by Eric Flint
Indeed, carbon left near subduction zones will get drawn into the Earth's crust, not due back for 100 million years. This puts the engine of continental drift on our side.
Costs and Criticisms
This method is far cheaper than capturing CO2 in power plants—that usually demands 30% of the plant power output. The reason is that the idea uses nature's plants, not power plants. Ordinary crops do the work for us as we farm.
How big a prospect is this idea? Suppose we assume a typical erosion-abatement farm technique that leaves 25% of the residue on the field. Adding up only major grains (wheat, milled rice, and corn) yields for the USA a total of 180 mtC (million metric tons of carbon). This is about 13% of total USA carbon emissions in 1990, the base year for the Kyoto Treaty.
How about the whole world? Available big crops could lock up nearly 17% of global 1990 emissions.
These are big numbers. Kyoto would have reduced emissions far less, and no one expects even those who signed it to fully comply. Yet Kyoto will cost at least $100 billion.
We found that depositing the entire disposable U.S. waste tonnage, 450 Mt of plant waste, would cost about $22.5 billion if total collection and transport costs are $50/ton, a reasonable estimate. Still, $22.5 billion seems a small cost to hide 13% of all U.S. emitted carbon. Kyoto alone would have cost us about $90 billion.
Can it work globally? Scaling this result to other nations makes sense only for those already producing substantial crops easily movable to ocean sites. This probably includes some European states, the Ukraine and a few developing nations such as South Africa and Brazil (the Amazon is a great way to move sugar cane stalks).
There can be political advantages, too. The $22 billion per year spent to sequester farm residue will go to the American heartland, into the hands of ordinary laboring people such as farmers and truck drivers. It demands no new infrastructure and is easily stopped if unwanted effects occur. A program of domestic carbon credits exchanged in a market could make disposal efficient. After all, waste need not be cleanly handled, as are edible crops; coal barges will serve nicely.
Such bulk disposal is the simplest, lowest tech way to hide carbon from our atmospheric cycle. As a bonus, it will give ordinary working people a feeling that they, too, can do something active about climate change. And because farm waste plausibly rises with population, as does energy use, this sequestering method will then keep pace with the predicted rise of our numbers to about 9 billions within a half century.
The projected cost of capturing 13% of our CO2 at power plants is huge—$300 billion or more. Pre-emission carbon sequestering simply cannot compete.
Many people don't like putting carbon into the oceans. We know that our fossil fuel emissions have already made the seas more acidic, and this will add more. Further, it sounds like pollution, dumping farm waste. This appeals to emotions, though ocean moderating of the air is how nature does it, striking a slow balance between sea and air. The essential point, I've found in discussing this with oceanographers, is that deep sequestering has a very long return time—thousands of years. The oceans do not swiftly transport their chemical properties vertically. The acid buildup we have caused has so far penetrated only about a kilometer downward. Putting carbon at the bottom of the oceans, and perhaps even subducting it into the crust, speeds up a natural process (the carbon we're emitting will eventually end up in the Earth's deep crust). Also, it protects the zone of air and upper oceans where nearly all life lives.
What has been the reception to this idea? A lab experiment at the University of Washington showed that waste does indeed enter the water under deep ocean conditions as we said. A cost analysis showed that the economics works at present levels of carbon trading prices, so the method can compete with carbon credit markets.
But there has been no action at all from the Department of Energy. They fund only pre-emission capture, and only skimpily. A pilot plant to test that idea will not open until 2012. Nobody is in a rush to explore carbon capture.
Instead of draconian cutbacks in greenhouse-gas emissions, there may very well be fairly simple ways—even easy ones—to fix our dilemma. But the discussion of global warming never makes this clear; it seems designed to preclude any hint that we might remedy the situation except through great sacrifice, discomfort, and cost. Indeed, it seemingly assumes a direct relationship between the level of sacrifice, discomfort, and cost demanded by any proposed solution and its scientific efficacy. Solutions based on suppressing fuel use will cost us dearly, in terms of both dollars spent and standard of living. Economists differ over the price tag, with a rough analysis yielding an estimate of about $250 billion a year to reduce carbon dioxide emissions alone by 15 percent worldwide. (This number is easily debatable within a factor of two.) To this price we must add the cost of reducing other greenhouse gases, a cost felt not merely in our pocketbooks but also in the goods, services, and innovations whose production would be halted or forgone.
Puritans and Prophets
Why have ideas like these gotten no traction?
Americans have a deep propensity for pursuing morality into the thickets of science. The cloning of a sheep in Scotland provokes stern finger pointing by archbishops and ethics experts alike. This we must expect as scientific topics become ever more complicated, and freighted with profound implications.
So it inevitably shall be for greenhouse gases. Of course it would be far better to abstain from burning so much. The fossil carbon resources are a vast heritage whose utility, convenience and endless applications we—or rather, surely our great-grandchildren—shall not see again.
In the end, the deep Puritan impulse to scold and condemn for rising fossil fuel use will very probably fall upon deaf ears in both the emerging and the advancing nations. It has not fared well among its natural constituency, those who are far more easily moved by campaigns to end smoking, save the whales or stop sullying the city air.
But among the able nations, those who have the foresight to grasp solutions, an odd reluctance pervades the policy classes. The past shouts but the future can only whisper. Ralph Cicerone, a noted atmospheric physicist, noted that "Many who envision environmental problems foresee doom and have little faith in technology, and therefore propose strong limits on industrialization, while most optimists refuse to believe that there is an environmental problem at all."
Next time: Editing the Sun : A Way Out Way Out
What I've Learned Interviewing Futurists
Written by Stephen Euin Cobb
Two years of asking people for their expectations about the future has radically changed my view of what is to come.
For decades I thought I had a pretty good notion of what the future might hold, certainly better than most people since I've been reading science fiction since I was in grade school, and have gone on to write several science fiction novels as an adult. But in hosting The Future And You I've listened to descriptions of trends that I had no idea were building all around me. I've heard of discoveries and innovations and areas of research I'd never expected. And I've listened to evidence in support of ideas that I'd previously thought too crazy to be true. Combing these many bits of data has painted for me a somewhat startling picture of the future.
Here are just a few of the conclusions I've come to.
* * *
The changes we observe in our world will occur at an ever increasing rate. Not just change in the form of technological advancement, but all changes: social, economic, political, linguistic, you name it and it will change faster. This is because people will continue to be more and more connected. They will talk and share information and ideas more and more easily. And because of this, the changes which people bring about in every area of life will happen faster and faster.
Changes that would take ten years to occur today will be done in five years, then three years, then two, and eventually only one. The pace of life, and the sweep of changes, and the volatility of stock markets, will be overwhelming to some. These peop
le will withdraw from society and seek refuge in quieter places of lower technology. But most will function at the more frantic pace; some will even thrive in it.
* * *
We, and I mean every individual in every developed or developing country, will never again have as much privacy as we have today. From this point on into the future, at least for the next few decades, our privacy will shrink every year. And every year we will feel as though it has become invaded so much that it can't get any worse, and then the next year to our amazement it will get worse. And every little bit of privacy we lose, we will never get back.
This has nothing to do with our overprotective or paranoid governments spying on us; and has everything to do with the relentless progress of technology: cameras in cell phones, in public places, in every police car, and soon in ordinary eyeglasses. These will be increasingly popular, and the images they produce, increasingly accessible through networks—some through private networks and some through the internet.
Soon video cameras will be small enough to be glued onto the back of a bee or a housefly. You will find them in the electronics department at all the big stores. Teenaged boys all across America will release a fly camera into their neighbor's house or the house of their girlfriend or the girl's shower room at school.
Eventually the camera won't need the living fly to carry it through the air, and will instead use a robotic fly. Then it will go directly to where it is instructed, perhaps by joystick. And it will continue to shrink, eventually becoming too small to see or feel. Then it can be guided to travel under that woman's clothing who just happens to be walking by.
I suggest you enjoy the privacy you have today, because you won't have it for long, and you will never again have this much.
* * *
Virtual worlds (sometimes called virtual reality) will become increasingly popular in direct proportion to how effectively they provide their users (or inhabitants) with a meaningful personal experience. The current limitations on this are: the power of home computers, the quality of the virtual world's programming, the power of the virtual world's computers, and the bandwidth available to the user and throughout the internet. Every one of these is improving at an exponential rate.
Eventually virtual worlds will look and feel and sound to their users as authentic as the natural world. For some it will be a world in which they are young and strong and beautiful, though in the real world they are old and frail and haggard. For others it will be a world in which they can walk and run, though in the real world they have no legs.
* * *
Cell phones will merge with the internet. All popular forms of information technology will be accessible through cell phones and become completely portable. All TV shows, all radio stations, all newspapers, all video games, all commercially produced books, even encyclopedias and libraries. Any entertainment or information company that fails to make the transition to the internet, and therefore cell phones, will fade out of existence.
Books printed on paper will become like candles: decorative objects that we all love and give to one another as gifts but never actually rely upon for their original function.
As more visual entertainment becomes accessible through the cell phone, an optional screen worn as eyeglasses will gain popularity and become the dominant means of viewing TV and movies. This visual device will eventually be replaced by wiring the visual input directly into the optical nerves.
* * *
Just as prosthetic devices have been developed to replace amputated limbs, so too, prosthetic devices will be developed to replace amputated portions of the brain. Eventually these will become common. Someday, after they become common, they will be improved so much that they work better than the tissue they replace. And sometime after that a few people—only a few at first—will begin to migrate their minds into them, completely abandoning their original organic brains. If these pioneers prosper in their new abode, others will follow.
* * *
As our technology allows us greater flexibility to manipulate large complicated organic molecules such as proteins, hormones, genes and viruses, those people who today are hacking the internet will redirect their focus upon this new technology and begin hacking biota. The viruses they unleash upon the world will be viruses in the traditional, not metaphorical, sense.
A hackers usual goal is not to destroy—or in this case to kill—but to impress ones fellow hackers by disrupting people's lives in some dramatically visual way. But while a bio-hacker's goal may be to make everyone in Chicago's hair fall out in a single day, or to make the skin of everyone in New York City turn neon pink, errors can be made, and those errors may be fatal to everyone in Chicago or New York City.
The worst news is that bio-hacking is probably not preventable. Computer hacking wasn't and still isn't. We may have to invent bio-firewalls and bio-virus-checkers to protect our bodies against such attacks. The only good news might be that such firewalls might protect us from nature's viruses as well. In which case we would never again catch a cold.
* * *
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that people either love or hate. There seems to be no emotional middle ground. Yet Wikipedia is growing at an exponential rate. As I write these words it is more than ten times larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica. Eventually, it would seem, that all human knowledge will be contained in this, and other wiki's, and will be made freely available to everyone with internet access.
* * *
The big screen TV will become ubiquitous and will get all its shows and movies as downloads through the internet. Not some, but all. The internet will become the primary means of distribution for TV shows and movies.
This will occur through a merging of the various TV delivery services. Cable TV networks, for example, will expand their offerings of internet services to their customers until eventually they become indistinguishable from the internet. The same will happen to the satellite TV systems.
Movie theaters will remain popular in their current form for at least a decade and possibly several decades, however, because people go there for the experience of "going out" as a couple or as a group not simply for the content.
* * *
eBay will continue to grow through the next few decades, and will remain the dominant online auction house, though it will also grow in its sales of items which are sold at a pre-set price rather than by auction.
The only competitors to eBay that will prosper are those which sell things eBay refuses to allow. There are dozens of such things, such as fireworks, food, human body parts for surgical transplant, and Nazi memorabilia.
* * *
The Earth (which over geologic-time has never remained at any particular temperature) is currently getting warmer.
Human-Caused Global Warming as a concept is extremely popular within the scientific community as well as with virtually all people who are either young or describe themselves as liberal.
The concept of non-human-caused global warming is not popular within the scientific community but is generally considered a possibility. It is moderately popular, however, with those whose life-style choices are blamed for human-caused global warming.
* * *
More and more surgery will be done using remotely controlled manipulators which enter the patient's body through a small incision. These devices will get progressively smaller, and be mounted on the end of a thinner and thinner cable, until eventually the cable will be as thin as a human hair, and the manipulators will be available in sizes ranging from that of a peanut for big surgeries, to a grain of sand for very delicate work. In this way surgeries will become progressively less invasive.
At some point the remote surgical manipulator will become liberated from the end of the long cable altogether. These wireless manipulators will be tiny remotely controlled robots.
Exploratory surgery will be done by these robots which will shrink in size over a period of several decades. Early versions smaller than a honey bee may be in use by
2015, and by 2035 they may be too small to see with the unaided eye, but will continue to shrink to the size of a single living cell.
* * *
Learn More
You can learn more about Stephen Euin Cobb here or here.
Or learn more about his podcast The Future And You here, or here or even here.
Television Has a Lot to Answer For
Written by Mike Resnick
It was close to seven decades ago that Isaac Asimov looked around at the current state of the art, realized that except for Eando Binder's crude, pulpish hero Adam Link, almost every robot in science fiction was a malicious monstrosity, applied a little rationality, and came up with the Three Laws of Robotics.
It was a brilliant breakthrough, and forever put an end to the kind of robots that dominated the covers and interiors of the science fiction magazines of the 1930s. In fact, it seemed reasonable to assume that from that day forward every science fictional robot would be governed by the Three Laws or some variation of them.
So what happened?
Clifford D. Simak created Jenkins, the robot servant in the classic City, a robot who felt, empathized, and could even lie in a good cause. John Sladek created Roderick, a robot whose middle name might well have been Satire. Robert Sheckley created a robot with (very humorous) sexual accomplishments. I picked up a Hugo nomination for a story about a robot whose greatest desire was to cry.