Saving Us

by Katharine Hayhoe

  New developments in modular “micro-nuclear”—small reactors that can be transported by trucks and grouped together to make a plant—have the potential to substantially reduce the price of nuclear fission and increase its flexibility and safety. The U.S. Department of Energy is currently investing in construction of a modular nuclear plant at Idaho National Laboratory to be integrated into the Utah Municipal Power System to replace fossil fuels they’re phasing out. It’s also investing in TerraPower, a fast reactor technology that reduces nuclear waste, a partnership between Bill Gates and GE Hitachi. In the U.K., Rolls-Royce is planning to build fifteen mini-reactors in the next decade. Research on nuclear fusion—which mimics the heat-generation process at work in the Sun and does not produce nuclear waste—is ongoing, with the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor being built in France as a partnership between thirty-five different countries. China turned on its own new experimental fusion reactor in December 2020. But while safe, affordable, waste-free, and widespread nuclear fusion may be a part of our long-term future, it’s not likely to happen at scale anytime this century—and despite recent technological advances, nuclear fission isn’t the all-encompassing antidote its enthusiasts often make it out to be.

  EXCITED ABOUT THE FUTURE

  Is it really possible to move to a world of net-zero electricity? It won’t be easy, but the answer is, emphatically, yes. Much of the technology is already in place to get there; what’s lacking now is the will and the investment. As businesses and new markets alike find opportunities in the new green economy, it’s time for us to move on, with gratitude, from the old ways of getting energy that have served us for so many centuries.

  After the Christmas nutcracker talk, one ladder-thin, straight-backed, white-haired woman said it best. “I’m a third-generation landowner,” she said enthusiastically, “and they’re installing my wind turbines this week. Me and my neighbor Mattie, we’re going to take our folding stools and our lunches out and watch them do it. I’m so excited!”

  “We all should be,” I said. “Because it isn’t just about reducing the damages from fossil fuels: it’s about the hope for a better future, too.”

  I. Cost is the main reason why the U.S. hasn’t successfully built a new conventional nuclear plant in thirty years. One multi-year attempt in South Carolina was finally abandoned in 2019 after spending, as one headline put it, “$9 billion to dig a hole in the ground and then fill it back in.”

  16 CLEANING UP OUR ACT

  “When we plant trees, we plant the seeds of peace and seeds of hope. We also secure the future for our children.”

  WANGARI MAATHAI, GREEN BELT MOVEMENT FOUNDER AND NOBEL PEACE PRIZE LAUREATE

  “Farmers and rural Americans, that’s who’s going to solve this.”

  MATT RUSSELL, IOWA FARMER, TO KATHARINE

  “I’m leaving climate science,” Chris Anderson told me over the phone. Chris and I had worked together on many projects, most recently a set of guidelines for the U.S. Federal Highway Administration to prepare for a changing climate. We’re both interested in practical work that provides the information people need to make decisions in the real world.

  “Leaving?” I asked in disbelief, finding it hard to understand why someone like him, successful and smart, would be giving up climate science at a time when we need every hand on deck. “To do what?”

  “To work for a new biofuel company,” he said.

  Biofuels… I’d heard of those. They were promoted by the George W. Bush administration to pay farmers to grow corn to turn into ethanol. The fossil fuels used to grow the corn and convert it into fuel exceeded any carbon emission reductions from burning it, and the program was only successful because it was heavily subsidized by the federal government. Plus, turning food into fuel? Even kids see the problem with that!

  My colleague Michael Webber is an energy expert. In his book Power Trip he recounts how, one night, he was watching a documentary on corn ethanol. He didn’t think his eight-year-old daughter was paying attention. But at the end of the movie, she bolted up, grabbed a pad of paper, and scribbled out a two-page essay called “Why We Can’t Use Corn!” that began with the line, “We should not use corn to make oil because we eat it!”

  “That’s not what we’re doing,” Chris assured me when I expressed my doubts. “And I think this could really make a difference with climate change. Why don’t you come for a visit next time you’re in Iowa and I’ll show it to you?” So I did.

  The headquarters for Renewable Energy Group, Inc. (REG) lies at the end of a business park in Ames, Iowa. The company is professional, organized, and clearly influenced by their engineers and scientists; much of their wall space is covered in infographics and diagrams. It takes agricultural waste and used cooking oil from restaurants and other food producers and transforms them into carbon-neutral bio-based diesel fuel that can be used in bus and truck fleets with no engine modifications. No new products and certainly no crops grown specifically for REG go into this fuel; it’s all made from waste products that would otherwise be thrown out.

  REG’s engineers know that, long-term, many will transition to electric buses and trucks. For now, though, there often isn’t enough infrastructure to support these types of electric vehicles. A lot of investment is needed for this solution to become a reality. Today, most buses and other long-haul vehicles still have internal combustion engines. Compared with using petroleum-based diesel, REG’s biomass-based diesel fuel could cut emissions over the whole production cycle by 86 percent. This is a great option until a city or a trucking company is ready to replace their fleet with electric vehicles.

  “What happens if you run yourselves out of a job?” I asked.

  “We can move on to aircraft fuel, then,” one of the engineers replied. “The world will also be a much cleaner place.”

  CRACKING THE TOUGH ENERGY NUTS

  Sectors that require energy users to carry their liquid fuels with them, like shipping and aviation, are two of the toughest nuts to crack when it comes to carbon-free energy. Today, shipping makes up about 2 to 3 percent of the human impact on climate change. Aviation is responsible for an estimated 3 percent as well. Together, if these two industries were a country, they’d be the fourth largest emitter in the world, between India and Russia.

  The International Maritime Organization has committed to reducing shipping emissions at least 50 percent by 2050. Ships such as ferries that make short trips can be electrified. After Norway banned all non-electric cruise ships and ferries from its UNESCO World Heritage fjords, cruise lines immediately began building electric ships, and the first one set sail in 2019. Two other start-ups are looking to bring the past into the future, designing sail systems that could quickly retrofit existing cargo ships with masts and large, rectangular sails they estimate would reduce their fuel use by up to 20 percent. Both the Wind Challenger Project based in Japan and the U.K.-based Smart Green Shipping Alliance hope to have demonstration ships ready by 2021 and are also working on entirely wind-powered ship designs.

  With aviation, only one-third of its warming effect on climate comes from burning jet fuel. The remainder comes primarily from the condensation trails or contrails planes leave in their wake, as water vapor condenses around particulates in the exhaust. About a third of aviation emissions come from short-haul flights, and there is significant potential to electrify these. The Israeli firm Eviation has created a prototype nine-passenger electric plane with a 650-mile range that is expected to take its first flight in 2021. Cape Airlines, which serves New England, has already placed an order for a number of them. EasyJet, the popular European budget airline, is partnering with a start-up appropriately known as Wright Electric to develop electric short-haul planes over the next decade.

  Electrification doesn’t work for long-haul flights. It’s simply because of weight. Per kilogram, jet fuel contains about fifty times more energy than current battery technology. For example, the Airbus A380, until production ceased in 2019, was
the largest passenger plane in the world. Aeronautical engineer Duncan Walker calculated that while it had a fossil fuel–powered range of fifteen thousand kilometers, with batteries, that range shrank to only one thousand kilometers. Instead, international airlines, under the United Nation’s Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, are looking to reach their goal of any growth after 2020 being carbon neutral via efficiency improvements; alternative fuels made of “green molecules” that don’t produce any new carbon when burned, including ammonia, hydrogen, and biofuels; and offset programs, where they pay for carbon emissions to be reduced or for carbon to be removed from the atmosphere elsewhere.

  Unlike ammonia or hydrogen fuel, which have to be stored under pressure, biofuels can be swapped out with fossil fuels, no new engines or retrofits needed. What’s used to create the biofuel is the challenge, though. It can be synthetic, or it can be made from something that removed the carbon from the atmosphere recently and did not, unlike corn-based ethanol, incur any additional carbon in doing so. Candidates include algae, agricultural waste, and cooking oil; even garbage, manure, and grass clippings could be turned into fuel. In 2019, a team of chemical engineers from University College London won British Airways’ Sustainable Aviation Fuels Academic Challenge with a plan to turn household waste into jet fuel capable of powering a five-hour long-haul flight without any carbon emissions. At this point, biofuel is more a question of supply, logistics, and cost rather than technology—another place where a price on carbon would accelerate the transition.

  The post-COVID green recovery is lending extra impetus to these plans. To receive a government bailout, France and the Netherlands required Air France and KLM respectively to cut their carbon emissions per passenger in half, relative to 2005, by 2030. United Airlines has been refueling its flights out of Los Angeles with biofuel created from agricultural waste since 2016, and five other airports—Bergen and Oslo in Norway, Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Brisbane in Australia, and Stockholm in Sweden—offer biofuel refueling options.

  Some sectors will take longer than others to decarbonize, but change is happening. As Air Emirates president Tim Clark said in 2019, “We [in the aviation industry] aren’t doing ourselves any favours by chucking billions of tons of carbon into the air. It’s got to be dealt with.” The only question is whether it will occur quickly enough to avoid dangerous climate change—and so far, it isn’t. That’s why we need climate policies: to accelerate the transition that is already occurring around the world.

  FARMING THE FUTURE

  “Farmers and rural Americans, that’s who’s going to solve this,” says Matt Russell. Matt is a farmer in Iowa. His farm, Coyote Run, lies about an hour south of where Chris works in Ames. Matt has experienced firsthand the pressures small landowners are facing as industrial-scale production continues to spread across the landscape. And he thinks climate solutions offer the answer for him and his fellow farmers to stay in business.

  Being in Iowa, Matt has some unique leverage. It’s the first state in the U.S. to hold its primary caucus each election cycle. In the caucus, registered members of the Republican and Democratic Parties cast their vote for which of the many candidates for president they want to lead their party. Every major news outlet in the country (and many international ones as well) descend on Iowa, and candidates often spend weeks in advance of the caucus traveling up and down the state. So Matt shares his carbon message with every politician who visits Iowa. As a result, nearly every primary candidate, Democrat or Republican, in the past decade has gotten an earful on what farmers can bring to the climate potluck and how that would benefit middle America.

  Forestry, land use, and agriculture may not seem like obvious places to look for climate solutions, but they comprise a huge chunk of heat-trapping gas emissions: 24 percent of the global total, to be exact. The biggest part of those emissions comes from livestock and deforestation. Ruminants like cows, sheep, and goats belch out copious amounts of methane, which as I mentioned before is thirty-five times more powerful than carbon dioxide. And as the world’s demand for meat and animal products increases, we’re seeing more slashing and burning of virgin forest to create space for grazing, which creates even more carbon emissions.

  It’s easy to see how a carbon price would help level the playing field by making new technologies such as renewable energy, high-temperature industrial processes, and electrification and biofuels for aviation and shipping more affordable compared to fossil fuels. But there’s another benefit to a price on carbon as well. Too much carbon in the atmosphere is bad, but carbon in the soil and biosphere is good. So how can we get it there? Plants are the key.

  That’s why Matt’s right when he argues that carbon farming, smart soil management, and sustainable agriculture are essential to any comprehensive climate plan. Not only that, but their payoff is substantial. Conservation agriculture is an approach that minimizes tilling and soil disturbance. It protects soil with cover crops, leaves waste behind after harvest, and uses crop rotations to manage the soil. Integrating livestock can close the cycle, providing a use for crop residue and waste vegetables while producing manure that can be used to compost and serving as part of crop rotations. Project Drawdown estimates that conservation agriculture could sequester a year’s worth of the entire world’s carbon emissions and save farmers somewhere between $2 and $3 trillion in lifetime operational costs. Another year’s worth could be sequestered by protecting indigenous people’s rights to manage their land, and a further one to two years’ worth of emissions through managed grazing and the integration of trees, pasture, and animal forage. Traditional practices, from fire management to agroforestry systems, not only increase carbon in the soil and biosphere but also protect habitat and biodiversity. It’s yet another win-win.

  Like me, Matt is motivated in large part by his faith. When he’s not farming, he serves as executive director of Iowa Interfaith Power and Light, an organization whose programs include “Faith, Farms and Climate.” It brings farmers together in church basements to talk about climate policies that would help them thrive. Farmers take the concept of stewardship seriously, and that’s the very value that informs the actions and attitudes Matt embodies and shares.

  People in Texas think that way, too. That’s what motivated a group of local sixth graders to partner with another one of my Texas Tech colleagues, soil scientist Natasja van Gestel, to create a science project called “Carbon Keepers.” The students measured how carbon levels change in response to drought, wildfire, and fertilizer, and studied how farmers could store carbon as organic matter in soil. Then they went out and shared what they learned with local farmers, ranchers, and community groups. In 2020 they won their category of a U.S. Army web-based science, technology, engineering, and mathematics competition. As I’ve said before: if something like this can happen in Lubbock, Texas, how else might the world change?

  PUTTING CARBON BACK

  When I visited his lab, Robert Brown, director of the Bioeconomy Institute at Iowa State University, introduced me to one of the most direct ways of putting carbon back in the soil. “This dark gray powder,” Robert said, uncapping a test tube and pouring some biochar into my hand, “is like MiracleGro on steroids.” It’s basically pure carbon, and if you plow it back into marginal or average soils, it is one of the best fertilizers under the sun. It also sequesters that carbon in the soil, instead of in the atmosphere.

  He pulled out two photos from the previous July of tomato plants in his backyard.

  “I bought these the same day and planted them with the same soil,” he said. “The only difference is that I mixed biochar into one of the pots. This is a picture from eight weeks later. Can you guess which one?”

  It wasn’t hard to tell: one plant had four or five tomatoes on it; the other looked like it had more tomatoes than leaves. All told, he said, the biochar pot produced several times more tomatoes than the pot without. A process called pyrolysis, burning agricultural waste at high temperature
s in the absence of oxygen, allows him to distill the carbon local crops pulled out of the atmosphere just a few months earlier into biochar, along with products, including oils, that can be used for other purposes.

  This is similar to the approach taken by SymSoil, a company based in California. They’ve created a new type of biologically active compost they call “Soil Food Web” that increases soil carbon storage by 2.5 metric tons of carbon per acre per year. Working with David Johnson, a researcher from California State University, they’re producing a special mix of biochar infused with fungi that increases the carbon storage to 10 tons per acre per year. It reduces the amount of irrigation needed, as well.

  Biochar, crop rotations, and regenerative agriculture aren’t new technology. Ancient peoples have been doing these things for centuries to enrich their soils. Many Westernized countries have just neglected them in recent decades, blinded by our fascination with big-box farming and industrialization, cheap pesticides and fertilizers, and the “bigger is better” mentality of the Industrial Revolution. Regenerative agriculture practices encourage us to return to the wiser approaches of previous generations. But at the very opposite end of the spectrum there’s also innovative, out-of-the-box technology to suck carbon out of the atmosphere and turn it into something that’s harmless. Much of this is led by, again, scientists who’ve stepped out of academia to develop leading-edge solutions, some of which sound like science fiction.