“Nuclear power does not emit greenhouse gases, but there remains a high level of public mistrust with this source. So, although we are making good progress with eliminating coal burning plants, and a good part will be replaced with non-emitting renewable sources, most of the replacement power will have to come from natural gas. That is still good progress, since natural gas combustion releases only a little more than half the greenhouse gases that coal combustion does per unit of energy released, but it does limit how quickly and how far we can go to limit global warming while maintaining our standard of living.
“Then there’s the fourth point of attack, which is carbon capture. The most effective way to do this is by growing forests. Other plants, including edible crops like corn, capture carbon dioxide from the air as well, but the harvesting process usually releases most of it back to the air. There is some forestation activity going on here in the U.S., but there is more potential in other countries. If fresh water were abundant, then reclaiming some of the world’s deserts, including our own arid lands, would make a big difference. However, availability of fresh water is becoming as big a problem as global warming, maybe bigger — but that’s a discussion for another day.
“So, Mr. President, here in the U.S., although we got off to a slow start, we are starting to make some good progress on each of these fronts. Some of this reflects voluntary conservation actions by Americans, part of the culture change I mentioned earlier, that likely would have occurred without any policy incentives. A lot of it is due to state-level policies, like renewable power portfolio standards. Some of it has been initiated by the reinstitution of many of the elements of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan and Climate Action Plan.
“With no intent to engage in flattery, Mr. President, I think what is now giving reinforced impetus to all four points of attack is the trilateral carbon tax and credit system, which you and President Mahally negotiated with Canada and Mexico and had ratified by congress by mid-2025. That tax of $50 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted, which increases by $5 each year for the following ten years, is providing a real incentive for people and businesses to conserve, be more efficient and produce more efficient products, and use energy from lower emission energy sources. It is really working in tandem with the culture change and technology progress I mentioned earlier. Many people already want to live a less consumerist, energy-profligate lifestyle, and you’ve given them an increasingly strong incentive to do so. So, Mr. President, I do stand by my original statement that there is both bad news and good in our track record so far.”
“Thanks, Eli,” said the president, “I am glad to hear that you think the Carbon Tax and Credit Act is helping, though I think we have to give President Mahally the credit for the masterful personal leadership and persuasiveness required to get three democratic national governments on board in a few short months. My role was limited to working with the secretaries of Energy, Commerce and Treasury, as well as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and the director, National Economic Council, to design the system. We wanted to provide strong incentives to curb greenhouse gases but with minimal adverse effects on employment and income. That’s why 100 percent of the net revenue from the system is being applied to reduce federal corporate and personal taxes. So, even though the price of gasoline will have increased by 25 percent by 2035 at a $100 per ton carbon tax, and many other things will be more expensive too, a lot of the pain will be offset by having lower taxes, though not all of it. I only wish Tim were here to see the results.
“Anyway,” the president continued, “I agree that there is some good news as you said, it’s not all bad; but where does that leave us? Are we going to be successful in avoiding global warming and its harmful effects — what is the bottom line?”
“Mr. President, I am sorry to say that it appears unlikely that the objectives of the Paris Agreement will be achieved. Although many countries, like us, are taking serious actions to curtail carbon dioxide emissions and, as a result, global warming will be less than it would otherwise have been, the collective actions do not appear to be sufficient to limit warming to 2.7 or even 3.6 degrees. The best we can achieve with current actions and technology will probably be closer to 5 degrees. The reductions in emissions required from the developed nations in order to counterbalance the growth in energy consumption by the developing nations would just be too much to accept. The impact on the economies of the developed nations and on their standard of living would be too great to be sustained in a democracy. As a species we will survive, though other species will not, and many individuals among us will suffer; however, it would be quite a bit worse in the absence of the Paris Agreement.”
“Eli, I know you are being objective and spelling out the most likely outcome that science can predict, but surely there’s something more we could do. What would it take? Do we have any other options?” the president asked unhappily.
“Well, Mr. President, what it would really take would be a source of energy that doesn’t emit greenhouse gases, doesn’t have any harmful or risky side effects, and is plentiful and inexpensive. In theory such a source exists — nuclear fusion, a different type of atomic reaction than the uranium-based fission reaction that powers our existing nuclear power plants. Fusion produces more energy than fission and doesn’t leave radioactive waste behind. However, it would still encounter the same fear factor as fission does. In any case, although good people have been working on it for quite a while, a workable fusion reactor still seems a long way away. Never count technology and human ingenuity out though.
“In terms of other options, Mr. President, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the field of geoengineering and in particular, stratospheric sulfate aerosol injection. Geoengineering in general refers to deliberate manipulation of the climate, as opposed to the unintentional impacts of human activity that are giving rise to global warming. There are numerous geoengineering concepts for cooling the Earth to offset greenhouse gases. The most effective, but also controversial approach, is to inject sulfate aerosols into the upper stratosphere using aircraft. Sulfate aerosols tend to work the opposite of greenhouse gases. They reflect some of the sunlight away from the Earth, preventing it from reaching the surface rather than trapping it at the surface. It is sulphate aerosols that are the reason large volcanic eruptions tend to produce a temporary cooling effect.
“Theoretically, injection of sulphate aerosols would be a low-cost, effective and rapid way to cool the Earth, and it is reversible since they would settle out of the stratosphere in a few years if they did not get regularly replenished. However, we don’t know for sure because all the work to date has been through computer simulations with no real-world test data. This approach is highly controversial, with opposition ranging from theology to concern with potential side effects to concern that it would diminish the motivation to address the human causes of global warming. Nevertheless, geoengineering is an option and could be used temporarily to buy us time for greenhouse gas curtailment, based on current and potential new technology, to take fuller effect.
“Mr. President, I think I’ve used up more than I should of your time again. I hope it has been worthwhile for you. If you like, I can talk more about nuclear fusion and geoengineering the next time we get together.”
“Eli, thank you again for bringing me up to speed on this whole subject area. I don’t think I am going to sleep any better because of it, but I do need to know what we are facing, and I will need to think on what more we should do about it. I’ll let you pick the topic for our next session though. I am sure there are lots of other things that I should also be aware of.” The president shook hands with the senior advisor as he let him out the front door of the dining room, directly into the main corridor and past the secret service agent stationed there. Although he didn’t know it, he would soon have more pressing reasons to lose sleep over than long-term global warming.
Chapter 7
September 15, 2027
Boston, Massachuse
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There was just enough light to make out the sidewalk as Larry emerged from Tang Hall at six o’clock in the morning, switched his phone’s clock to stopwatch mode, adjusted his headlamp, and headed down Audrey Street and across Memorial Drive. He turned upstream on the path along the Charles River and settled into a steady six-mile-an-hour pace. At twenty-eight years old, Larry wasn’t a huge jock, but he liked to get in three runs a week, with usually one longer run on the weekend. He alternated run days with his gym days. This morning he was eager to get back to his lab and check the overnight results, but he still planned on an eight-mile loop along the river, picking up the pace for the last two miles to get the endorphins flowing.
Larry Johnstone worked as a research engineer, a post-doctoral fellow under the supervision of a full professor at the MIT faculty of engineering, where he had recently graduated with his PhD in chemical engineering practice, with a minor in materials science. His passion was fresh water, as reflected in his doctoral thesis, “Cell Geometry, Membrane Properties, and Electrode Composition Impacts on Electrical Efficiency of Capacitive Desalination.” He would tell family and friends that it was just a fancy way of saying “how to make fresh water cheaper.”
Larry passed the Boston University Bridge, sticking to the Cambridge side of the river. He enjoyed running in the early morning — the cool air and quiet. He crossed to the Boston side at the John W. Weeks Footbridge connecting the two sides of the Harvard campus. There were a few other runners on the path as he turned downstream, and through tendrils of mist he could just make out several silhouettes of sculls warming up out on the water, both eights and fours. The crisp commands of the coxswains were audible over the dark water, contributing to the surreal feeling of the morning.
Larry’s current work was a continuation of his thesis research — basically experimenting with a few different design variables, each of which would individually lower the power required to turn a gallon of seawater into a half gallon of fresh water and a half gallon of very salty brine. His objective was to unravel the nonlinear interaction of these variables to find a combined design where they would reinforce each other. He was fortunate that his supervisor believed his work was promising enough to have secured a fellowship that provided laboratory facilities and funding for the equipment and materials he needed and allowed him to keep his small apartment in Tang Hall.
The young man was keen to make a difference for the better in the world. As he passed the Boston University Bridge on the Boston side heading toward the harbor, he reflected on what he believed was one of the greatest obstacles to a better future for mankind — probably the greatest one — the increasing scarcity of fresh water. He knew that only 2.5 percent of the world’s water was fresh, and of that 69 percent was frozen in glaciers and ice fields and 30 percent was underground, leaving only 1 percent readily accessible as surface water in lakes, rivers, and swamps.
With only 1 percent of the fresh water, or 0.025 percent of total water, readily accessible, what was making matters worse was that much of that water was concentrated in geographic areas with low populations — Canada and Russia. Use of water for agricultural purposes was rapidly depleting the available supply in many countries, with acute chronic shortages prevalent in India, the Middle East and much of Africa. Some people in these areas were already dying of thirst, but many more were facing starvation due to insufficient water to irrigate the arid fields. Growing populations in these places were driving water depletion ever more rapidly toward a massive crisis. Even in the United States, regional shortages were increasing. The mighty Colorado River is a dry river bed in its southern reaches, drained to support agriculture in the sweltering Imperial Valley in California and the Mexicali Valley in Baja California, Mexico.
The Sun was peeking above the horizon as Larry reached the downstream end of his planned run at the Longfellow Bridge. He turned to retrace his steps back to the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge, gradually increasing his pace as he approached the final quarter. He was concerned about global warming, in part because he knew it would exacerbate fresh water shortages. He believed strongly in energy conservation and greenhouse gas emission curtailment as being important for the long-term welfare of mankind, but he knew that people would perish in larger numbers — and much sooner — from water shortages than they would from heat.
He reached the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge and crossed back to the Cambridge side, upping his pace still further for the final mile back to Audrey Street. Larry believed that water conservation was as important as energy conservation, but doubted it would be enough to overcome shortages in the hotter, drier, more populous regions of the world. However, if only a small portion of the 97.5 percent of the water in the world’s oceans could be converted to fresh water economically, then there would be ample fresh water for all, at least anywhere within pipeline distance of a coast, and that was Larry’s vision.
Technically it was quite possible to desalinate seawater, and that was being done in small quantities in many places to provide drinking water. However, the existing technologies were relatively energy intensive and therefore expensive and not suitable for the large volumes of fresh water required for agricultural purposes.
Larry’s objective was to reduce the energy required to convert salt water into fresh water to a tenth or less of the best existing technology. At the same time, he knew he needed to avoid exotic and expensive materials for his membranes and electrodes. This wasn’t cutting-edge theoretical research that would revolutionize man’s understanding of the physical world, like the work of Albert Einstein or Peter Higgs or Saul Perlmutter; it was basic engineering design and process control blocking and tackling. Larry had some theoretical models and simulations to guide him, but much of his work was trial and error, building up a database of what worked well and what didn’t. He knew that research and engineering had reduced the cost of computing power significantly, so he was confident that his persistence would eventually achieve a similar payoff. And he thought he was close, very close.
As he reached the foot of Audrey Street, Larry slowed to a walk and stopped his timer. He was breathing heavily after his sprint over the last quarter-mile. He checked his time and was pleased to see just over an hour — not bad for a nerd, he thought. He walked on for a few minutes to cool down, enjoying the moment as the early morning Sun began to light up the riverside hardwoods, with the brilliant reds and oranges of the New England autumn just starting to appear. Larry loved the Boston climate — a little cool and damp in winter but with pleasant temperatures for most of the year. He knew that the Charles had occasionally frozen solid enough to walk across as recently as the last decade, but winters were milder these days.
By eight o’clock in the morning, Larry, having showered and breakfasted, unlocked the door of his lab. A desk equipped with a high-end desktop computer took up one wall of the lab, a stainless steel workbench covered with various pieces of equipment and materials, as well as a number of microprocessors for process control and measurement, took up another two. Three open-topped thousand-gallon tanks stood in the middle of the room with various pieces of clear plastic tubing connecting them to the apparatus on the bench. One tank was labelled “salt water,” one “brine,” and one “fresh water.” Several fifty-pound bags of salt were stacked in a corner — it was simpler to make seawater on site than to fetch it from the harbor. Each of the tanks had a hydrometer floating on the top to provide a quick check on salinity levels, though more exact and continuous measurements were being taken by in-line refractometers attached to the inlet and outlet tubing and tied into the recording microprocessor.
Larry pulled up a stool in front of the recording microprocessor and called up a summary of the overnight performance of his latest set of cell design parameters. He was already excited because he could see that his fresh water tank was almost half filled in the twelve hours since he had started the run. The summary display confirmed over four hundred gallons of production, which wasn’t much in absol
ute terms, but it was a small laboratory-scale cell, so the amount of fresh water production wasn’t as important as the power consumption, and that showed just what he had hoped — a paltry 0.6 kilowatt hours, about the same amount of power required to light a fifty-watt bulb for twelve hours. He checked the salinity level of the input stream and the brine and fresh water outputs, and all were correct, with no degradation in the fresh water purity over the duration of the run. Power consumption was also constant as was the rate of water production.
Larry switched on the recycle pumps to send the fresh water and brine back to the salt water tank and reset the measurement system to run the same test a second time. He also turned on a local radio station for background noise as he moved over to his desk to send a brief report to his supervisor. He knew he still had a long way to go, including a little further design refinement, independent verification, and scaling up, first to a pilot plant and ultimately to a large utility-scale plant, without losing the power efficiency achieved in his laboratory apparatus. Nevertheless, he was excited by the path ahead.
Larry wasn’t paying much attention to the news summary, but the latest update on Carrie, an intense cyclonic system tracking from the central Atlantic west toward Bermuda and North Carolina, caught his attention. Carrie was now a full Category 5 storm and still growing in size and strength, and the computer models were showing a high likelihood that it would begin to swing north and make landfall on the New England coast with a potential surge of twenty feet or more. The newscaster said that the governors of all the coastal states were advising residents in low-lying areas to be prepared to evacuate, and all others to have sufficient food and water on hand for an extended interruption of power and services. As he finished his report and emailed it off, Larry mused on the relative risks of climate change versus fresh water scarcity. Time would tell — less time than he imagined.
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