by Naomi Klein
Part Three WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
CHAPTER 7 Changing the Future
You are going to live with some effects of climate change. So am I. So is my son. So is everyone else.
We can’t travel back in time to change the past that got us here—but we can change the future, and we don’t need a time machine to do it.
It is impossible to completely avoid climate disruption. The rising temperature of our planet is already changing how people, plants, and animals live, and that will keep happening. Even if the whole world stopped adding any greenhouse gases to the atmosphere tomorrow, temperatures would keep inching up, and the climate would keep changing for some time.
The question we all face is simple: How much will it change, and how quickly? How much disruption will we—and the generations that come after us—have to live with?
The answer depends on what we do now. If we follow the lead of young activists like the Torres Strait Islanders, Greta Thunberg, and the Juliana plaintiffs, we will greatly lower the amount of greenhouse gases we add to the air. This will bring us to a much brighter climate future than if we keep burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests as if there were no tomorrow. We already know we have to change everything. But how?
People have come up with all kinds of approaches to solving the climate change problem, from the far-out to the practical. Some of these approaches are already in use, but they are not enough by themselves to solve our climate crisis. Other approaches have not yet been tried. Some are risky. Some may not even be possible. But some have already shown that they are keys to a better future.
No single approach will be the best solution in every setting. As you will see in this chapter and the next one, to solve a big, complex problem like worldwide climate change, we can draw on a mix of multiple ideas and tools. They all start, though, with people and their values.
IF CARBON IS THE PROBLEM…
If carbon dioxide is driving climate change more than any other greenhouse gas, what about attacking the carbon directly?
That approach has come to be known as carbon capture and storage (CCS). The basic idea behind CCS is that if we suck carbon out of the atmosphere, or keep it from going into the atmosphere, we can put it somewhere safely out of the way, where it can’t do any harm.
There are many different versions of CCS. Some of them are still being planned, or are being tested. Others are already in commercial use around the world.
CCS has two main parts. The first part is capturing the carbon. One form of carbon capture is called point-source CCS. This is taking carbon dioxide directly from the sources that produce it, such as power plants that burn fossil fuels, before the gas has a chance to go into the atmosphere. Another form of carbon capture is direct air capture. This is drawing carbon dioxide out of the general atmosphere. It involves fans that move air through filters or chemical devices. Both point-source capture and direct air capture turn the CO2 into a concentrated stream that can be collected and contained.
A carbon capture facility at a US coal mine.
The second part of CCS is figuring out what to do with the carbon once it has been collected. One solution is to bury it underground and hope it won’t find its way out again. Some storage places for CO2 are seams or spaces in mines or oil fields that have been left empty after coal, oil, or natural gas have been taken out.
Another possibility is to store carbon dioxide in an underground layer of rock. A layer used for carbon storage must have two things. First, it has to be a kind of rock that has a lot of small holes and gaps in it to hold the CO2. Second, it has to have layers of other, more solid kinds of rock above it. After the CO2 is pumped down into the more open rock, the solid rock traps it there.
This is the method used at the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea, where a Norwegian company has been mining natural gas and oil from wells since 1974. In 1996 the company started capturing CO2 from its operations and pumping it into a rock formation about thirty-three thousand feet (a thousand meters) below the seabed. A network of several dozen monitors on the seabed helps test for leaks and disturbances. The British Geological Survey, one of several organizations that has been studying the Sleipner field, reports that “so far, the CO2 is confined securely within the storage reservoir.” Sleipner is considered a successful example of CCS, with the ability to hold many more years’ worth of carbon dioxide injections.
A different kind of storage could involve types of rock that bind CO2. When carbon dioxide comes in contact with these rocks, a chemical reaction takes place that turns the carbon dioxide into part of the rock. In 2013, this approach was tested in Washington State and Iceland. Researchers injected captured carbon dioxide in liquid form into underground basalt, a volcanic rock. Most of the carbon mineralized—or became solid rock—within two years.
This sounds promising, right? But carbon storage faces a problem. Unless the CO2 is captured close to where it can be safely injected into the ground, it has to be moved, possibly over long distances. This could be costly, potentially dangerous, and wasteful of the energy needed to transport the CO2.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, created to provide governments with the most thorough climate science, has said that carbon capture and storage should play a role in bringing carbon dioxide down to an acceptable level. But there are several reasons CCS isn’t going to be close to the whole solution. As of 2019, about thirty million tons of carbon dioxide were captured and stored around the world each year. More than two thirds of the CCS facilities were in North America. Still, the total amount of carbon being captured is a tiny fraction of what is needed to keep us on track for the Paris Agreement target for cutting carbon emissions.
Carbon capture and storage technology is also expensive, and it doesn’t make money, which is what companies are formed to do. Companies act in the interests of their profits. While there could be a market for using captured CO2 to make certain products, energy companies do CCS to get tax benefits from their countries, or to avoid paying pollution penalties. For CCS to have a real impact on climate change, governments—not just corporations—would have to invest more heavily in it. The amount of CCS activity in the world would have to increase enormously.
Beyond cost, though, is the question of safety. Some scientists are concerned about possible problems with carbon storage over long periods of time. We have been using and studying carbon storage for only a few decades. Can we be sure that buried carbon dioxide will never leak into water or air, causing the problem to reappear at a later time? And if we shoot CO2 into the ground, are we setting the stage for more frequent earth movements and tremors, possibly even earthquakes that would release the stored CO2? Increased earth movements have been recorded in areas where the fossil-fuel industry uses high-pressure liquids to push oil and gas out of the Earth, in the type of extraction called fracking.
But more than all of this, there is a deeper issue with carbon capture. CCS is simply part of the system that has caused the problem in the first place—the fossil-fuel industry. Building more CCS facilities and moving carbon dioxide around would take a lot of mining and a lot of energy. Where would that energy come from? From fossil fuels like those that probably produced the carbon dioxide in the first place?
Placing our hopes on CCS could encourage us to keep using fossil fuels. We might tell ourselves, “Yes, carbon dioxide emissions are bad, but that doesn’t matter because we can clean the air.” And this kind of thinking could pull us away from investing in renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind power, that are cleaner to start with. CCS also puts off the conversation about how much energy we use. In other words, CCS doesn’t get to the root of our problem, which is our dependence on fossil fuels, as well as a mindset that tells us we can consume the Earth’s resources without limits. It isn’t enough to bury the worst by-products of today’s crisis while we continue the behavior that caused the crisis in the first place. We should change our behavior so that no one faces the same cr
isis in the future.
HACKING OUR PLANET
I used to live in a part of British Columbia, Canada, called the Sunshine Coast. That’s where my son was born. When he was just three weeks old, my husband and I were up with him at five in the morning when we saw something remarkable through our window. Looking out at the ocean, we spotted two towering black fins—orcas! Then we saw two more.
We had never seen an orca on this part of the coast. Certainly we had never seen one like this, just a few feet from the shore. Seeing four of them felt like a miracle, as if the baby had awakened us to make sure we didn’t miss this rare visit.
Later, I learned that a bizarre ocean experiment might have had something to do with our unusual sighting.
In another part of British Columbia, an American businessman named Russ George had dumped 120 tons of iron dust into the ocean from a rented fishing boat. His idea was that the iron would fertilize the ocean and feed algae, creating an algae bloom—a sudden large increase in the number of the tiny plants that float near the surface of the water. Because they are plants, the algae would absorb carbon dioxide from the air. George thought he was demonstrating a way to capture carbon and fight climate change.
George claimed that his ocean experiment created an algae bloom half the size of Massachusetts. It drew sea life from all over the region, including, in his words, whales “counted by the score.” Orcas are a type of whale that hunts and feeds on other fish. Were the orcas I saw heading for the all-you-can-eat seafood buffet that had come to feast on George’s algae bloom? Probably not, but I couldn’t help wondering.
Deliberate interference with Earth’s natural systems is called geoengineering, meaning “engineering the Earth.” The name suggests that the Earth is a machine that can be tinkered with to get the results we want.
People who want to try geoengineering say that we have already interfered with Earth’s systems by spewing greenhouse gases into the air. Why not use our powers of interference to correct that mistake?
Other Worlds?
Elon Musk is a billionaire who founded Tesla, a company that builds electric cars, and SpaceX, a company to launch rockets into space. In 2018 he combined the two in a scientific test that was also a publicity stunt.
SpaceX needed to launch something into space to test its rocket. The object chosen for the test was Musk’s own Tesla sports car. He did not ride it into space. The driver’s seat was filled by Starman, a mannequin dressed in a space suit. The launch was a success for SpaceX, and Musk’s bright-red car now orbits the sun.
One reason Musk has invested in space travel is that he wants to create a colony on Mars. In his opinion, colonizing Earth’s planetary neighbor is necessary to preserve the human race.
Earth may become uninhabitable for humans at some point, Musk fears. Climate disruption could take hold. An asteroid could destroy us all. A devastating world war could turn our home planet into a wasteland. Mars would be our backup plan. A colony there would keep our species from being completely wiped out. Or… maybe it would just be cool to go to Mars.
Musk’s companies are developing a rocket-and-spaceship combination that he says will carry people to Mars to start a colony there. Experts in planetary science, meanwhile, say that although we could reasonably send humans on scientific missions to Mars at some point, it would be enormously challenging for them to live there permanently. Even if martian colonists solved the huge problems of supplying themselves with air, water, and food, there is another, ever-present danger. No one knows how well our bodies would stand up to long-term exposure to the sun’s radiation, both in space and on Mars, where the atmosphere is too thin to block much radiation.
But Elon Musk isn’t the only one looking to the stars for a climate change solution. An even more far-fetched idea was mentioned by Rand Paul, a senator from Kentucky, in January 2020. He suggested that we should “begin creating atmospheres on suitable moons or planets.”
Making another world livable for humans is called terraforming, from “terra,” the Latin word for “land.” Turning an alien world into something Earthlike is the subject of a lot of science fiction, but in reality it is a very long way off and may well be impossible.
Paul could have been joking—but the sad fact is that he is one of many politicians who refuse to accept the reality of human-caused climate change. If they don’t believe human activity could change Earth’s climate, how can they believe we can change the climates of other worlds?
A colony on Mars, or on some other “suitable” moon or planet, even if it were possible, could never be home to the entire human species, because it would be unthinkably costly and difficult to move everyone across space—not to mention all the air, water, and food they would need to survive. At best, a colony on another world could offer a difficult living to a few specially chosen survivors.
Meanwhile, here on Earth, the rest of us can keep our feet on the ground and look for solutions that are really possible. We need to get on with the work of saving the one planet that we know can give us life.
Geoengineers call for large-scale actions to cool down the effects of global warming. In addition to schemes to fertilize the ocean, they have come up with ideas for lowering the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth. Some of these ideas, such as space mirrors to reflect the sun’s light away from the planet, are science-fictional and not very practical. Much more attention, though, has been given to the idea of copying certain volcanic eruptions.
Most volcanic eruptions send ash and gases into the lower atmosphere. The gases include a substance called sulfur dioxide. It combines with water vapor in the air to form sulfuric acid. This acid takes the form of an aerosol, a haze of tiny droplets. They simply fall down to Earth. Once in a great while, though, an eruption sends a lot of sulfur dioxide much higher into the atmosphere. Within weeks, air currents carry aerosols around the entire planet.
The droplets act like tiny mirrors, blocking the full heat of the sun from reaching the Earth’s surface. As a result, temperatures drop. If such an eruption happens in the tropics, the aerosols can stay in the upper atmosphere for one to two years. They may cause a global cooling that can last even longer.
Geoengineering schemes include (left to right) placing mirrors in orbit to keep sunlight from reaching the Earth, sending chemicals into the atmosphere to create artificial clouds, and building giant filters to pull greenhouse gases out of the air. Who gets to decide whether the benefits of such schemes outweigh the hazards?
Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted like this in 1991, seeding the upper atmosphere with aerosols. The year after the eruption, global temperatures dropped by half a degree Celsius. Some scientists think that if we could find a way to do with technology what some eruptions do naturally, we could force down the temperature of the Earth and combat global warming.
What could go wrong? Well, the risks of geoengineering are huge.
Blue skies could become a thing of the past. Depending on what method is used to block the sun, and how much it is used, a permanent haze could cover the Earth. By night, astronomers would have difficulty seeing stars and planets clearly. By day, weaker sunlight could make it harder to produce clean energy from solar power. This is a serious drawback because clean, renewable solar energy is a clear path away from greenhouse gases.
Copying the effects of major volcanic eruptions would likely also change weather and rainfall patterns, with potentially unequal results. Depending on how this type of geoengineering is used, studies have predicted that it could interfere with seasonal rainfall in Asia and Africa, causing drought in some of the world’s poorer countries. Geoengineering, in other words, could threaten the food and water sources of billions of people. Climate change itself has already taught us that once we change our planet’s atmosphere, many unexpected things can happen.
What about fertilizing the ocean instead—as Russ George did in British Columbia? This type of geoengineering could turn the sea green, but it might do worse things
than that. We already know that fertilizer and animal waste that flow into the ocean often trigger “dead zones.” These are patches of ocean where there is not enough oxygen in the water to support life.
Fertilizer and waste feed algae blooms, like the one Russ George created off the coast of British Columbia. Algae consume carbon dioxide and release oxygen—which sounds great, at first. But the problem comes from the trillions of tiny ocean creatures and the fish that flock to feed on the algae. They release their own waste into the water. This waste decays, along with dying algae. The process of decay then soaks up more oxygen than the algae released. The result is water that can no longer support many forms of ocean life. Fertilizing the ocean could do more to harm the environment than help it.
Geoengineering—or geohacking, as some call it—also raises questions of fairness. Governments, universities, and private investors or companies are now talking about researching or regulating a range of geoengineering projects. On a large scale, some of these projects could affect the whole world.
Who gets to decide whether or not to dump vast quantities of fertilizers into the sea or shoot aerosols into the sky? Will everyone who might be affected get a vote? What happens if a few countries, or one country, or a single rogue geoengineer decides to go ahead?
In spite of these risks and drawbacks, researchers are working on plans to test various geoengineering schemes. But wouldn’t it be better to change our behavior, to reduce our use of fossil fuels, before we begin fiddling with our planet’s basic life-support systems?
Cutting back on fossil fuels and lowering our emissions of greenhouse gases is something we know will work. It may seem overwhelming to some, because to do it effectively, we really do have to change everything. But isn’t that less overwhelming than the changes that will be forced on us if we fail to take well-thought-out action against climate change? Remember too that making a major change in our way of doing things is also our opportunity to create a fairer world for all people and a healthier one for the creatures of our planet’s land, sea, and air.