Windfall

by McKenzie Funk

  The zapper was known as the photonic fence, and its similarity to the Reagan-era Star Wars scheme—nuclear-powered X-ray lasers orbiting in space, zapping Soviet missiles—was no coincidence. It was a brainchild of the astrophysicist Lowell Wood, Myhrvold’s longtime friend and an associate at IV, who had developed and led the Star Wars program at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The tie-dye-wearing Wood was a protégé of the LLNL’s co-founder Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb” who tested his wares in the Marshall Islands and was an inspiration for the character Dr. Strangelove. Wood and Teller had been fellows at the Hoover Institution, the libertarian-conservative think tank housed at Stanford University.

  In the 1990s, Wood and Teller were among the first to seriously study planet-scale engineering to reverse climate change, which has come to be known as geoengineering. Their idea, described in a paper submitted to the Twenty-second International Seminar on Planetary Emergencies, was to mimic volcanoes. Find a way to spray sulfur or other aerosols into the stratosphere, and it would be like the aftermath of 1991’s Mount Pinatubo eruption: The particles would shade the sunlight, and the global temperature would drop. That Intellectual Ventures had begun patenting geoengineering technologies—methods to stop hurricanes, refreeze the Arctic, and engineer the climate back to “normal”—was mostly speculation at the time of the lab’s grand opening. Myhrvold said nothing about it to Cantwell, but later that day, in a brief conversation watched over by two wary handlers, he told me the rumors were true.

  The tour ended under a gray sky in the parking lot. Inside a white tent, champagne and salmon were being served to a crowd of dignitaries, including venture capitalists, University of Washington professors, and the celebrated wildlife photographer Art Wolfe. He was a friend of Myhrvold’s, himself a published photographer. Myhrvold and Cantwell stood in front of a red ribbon, and when the cameras were ready, he announced that scissors were “a boring way to cut a ribbon, so we’ve devised something else.” A staffer wheeled up a stand with a big red detonator button on it. Two others stood by wearing fireproof gloves, holding fire extinguishers. “Is the device armed?” Myhrvold asked, and then he began counting down: “Five, four, three, two, one.” Cantwell pushed the button, the ribbon burst into flame, and the audience clapped wildly.

  • • •

  CLIMATE CHANGE WAS a new excuse, but inventors have always wanted to do something about the weather. In July 1946, one of the researchers in the General Electric lab run by Irving Langmuir, the chemist and Nobel laureate, accidentally invented cloud seeding, the forebear of geoengineering. He dropped a piece of dry ice into a cloud chamber, and the cloud was instantly transformed into ice crystals. “Control of Weather,” scrawled Langmuir in his notebook. One of the lab workers was Bernard Vonnegut, brother of Kurt. Bernard would discover and eventually patent the fact that silver iodide serves even better than dry ice as a seed crystal, pulling a cloud’s humidity into flakes or drops until they fall out of the sky. In his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle, Kurt, who worked in GE’s public relations office, would describe ice-nine, a fictional seed crystal that turns liquid water solid. The Langmuir lab ran its first cloud-seeding trials in November 1946, dropping six pounds of ice pellets into a cloud over New York’s Berkshire Mountains, seeming to create three-mile-long bands of snow while winning headlines across the world. Within five years, commercial rainmaking operations, most using silver iodide, covered nearly 10 percent of the United States. Walt Disney soon produced a comic strip, Donald Duck, Master Rainmaker, in which Donald flew a red prop plane into a cloud. “Goodnight!” he yells. “I overseeded!” Many scientists, particularly in the United States, now doubt cloud seeding has much efficacy, but modern rainmakers have worked in more than fifty countries, including Israel, India, Senegal, and Saudi Arabia.

  Cloud seeding’s allure was also its danger: Assuming it worked, we were now in control. After the Chernobyl disaster, according to the historian James Fleming in his book Fixing the Sky, Soviet authorities might have employed it to save Moscow from an approaching radioactive cloud. Silver-iodide-spewing bombers allegedly triggered rain over Belarus, where in some areas the rate of thyroid cancer among children would jump fiftyfold. More recently, China’s Weather Modification Office set up its rocket launchers outside Beijing in advance of the 2008 Olympics, shooting up any approaching cloud before it could rain on the parades. Elsewhere in Asia, seeding’s legacy was darker: During the Vietnam War, America’s classified Operation Popeye weaponized the rain, working for five years to disrupt the seasons and lengthen the monsoon over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  A year after Langmuir’s big discovery, his lab was folded into Project Cirrus, a $750,000-a-year classified program led by the army, air force, and navy. It ran more than 250 experiments, including a campaign to suppress forest fires, between 1947 and 1952. The most dramatic was one of the first: In October 1947, researchers intercepted Hurricane King, a tropical storm that had just ripped past Key West and through southern Florida, as it headed back out into the Atlantic Ocean. They flew a bomber into the eye of the storm and dropped eighty pounds of dry ice. The hurricane did a U-turn and made landfall again near Savannah, Georgia, killing one person and causing $23 million in damages. That year, Langmuir paid a visit to Edward Teller in Los Alamos, where he bragged to the cold warrior about the damage done by his cloud seeding. Weather control, as he would tell the New York Times, “could be as powerful a war weapon as the atom bomb.” It was the first known attempt at hurricane modification—which Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures would one day tackle via other means.

  I witnessed my first cloud-seeding operation in Australia during the Murray-Darling drought. In the Snowy Mountains, the reservoirs that gave hydroelectric power to Sydney had become depleted, and the region’s privatized power company, Snowy Hydro, was desperate. The command center, in the city of Cooma, was a darkened room filled with computers and grad students. They tracked a passing cold front via an array of eight side-by-side monitors, waiting to radio the activation signal to their silver-iodide generators: thirteen solar-powered, treelike metal towers hidden throughout a protected wilderness.

  In the lift line at the Snowies’ biggest resort, Thredbo, Snowy Hydro had already put up banners touting its work on behalf of skiers: “Cloud Seeding This Winter to Improve Snowfalls.” A manager told me how much he preferred cloud seeding to installing more slope-side snowmakers, which had been crucial on lower runs the more temperatures rose. Across Australia, the only complaint I heard was from a man in a dried-out farming town a hundred miles away, on the other side of the mountains. “The problem with seeding,” he said, “is that you’re deciding which region deserves the rain.”

  • • •

  CASEY TEGREENE, INTELLECTUALLY Ventures’ top patent lawyer, ushered me into his office a few months after the ribbon cutting, and as the door closed, there was a flash of tie-dye in the hallway: a brightly clothed Lowell Wood, rushing by in his sandals. I’d wanted to hear how IV invented things before I heard more from Myhrvold about what things it had invented, and Tegreene had been volunteered to describe the standard method. A mountain climber, trail runner, and ultimate Frisbee player in his late forties, he coordinated what the company called “invention sessions”: the process of sticking three to ten handpicked scientists, doctors, or engineers in a conference room for eight to sixteen hours and asking them to grapple with “big, interesting, well-stated problems.” There was no metaphor that perfectly captured what went on in the room, Tegreene said. “It looks sort of like brainstorming,” he told me. “It looks sort of like a physics or engineering class. It looks sort of like arguing.” I was reminded of scenario planning: all the smartest guys, all in a room.

  The topic of IV’s first invention session, in 2003, was digital cameras. There were now up to five sessions a month, tackling everything from surgical techniques to metamaterials. “Let’s say the topic was addressing the Earth’s albedo,
” Tegreene said. “Then the inventors we’d pick might be physicists or material scientists, and most would be multidimensional, polymathic types, like Lowell and Nathan.” Three or four sessions a year had been dedicated to geoengineering—which had interested Myhrvold almost from the moment IV was founded, Tegreene said—and perhaps another ten a year touched at least tangentially on the topic.

  The free-form sessions were typically held in the conference room I’d seen at the lab, where video cameras and mics recorded every word and transmitted the in utero inventions to Tegreene’s sixty-three-person patent group, which included nearly two dozen attorneys, most of them with Ph.D.s of their own in aerospace engineering, computer science, biochemistry, or mathematics. The inventors, who were flown in for a day or two, were fed well—Indian food, Ezell’s Famous Chicken, cookout barbecues in the early days—and they were paid modestly for their time. IV also gave them a stake in any resulting patents. “But I wonder if they’d do it if they didn’t get any compensation at all,” Tegreene said. “I think they would. The people who like to invent with us, they like to discuss interesting problems.”

  In general, he let the conversations wander where they might. “If they start talking about how to invent a better buggy whip, we might steer them away,” he said. “The market for buggy whips has been down for 150 years. But sometimes the kernel of an idea, you’re not even sure where it comes from. Two people might start arguing about this or that technique to make clouds precipitate things out. And suddenly you’re working on a better way to ionize the vapors in clouds.”

  There was a strange sound at Tegreene’s window, which looked down on some trees and parking spaces near the Bellevue Club, an athletics facility. A flicker was attacking its own reflection. “He always sits there and pounds the left side of the window,” Tegreene explained. He turned back toward me. “Sessions may migrate into new areas, and that’s okay,” he said. “We’re not trying to develop next year’s product. Typically, if you give a set of good problems to very bright people, it stimulates them to think of other ideas as well. If we figure out how to capture wave energy from water, for instance, that might lead to some valuable ideas.”

  A patent typically lasts twenty years, and IV’s investors were expected to take the long view. Their money was reportedly locked up for more than a decade in its two funds, the $590 million, Asia-focused Invention Development Fund and the broader, $2.3 billion Invention Investment Fund II. Investors included such tech companies as Amazon, Apple, Intel, Microsoft, and Sony, which were also amassing patent war chests of their own, and the Rockefeller and William and Flora Hewlett foundations and the endowments of Brown, Stanford, Cornell, and the University of Texas, which managed money for future generations, not just today’s. Big trends were more important than quick gains, and geoengineering was not out of place among the inventions IV was developing and patenting: advances in nanotechnology, semiconductors, nuclear energy, medical devices, and agriculture whose payoff might be many years down the road. In the meantime, the firm generated revenue—more than $2 billion by 2011—partly through patent-licensing agreements with tech companies, some of whom, confusingly, were its own investors. The agreements made lawsuits unnecessary, though the implicit threat of lawsuits was arguably what propelled the agreements.

  IV would soon hold an invention session “about moving large things, like dirt and rocks,” Tegreene told me. “How do I get to something that is under, around, below, or inside an object—or is very large and very far away from me?” Myhrvold had recently taken a helicopter tour of Canada’s tar sands along with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. They were guests of the $6-billion-a-year tar sands contractor Kiewit Corporation, which also had a hand in lining the All-American Canal. Myhrvold had noticed mounds of sulfur, a by-product of tar sands mining—and the main ingredient in geoengineering schemes then being patented by IV. “There were big yellow mountains of it, like a hundred meters high by a thousand meters wide!” he later told the authors of SuperFreakonomics. “And they stair-step them, like a Mexican pyramid. So you could put one little pumping facility up there, and with one corner of one of those sulfur mountains, you could solve the whole global warming problem for the Northern Hemisphere.”

  The official line at IV was that they were not pursuing geoengineering for profit. “Intellectual Ventures invents new technology as its main business, but we do not expect or intend that our climate technology inventions will make money,” read an FAQ posted after its interest in geoengineering became publicly known. That morning in Tegreene’s office, before the flicker attacked the window again, he described what happened to inventors’ ideas once they left the free-form sessions in the conference room. “After a session, we do a process we call triage,” he said. “We have a whole computer system to categorize the ideas. We have a series of four conference calls every week, with patent attorneys, business-development people, and support staff. We’ll say, ‘Okay, we’re looking at geoengineering ideas. Here’s idea number one. Is it better than the first idea already in the stack? No. Is it better than the second? No. Is it better than the third?’ Okay, then we’ll move it to number three in the stack, and then three moves down to four, four to five, and so on. We rank them.”

  What did “better” mean? “You’re mapping a bunch of different factors,” Tegreene said. “Whether or not it’s gonna get good patent protection. Whether it’s in a licensing-friendly industry. Does it have some commercial implications? Is there some broader concept that could be patented based upon it? Will it cost a lot in terms of technical support to file it? So it’s a combination.” Filing a patent is expensive, usually very time-consuming. IV’s inventors spewed out thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of ideas a year, and most never made it to the top of the stack. Triage meant that usually only the most commercializable ideas got through. “If an idea is one of the top few in a certain area,” Tegreene said, “then we start patent applications on it.” Knowing all the steps involved, I still found myself wondering why they had gone to the trouble of filing for geoengineering patents.

  • • •

  ADVOCATES OF GEOENGINEERING, or at least of geoengineering research, tend to fall into three categories: scientists deeply afraid of runaway climate change; free-market advocates deeply afraid of mandated carbon cuts; and the capitalists or philanthrocapitalists who sustain them both. To find all three, I had only to visit two Washingtons—Washington, D.C., and Washington State.

  In both Washingtons, flitting between conferences and meetings and panels and labs, were the scientists, notably Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University, a celebrated climate modeler who had coined the term “ocean acidification.” On the opposite side of the political spectrum from Edward Teller and Lowell Wood, he was dead set against geoengineering when the cold warriors proposed their Pinatubo option. Then he ran some numbers. More aware than almost anyone of what climate change would do to the world, he soon became a frequent visitor to Capitol Hill and a key IV inventor, though profit was apparently not his motive. In the case of a related climate patent, he promised to “donate 100% of my share of the proceeds to non-profit charities and NGOs.”

  Official acceptance of geoengineering was growing in step with global carbon emissions. After Barack Obama was elected came the first top-level scientific panels, starting with the Royal Society in the U.K. and the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. Then came geoengineering hearings in the U.K. House of Commons and the U.S. House of Representatives, closed-door sessions led by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency), studies by the Government Accountability Office and Congressional Research Service, policy statements by the American Meteorological Society and Britain’s Met Office, a design competition by Britain’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers, an ethics conference at Asilomar, a report by the Rand Corporation, a side event at the 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen, funding from the U.K. government for limited field research,
a neologism-spawning endorsement (“climate remediation”) from the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, and a place in the 2014 IPCC report. Across the papers and panels and symposia, the majority opinion was not that geoengineering should be deployed—just cautiously studied.

  The most promising scheme was still the Pinatubo option, part of a set of ideas now known as solar radiation management, or SRM—another term coined by Caldeira. It was Benjamin Franklin who apparently first linked volcanoes to global climate. In 1783, when Franklin was stationed in Paris, a chain of Icelandic volcanoes had erupted for eight straight months, and temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere plummeted. “There existed a constant fog over all Europe, and great part of North America,” Franklin wrote. “Hence the surface was early frozen. Hence the first snows remained on it unmelted. Hence the air was more chilled.” Another promising SRM scheme came from the British professors John Latham and Stephen Salter, who later worked with Intellectual Ventures: unmanned, wind-powered yachts that would sail the high seas, seeding marine clouds with a spray of saltwater droplets, thereby raising their reflectivity, or albedo. A greater portion of the sunlight hitting the tops of these clouds would bounce back, and the planet would cool.