Whole Earth Discipline

by Stewart Brand

  So test the ideas we have, and keep thinking up new ones. For example, there’s a scheme to ionize carbon dioxide molecules with lasers, which would supposedly cause the Earth’s magnetic field to eject the CO2 from the atmosphere at the poles. I would outline the concept here if I understood it, but I don’t. Far more comprehensible is an idea, proposed in 2009, called CROPS—Crop Residue Oceanic Permanent Sequestration. Taking 30 percent of U.S. agricultural residues and sinking the baled material in the ocean would capture and sequester 15 percent of the annual increase of global atmospheric CO2, according to bioremediation expert Stuart Strand and physicist Gregory Benford. I like the criteria they use to judge a sequestration scheme’s practicality. As summarized by Science Daily, the method must “move hundreds of megatons of carbon, sequester that carbon for thousands of years, be repeatable for centuries, be something that can be implemented immediately using methods already at hand, not cause unacceptable environmental damage, and be economical.”

  • How does the current roster of notions stand up to criticism? Oliver Morton reported in Nature: “Geoengineering, many say, is a way to feed society’s addiction to fossil fuels. ‘It’s like a junkie figuring out new ways of stealing from his children,’ says Meinrat Andreae, an atmospheric scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.” Quoting MIT climatologist Ronald Prinn—“How can you engineer a system whose behavior you don’t understand?”—Morton answered the question: “As carefully and reversibly as you can.”

  There are two major worries about the stratospheric-sulfates approach. (They apply also to oceanic cloud brightening and sunshades in space.) Effectively dimming the Sun would relieve the pressure to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but the short-term gain has a long-term penalty. Humanity would be forced to keep on dimming the Sun indefinitely, because if the project ever stopped, the renewed full sunlight on an atmosphere further overloaded with CO2 would make the global temperature jump catastrophically. One climatologist calls it Damocles world.

  Furthermore, the acidity of seawater would continue to increase, along with whatever harm that does to the ocean’s vital ability to fix carbon. But there may be a ray of hope on that subject. Débora Iglesias-Rodríguez at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, has found that increasing acidity is welcomed by one of the most abundant of all phytoplankton, a coccolithophore named Emiliania huxleyi—Ehux to its many friends (it has its own home page). Ehux not only thrives in acidic water, its rate of calcification goes up proportionally as acidity increases. The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the ocean, the more Ehux fixes carbon in a form that sinks. In addition, algal blooms of Ehux—they are visible from space—increase the ocean’s reflectivity. The blooms themselves are light-colored, and—in one of the first Gaian mechanisms to be identified—they emit dimethyl sulfide particles that lead to local cloud formation. Thus Ehux appears to work in three ways to head off climate change. It is a genuine natural negative feedback process that moderates global warming. As the Earth heats up, geoengineer Ehux responds by fixing more carbon and brightening the ocean’s albedo, which helps Earth cool. Get this organism a grant. (Once the ocean surface stratifies, though, Ehux starves along with everything else.)

  The carbon fixation schemes—biochar, ocean fertilization, air capture—have the double advantage of threatening little harm and working toward the permanent solution of getting to a manageable level of CO2 in the atmosphere. But they’re too slow. The same is true of just cutting back on carbon dioxide emissions, nearly impossible as that is. Lovelock points out: “The response time of the Earth to carbon dioxide change is of the order of 100 years.”

  To turn down the heat we will probably have to do something radical to alter what the Earth does with sunlight—dim it or reflect it.

  • There remains a larger issue. Suppose geoengineering works technically. How can it work politically? Who decides to do it? Who runs it and balances its various forms? Who pays for it? Who accepts responsibility? Who compensates those who are harmed by it? Who decides which claims for compensation are valid? Does taking responsibility for climate geoengineering also mean taking responsibility for climate refugees?

  It’s easy to govern a negative. No one has to take responsibility for global warming because it was brought about by damn near everyone, and unintentionally. But geoengineering is intentional, an act of commission. Everything it accomplishes and fails to accomplish and inadvertently causes and is accused of causing has an identifiable human source. The climate will keep changing as it is without governance. To change the climate—the world—in the direction we want requires forms of governance we do not yet have.

  Someone who has given the subject realistic forethought is David Victor, a Stanford law professor specializing in climate-change issues. Here I’ll draw mainly on a 2008 paper he wrote for the Oxford Review of Economic Policy titled “On the Regulation of Geoengineering.” People imagine, Victor says, that what is needed is a “legally binding regulatory treaty” like the Montreal Protocol governing harm to the ozone layer. But he thinks that “most treaties on geoengineering will be useless or actively harmful because, at present, experts and governments do not know enough about the scope and hazards of possible geoengineering activities to frame a meaningful treaty negotiation.” He especially worries about treaties that would make geoengineering taboo, because “a taboo is likely to be most constraining on the countries (and their subjects) who are likely to do the most responsible testing, assessment, and (if needed) deployment of geoengineering systems. A taboo would leave less responsible governments and individuals—those most prone to ignore or avoid inconvenient international norms—to control the technology’s fate.”

  Because the cost of some geoengineering schemes is so low, Victor predicts, “A lone Greenfinger, self-appointed protector of the planet and working with a small fraction of the Gates bank account, could force a lot of geoengineering on his own.” The way to head off unilateral geoengineering and premature treaties, Victor suggests, is with a growing body of norms rather than rules:Meaningful norms are not crafted from thin air. They can have effect if they make sense to pivotal players and then they become socialized through practice. . . . Useful norms could arise through an intensive process of research and assessment that is probably best organized by the academies of sciences in the few countries with the potential to geoengineer. . . .

  Most likely . . . is that the impacts of global climate change will have reached such a nasty state by the time societies deploy large-scale geoengineering that some side effects will be tolerated. The . . . systems they deploy will not be a silver bullet but rather many interventions deployed in tandem—one to focus on the central disease and others to fix the ancillary harms.

  To my mind, a useful role for Greenfinger entrepreneurs might be to jump-start serious geoengineering research while national academies of science are spending years making up their minds to act. Then the privately funded researchers could bring real data to the “transnational assessment process,” where the norms and best practices emerge. This is a planetary hack we’re talking about. It has to be totally transparent and highly collaborative. Everyone’s first preference is to not deploy it at all, but if it has to be used, it must be done effectively and minimally, and if possible, for a limited period. Like abortion, geoengineering should be “safe, legal, and rare.”

  That still leaves the question of who runs things—“whose hands will be allowed on the thermostat,” as David Victor puts it. The task can be divided between the operators and an oversight body. In one previous piece of planet craft—the total eradication of smallpox in the 1970s—the World Health Organization provided oversight and funding, and the Smallpox Eradication Unit, led by Donald Henderson, did the work.

  In Victor’s formulation, norms and leadership for geoengineering will emerge from an intensifying sequence of conferences, research projects, data sharing, and brainstorming. The most effective early players w
ill determine the play, and funding will determine the pace. Geoengineering is government-scale infrastructure; it will need government-scale money. Once one nation commits, I suspect, other nations will join in, lest they be left out. If China says, “We’re going to geoengineer,” the United States, Russia, the European Union, Japan, Brazil, and India are not going to say, “Fine, let us know how it works out.” They’ll start their own programs. With luck, an ad hoc standards-setting body similar to the Internet Engineering Task Force (“rough consensus and running code”) will emerge. That kind of governance was required in order to have one universal Internet. The planet’s one universal climate requires something similar.

  • We can get practice on how to engineer the Earth ecosystem with a light touch by stepping up to a bit of solar system engineering first. Earthlings now have the ability, but not yet the will, to prevent devastating asteroid and comet strikes. Astronaut Rusty Schweickart has led the way on this one. (He’s had occasion to take orbital mechanics more seriously than most. On the Apollo 9 mission in 1969, which took place entirely in Earth orbit, he flew the Lunar Module 111 miles away from the Command Module. Because his craft could not reenter the atmosphere without burning up, he had to navigate back to the Command Module and dock with it, or die.)

  Schweickart estimates that the probability of an “unacceptable” asteroid collision in this century is about 20 percent. Over the long term, of course, it’s 100 percent. The impact from an asteroid over a kilometer in diameter would kill billions of people and violently disrupt the climate and biosphere. As of late 2008, NASA had detected 742 near-Earth objects (NEOs) of that size. Powerful new telescopes in Hawaii and Chile (the one in Chile partially funded by Greenfinger billionaires Charles Simonyi and Bill Gates) are expected to detect 21,000 near-Earth asteroids greater than 460 feet in diameter—a size that could wreck a nation or a seacoast—and up to 400,000 that could cause substantial harm. (The exploding asteroid that laid waste to 800 square miles of the Tunguska region in Siberia in 1908 was only 160 feet in diameter.) Very soon, dozens of asteroids will be identified as direct threats to Earth, requiring some kind of action.

  How do you deflect an asteroid? Schweickart spells out the current technique:If you know for certain that an impact is due, it’s generally too late to do anything about it. You have to act at the stage when it’s a question of probabilities. Deflection of a potentially threatening asteroid is a relatively inexpensive three-step process, which you need to begin 15-20 years before the possible impact of the asteroid:

  1) Place a transponder by any NEO that looks like it’s big enough and in an orbit threatening to impact Earth. The transponder is necessary to get the detailed tracking information to decide what to do next. If the data indicates a collision is possible (like a 1-in-20 chance), proceed to step 2:

  2) The first deflection move is kinetic—you “rear-end” the asteroid with a spaceship. The impact will drive it forward just enough (th of a mile per hour or so) to miss Earth. But that still leaves the possibility that the asteroid might pass through one of several “keyholes” that would bring it back on a collision course with Earth in a later orbit. To adjust for that, go to step 3:

  3) Use a “gravity tractor” to fine tune the orbit so that it misses the keyholes as well as the Earth. Adjustments are on the order of 1 to 10 millionths of a mile per hour. That should assure a relatively permanent solution for that particular rock.

  (Because asteroids tumble, you can’t just push them. In 2005 astronauts Edward Lu and Stanley Love devised the “gravity tractor”: A spacecraft hovers gravitationally close to an asteroid and drives gently in the desired direction, drawing the asteroid with it.)

  Schweickart says that asteroid deflection is similar to geoengineering for climate change, “only much simpler, better understood, and cheaper.” As with climate, you’re taking global action on a global problem, based on global awareness. “But the fatal missing element,” he says, “is there is no agency in the world charged with protecting the Earth against NEO impacts.” To remedy that, Schweickart got the Association of Space Explorers (an organization of astronauts and cosmonauts he founded) to send a “Draft NEO deflection protocol” in 2009 to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

  The draft protocol recommends that the UN establish a three-part decision apparatus—one part to manage asteroid data, one to design missions, and one for oversight. Execution would be done by one or more of the major spacefaring entities—Russia, the United States, the European Space Agency, Japan, China, the United Kingdom, and India. To prove the overall concept and advance the process, Schweickart and others are lobbying the U.S. Congress and NASA to dedicate an American space mission “to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid, in a controlled manner, by 2015.”

  As usual with grand projects, it’s important to ponder the victory condition. What happens when you succeed? “There is one long-term consequence,” Schweickart notes. “The Earth has been bombarded with rocks for 4.5 billion years. They made life and then shaped it. We’ll be putting an end to that process. No more cosmic pruning of the tree of life. No more craters.”

  Asteroids can be carrot as well as stick, claims John Lewis in Rain of Fire and Ice (1996). Once we’re able to redirect some, others we may wish to mine. “The smallest known metallic (M-type) asteroid, 3554 Amun,” Lewis writes, has “a radius of 500 meters. It contains over $1,000 billion worth of cobalt, $1,000 billion worth of nickel, $800 billion worth of iron, and $700 billion worth of platinum metals. . . . By comparison, the uncontrolled impact of Amun with Earth would deliver a devastating 80,000-megaton blow to the biosphere, killing billions and doing hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of damage.” (I should quickly add that asteroids of any size are worthless as weapons: They’re hell to aim. Climate is no good as a weapon either, for the same reason.) If we start mining asteroids, space-based solar electricity for Earth would be an obvious use for the metals.

  Asteroid deflection is such a crisp and doable program of planet craft, it can serve as a model and inspiration for the much more complex task of climate restoration.

  Seize the century. We’re facing multidecade, multigeneration problems and solutions. Accomplishing what is needed will take diligence and patience—a sustained bearing down, over human lifetimes, to bridge the long lag times and lead times in climatic, biological, and social dynamics, and to work through the long series of iterations necessary for any apparent solution to become practical. At the same time, we need a professional caregiver’s sense of urgency. Here’s how that works.

  You’re outside the locked door of a room where you think a suicide might be going on. What do you do?

  If you break down the door, it might be a false alarm. It could be that the person isn’t there at all, or is just sleeping, and they’ll be really upset about your breaking their door and embarrassing them. It might even make their emotional fragility worse. Besides, breaking down a door is hard. You might fail or hurt yourself. Other people in the building might try to stop you. The liability issues are horrible to contemplate.

  Suppose the person in there really is committing suicide. It’s his choice. What right do you have to interfere? If you do intervene, the person may well just try again later, and all you will have done is extend their suffering and delay the inevitable. On the other hand, suicide attempts are often impulsive and situational, caused by a medication imbalance or a wave of bad news. This may be a unique situation, a survivable crisis.

  In life-threatening situations, time is of the essence. Getting to a stricken person fast often makes the difference between life and death or between life and permanent impairment. You don’t have time to argue with yourself or with others at the door.

  You’re outside the locked door of a room where you think a suicide might be going on. What do you do? You break down the door.

  • There is so much work to do that it doesn’t matter who does it. Large corporations making money doing the right thing
is just fine. The United Nations sending black helicopters to do the right thing is just fine. Property-defending conservatives doing the right thing is just fine. Placard-waving leftists stopping the wrong thing is just fine. Paul Hawken’s myriad micro-organizations doing the right thing locally is the health of a system curing itself.

  I would love to see the environmental movement as a whole (along with everyone else) embrace the kind of ideas posed here, and maybe it will happen. But my impression is that movements don’t change that way. The environmental movement became unified in 1970 with Earth Day, and that unity served it well for a decade or two. Then the advantages diminished and the papered-over unity became more of a problem than a help. I would not be surprised if the movement now divides like a bacterium into two or more lively offspring.

  In that case, there will be traditional Greens, ever more resolute in their well-established methods and purpose, and there will be another set of Greenish players more interested in innovation and risky endeavors. The new crowd will eventually be labeled—Post-Greens, Greens-plus, Greens 2.0, Off-Greens—who knows? I need to call them something for rhetorical purposes here, so I’ll improvise. Combine the color green with the color of the blue sky, the blue planet, the blue ocean—all that atmospheric blue an artifact of life, back when it converted to oxygen—and what do you get? The science- and technology-loving Blue-Greens: the Turquoise movement, made up of Turqs (to their friends) or Turqueys (to their critics).