a few times optimistic, so maybe I offset ~1/3rd of my year's emissions but that's still both good and a good price, so fair dinkum. And maybe the lower forcing estimates for carbon dioxide are right and I actually just over-offset (even better and even better value).
Tomas, I always enjoy your essays but I *strongly* disagree with your arguments here.
1. I agree we need to electrify the world and that will go a long way in resolving our problems. The only thing I would add as a nuance is that we need to scale those solutions, and do it fast. We have not solved energy storage and renewable intermitency, and we need that cheeply at scale. Building nuclear plants take decades, we need lots of materials for the transition and it is not certain supply will match demand... these factors need to be accounted for when thinking about the pace of the transition. I believe it can be done, but looking at current trajectory I do not think we are nearly going fast enough *if we want to stay below 2 degrees*. Same thing on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) current usage is < 0.1% of total fuel and we need to scale production from 5 million litters today to 449 billion litters in 2030 - not saying it can't be done, but that's going to be very challenging, especially when considering limited supply of feedstock -- https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2022-releases/2022-06-21-02/
2. These theoretical calculations are nice and beautiful, but I'm worried they're quite quite far from the reality. Take Lithos, who "accelerates the natural ability of rocks to absorb CO₂ by spreading superfine crushed basalt on farmlands and measuring the removal empirically": Frontier - a group of some of the world leading companies - made a commitment to purchase their carbon credits at $370/ton, and they're saying that the company is on a path to achieve $100/ton by 2030. These are EXPERTS working on the topic, saying that the price is 10-35x more expensive than your calculation AND they're saying that there will be challenges at scale "At very large scales, there are limits to all carbon removal methods, Lithos’s approach included. Even though waste basalt is currently abundant, the method’s dependence on its availability as a feedstock could become a limiting factor when scaling up to gigaton levels." -- https://frontierclimate.com/portfolio/lithos. So again, reality is more complex than some napking math.
3. We have absolutely NO idea how geoingeneering works and what would be the impacts of it. The earth's climate is one whole sytem, and modifications in the US could have consequences in Asia "for example, that the monsoon season in south and south-east Asia would be disrupted, and solar geoengineering could cause agricultural losses, food crises and water insecurity in many parts of the world". That is from a letter signed by 430 experts to halt all research in that space, which I encourage you to read here: https://www.solargeoeng.org/. Because of this we'd need global alignement, which will never happen. And if some countries start messing with other countries' climate, I guarantee you this will lead to war.
More than strongly disagreeing with you, I think those kind of post are not intellectually rigorous and are very dangerous. Don't get me wrong, we need optimism and there are solutions that we need to continue scaling, but arguing we can solve climate change with a $700m check and some rocks is just plainly wrong and creates a false sense of non-urgency (which the comment section very well shows). When you start looking at every solutions in details, there are huge challenges that come with them, and we have not solved those and are often far from solving them.
I understand you desire to take a position and be contrarian, and I generally enjoy that, but on that topic I think you should be careful when claiming that you know better than thousands of scientists and entrepreneurs working day and night on this. Not saying they're necessarily right and don't have biases that should be pointed out, but when every top researcher in its field is ringing the alarm, I find it foolish to AT LEAST not mention in your essay why you could be wrong.
I'd have to go read my thesis again (that's from 43 years ago when we used to write by hand) but I am absolutely 100% sure that I never used the word "badder".
This platform is for people who want to communicate. In communication theory we have the concepts of the "sender", the "medium" and the "receiver". One of the most important parts of this process is that the sender and the receiver are able to understand the same protocol. (The protocol is the method of encoding and decoding the information so that the medium can carry it without error. )
Unfortunately, this particular receiver is unable to decode the sender's data after receiving it.
Practically, the use of a cable-tube to send SO2 to the stratosphere is probably very difficult and possible dangerous. Surely it would be easier and simpler to just keep sending up balloons with a pack of SO2 for dispersal, then burn the balloons?
Hi Tomas, great article. I recently joined your subscription, thanks for your work.
One comment on the EV transition. You refer to two sources that bring very differrent results. The first link predicts that 100% of car sales will be EV by 2030.
You can do all those things and the climate will still change. The climate changed before humans and will continue to do so.
The pandemic has shown us that if you mess with complex systems (i.e reflect sunlight), you will get a whole load of unintended consequences that often will be much worse.
Poor scientific assumption: increased CO2 increases temperatures. The temperature record supports the reverse. Predictions from climate models that cannot even account for clouds are useless as evidenced by their inability to predict anything. There should be a debate about climate change - pit the scientists whose livelihood depends on govt/corp funding and pit them against independent scientific voices:
That said, I don't get the urgency to phase out fossil fuels (which is not a zero cost endeavor for human wellbeing) nor the necessity to deploy vast amounts of land and resource for renewables, when you already have the option of an highly concentrated energy in the form of nuclear generated electricity
Thanks for the great write-up on S02 geo-engineering and CCS. I wish more smart, climate oriented people would focus on them.
Because #1 is not going to happen anytime soon. It just baffles me that it's presented as a choice. It's not a choice. We cannot do it. We are not even remotely close to being able to do it. Over 75% of world wide energy comes from fossil fuels. The rest is mostly nuclear and hydro. Nuclear is effectively illegal to build in most of the Western world, and we've already built most of the hydro we can.
We can go all out developing all the technologies listed here and it will still be a decade before we even begin to make a large dent. This isn't just a matter of political will, or investments. It's a matter of dealing with the physical world. You can't just snap your fingers and choose to update 75% of the world's energy infrastructure.
We still have no real solution to deal with the seasonality of solar and wind. This will take decades to build out. We still have no real solution to make concrete, steel, fertilizers and plastics. This will also take decades to build out.
Interesting read. A UN-approved report last year said that geoengineering by injecting sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere may be necessary, but would come with major uncertainties. Releasing S02 is not without risks which we don't fully understand, and some regions might 'lose' in terms of greater climate impacts as a result. 'The primary challenges of geoengineering are conducting field experiments to accurately assess potential consequences and developing international agreements to safely deploy and monitor geoengineering technologies.'
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0398-8
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/11/solar-geoengineering-climate-change-new-study
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2022/reversing-climate-change-with-geoengineering/
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/mar/right-dose-geoengineering-could-reduce-climate-change-risks
Also, as mentioned by others, climate change is only one of the many planetary boundaries we are exceeding; others include novel entities, biosphere integrity, land-system and freshwater change, and biochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen). The debts are mounting up as our environment (water, land, air, oceans) degrade and can support less. Surely we need a more fundamental systems change from our current economic growth model at all cost to something more sustainable.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-09-18/the-earth-system-has-passed-six-of-nine-planetary-boundaries/
I'm amazed that conservation is rarely mentioned in much of what I read. It must be more efficient in many cases, at least up to a point. Do we ignore it because it is just 'too hard' in our current economic system?
Thanks a million for writing this. I am retired, but up to late in 2021, I worked over 20 years in patent portfolio management for a Fortune 500 company, after having been trained as a research scientist and practiced as one (for that same company) for 15 years. One of my internal client groups, as a patent portfolio manager, was the huge, sprawling Engineering team - the folks who did the very serious work of designing, building, maintaining, troubleshooting, and improving all the "must work" hardware that goes into factories that are actually making stuff for the company to sell to people and other companies. The folks I had regular contact with were SERIOUS engineers. No "pie in the sky" for these folks. They worked on things that needed to be worked on in order for the company to make money in the short, medium, and long terms, and the things they toiled on had to work. Not just theoretically. When someone threw a switch, stuff had to work.
I was always taken, when "chewing the fat" with these folks, by how many of them dismissed as "solutions" most every thing in your "Part 1" that is commonly put forward as being responsive to the threat of climate change - ESPECIALLY the things put forward most avidly by experts in environmental sciences. The common complaint was that they were good ideas, but "drops in the bucket". The most common explanation for why they were always the things that "experts" (with educations equal to their own) were putting forward, was that the experts are "too close to the problem" and "dependent for employment on companies and agencies tied to those approaches". Almost to a person, these engineers believed that - eventually - the world will do your "Part 3", but likely, not until the pain of climate change is very, very great. Because... politics...
We need more folks like you making The Big Picture clear - or at least clearer. Just because something is good to do, does not make it a solution to a problem. We need to approach this from a standpoint of "If the plan NEEDS to WORK (and it does...), what does the plan NEED to include?" My experience is that many, many well-educated engineers already "get" what you're saying here - and we need to get it better communicated to the rest of the culture.
Tomas, interesting as always. I understand that nuclear fission seems attractive now because it doesn't release CO2, but the problem of how to safely transport and dispose of highly radioactive waste has still not been solved. Also, once countries adopt nuclear fission at scale, it seems unlikely that it will be used only as a transition to renewable sources after large expenditures on infrastructure. There is the potential that the nuclear "patch" will become permanent, returning us to same problems that led to abandonment of fission in the first place. Fusion is the pipe dream, but still far from being practical. There is much room for exploitation of solar, wind, and geothermal, along with new battery technology, before going to fission.
"We can stop global warming with $700M." Where are the sane voices advocating for this, and how can it become more prominent in the media?
That would be a worthwhile group on the planned social graph (or how it was called)!
As the intermediate solution (3) is simple and cheap, it looks like it's kept in the dark so businesses can better run EV /PV etc. campaigns while the climate doomsday is lurking around the corner. But as that cooling off the planet solution is kept at bay, biodiversity is suffering every day and this cannot be reverted. Pondering over it, the great article sparked some sad thoughts I wish my brain did not produce.
By the way, the chemistry interlude does make very much sense, I would not want to miss it.
I'm impressed by Making Sunsets: I just offset (the forcing of) my projected emissions for the year (based on a WWF calculator that didn't seem great but gave a plausible answer (8 tonnes) that I think is usable for this purpose) for just £72 (I was a little disappointed it converted at £1/$ but it's still mad cheap). I read their FAQ and they seemed on top enough of things for me to be happy to do that, as the worst plausible case scenario I see is they're being a few times optimistic, so maybe I offset ~1/3rd of my year's emissions but that's still both good and a good price, so fair dinkum. And maybe the lower forcing estimates for carbon dioxide are right and I actually just over-offset (even better and even better value).
Thanks for the tip!
Brilliant! The question then becomes what are these so-called experts working on rather than doing this, and why?
Seems like #3 solves the problem without the expense or dislocations of #1 and #2.
Tomas, I always enjoy your essays but I *strongly* disagree with your arguments here.
1. I agree we need to electrify the world and that will go a long way in resolving our problems. The only thing I would add as a nuance is that we need to scale those solutions, and do it fast. We have not solved energy storage and renewable intermitency, and we need that cheeply at scale. Building nuclear plants take decades, we need lots of materials for the transition and it is not certain supply will match demand... these factors need to be accounted for when thinking about the pace of the transition. I believe it can be done, but looking at current trajectory I do not think we are nearly going fast enough *if we want to stay below 2 degrees*. Same thing on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) current usage is < 0.1% of total fuel and we need to scale production from 5 million litters today to 449 billion litters in 2030 - not saying it can't be done, but that's going to be very challenging, especially when considering limited supply of feedstock -- https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2022-releases/2022-06-21-02/
2. These theoretical calculations are nice and beautiful, but I'm worried they're quite quite far from the reality. Take Lithos, who "accelerates the natural ability of rocks to absorb CO₂ by spreading superfine crushed basalt on farmlands and measuring the removal empirically": Frontier - a group of some of the world leading companies - made a commitment to purchase their carbon credits at $370/ton, and they're saying that the company is on a path to achieve $100/ton by 2030. These are EXPERTS working on the topic, saying that the price is 10-35x more expensive than your calculation AND they're saying that there will be challenges at scale "At very large scales, there are limits to all carbon removal methods, Lithos’s approach included. Even though waste basalt is currently abundant, the method’s dependence on its availability as a feedstock could become a limiting factor when scaling up to gigaton levels." -- https://frontierclimate.com/portfolio/lithos. So again, reality is more complex than some napking math.
3. We have absolutely NO idea how geoingeneering works and what would be the impacts of it. The earth's climate is one whole sytem, and modifications in the US could have consequences in Asia "for example, that the monsoon season in south and south-east Asia would be disrupted, and solar geoengineering could cause agricultural losses, food crises and water insecurity in many parts of the world". That is from a letter signed by 430 experts to halt all research in that space, which I encourage you to read here: https://www.solargeoeng.org/. Because of this we'd need global alignement, which will never happen. And if some countries start messing with other countries' climate, I guarantee you this will lead to war.
More than strongly disagreeing with you, I think those kind of post are not intellectually rigorous and are very dangerous. Don't get me wrong, we need optimism and there are solutions that we need to continue scaling, but arguing we can solve climate change with a $700m check and some rocks is just plainly wrong and creates a false sense of non-urgency (which the comment section very well shows). When you start looking at every solutions in details, there are huge challenges that come with them, and we have not solved those and are often far from solving them.
I understand you desire to take a position and be contrarian, and I generally enjoy that, but on that topic I think you should be careful when claiming that you know better than thousands of scientists and entrepreneurs working day and night on this. Not saying they're necessarily right and don't have biases that should be pointed out, but when every top researcher in its field is ringing the alarm, I find it foolish to AT LEAST not mention in your essay why you could be wrong.
EDITED for a typo in your name, apologies :D
I'd have to go read my thesis again (that's from 43 years ago when we used to write by hand) but I am absolutely 100% sure that I never used the word "badder".
This platform is for people who want to communicate. In communication theory we have the concepts of the "sender", the "medium" and the "receiver". One of the most important parts of this process is that the sender and the receiver are able to understand the same protocol. (The protocol is the method of encoding and decoding the information so that the medium can carry it without error. )
Unfortunately, this particular receiver is unable to decode the sender's data after receiving it.
Good point. Well, he said it, not me. I studied Thermodynamics for engineering purposes, but I'm not a scientist.
Maybe the size of the body has an effect too.
Practically, the use of a cable-tube to send SO2 to the stratosphere is probably very difficult and possible dangerous. Surely it would be easier and simpler to just keep sending up balloons with a pack of SO2 for dispersal, then burn the balloons?
Hi Tomas, great article. I recently joined your subscription, thanks for your work.
One comment on the EV transition. You refer to two sources that bring very differrent results. The first link predicts that 100% of car sales will be EV by 2030.
https://medium.com/enrique-dans/the-internal-combustion-engine-is-dead-and-about-time-too-3acd70b74f9f
Then the Bloomberg chart predicts a much more conservative EV% sales.
What seems off in the Bloomberg chart is that 2025 seems to be at <10%, when according to the first source, we are already at 20%
what's your view here?
is there an definition problem here? (ie some sources counting Hybrid cars as EV?)
You can do all those things and the climate will still change. The climate changed before humans and will continue to do so.
The pandemic has shown us that if you mess with complex systems (i.e reflect sunlight), you will get a whole load of unintended consequences that often will be much worse.
Poor scientific assumption: increased CO2 increases temperatures. The temperature record supports the reverse. Predictions from climate models that cannot even account for clouds are useless as evidenced by their inability to predict anything. There should be a debate about climate change - pit the scientists whose livelihood depends on govt/corp funding and pit them against independent scientific voices:
https://www.2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com/p/psyop-climate-change-update-1200
That said, I don't get the urgency to phase out fossil fuels (which is not a zero cost endeavor for human wellbeing) nor the necessity to deploy vast amounts of land and resource for renewables, when you already have the option of an highly concentrated energy in the form of nuclear generated electricity
Thanks for the great write-up on S02 geo-engineering and CCS. I wish more smart, climate oriented people would focus on them.
Because #1 is not going to happen anytime soon. It just baffles me that it's presented as a choice. It's not a choice. We cannot do it. We are not even remotely close to being able to do it. Over 75% of world wide energy comes from fossil fuels. The rest is mostly nuclear and hydro. Nuclear is effectively illegal to build in most of the Western world, and we've already built most of the hydro we can.
We can go all out developing all the technologies listed here and it will still be a decade before we even begin to make a large dent. This isn't just a matter of political will, or investments. It's a matter of dealing with the physical world. You can't just snap your fingers and choose to update 75% of the world's energy infrastructure.
We still have no real solution to deal with the seasonality of solar and wind. This will take decades to build out. We still have no real solution to make concrete, steel, fertilizers and plastics. This will also take decades to build out.
Donate to https://makesunsets.com/ everyone