Saving Us

by Katharine Hayhoe

  Scientists have recently discovered how to grind up rocks that then react with CO2, pulling it out of the atmosphere and turning it into… more rocks. This might sound counterintuitive, but anything that moves carbon from the atmosphere back into the lithosphere, where fossil fuels come from, is a big help. About 25 percent of the carbon humans produce is taken up by the ocean, and in 2017 graduate student Adam Subhas at Caltech led a team that discovered how, by adding an enzyme, they could speed up those chemical reactions by as much as five hundred times. Then, in 2019, researchers in synthetic biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel successfully created a strain of E. coli—a type of bacteria that commonly lives in the intestines of healthy people, feeding off sugars and fats—that instead consumes carbon dioxide.

  Climeworks is a small Swiss company that’s developed and, even more importantly, brought to market what’s called “direct-air-capture” technology: the ability to suck carbon dioxide right out of the air. With carbon pricing, they’d be able to turn this into a solid product that could be stored deep underground, essentially removing the carbon from the atmosphere for millions of years. Lacking that incentive, instead they’ve turned to products they can make from the captured carbon and sell, from stone at their Iceland plant to the carbon they capture in Switzerland and sell to greenhouses and fizzy drink sellers such as Coca-Cola.

  There’s also the idea that rather than letting the carbon from burning coal or natural gas escape into the atmosphere, we can trap it and store it underground. There’s one operational carbon capture plant in the U.S., in Texas. Petra Nova is touted by many politicians as the future of climate solutions. But the carbon dioxide it captures goes straight to the oil and gas industry, to enhance oil recovery from existing wells. The reality is that carbon capture and storage is nearly always a more expensive option than just cutting emissions in the first place, and there’s even a risk that such approaches create more CO2 than they remove.

  The true holy grail of carbon capture has already been achieved in 2018 by a Canadian company called Carbon Engineering: experimentally, that is. They combine the carbon dioxide they suck out of the atmosphere with hydrogen from water and turn it back into liquid fuel. When burned, it can be carbon neutral since it’s only releasing carbon that was already in the atmosphere. This has the added bonus of creating a fuel that can be used in places where it isn’t easy to trade out liquid fuels for batteries: like ships and aircraft. Carbon Engineering’s technology is being used to develop 1PointFive, a new, industrial-scale joint venture between Occidental Petroleum and Rusheen Capital Management, to be built in Texas’s Permian Basin in 2022. The plant will be able to capture and store one million tons of CO2 each year. And, with an appropriate price on carbon, more of these projects could soon get off the ground.

  SCALING UP NATURE

  Taking up carbon isn’t necessarily high-tech. Planting trees can take up massive amounts of carbon dioxide. Trees carry all kinds of side benefits: supporting natural ecosystems and biodiversity, filtering water, and cleaning air. A 2019 study claimed that planting a trillion trees—which could be accomplished on the land currently occupied by parks, forests, and abandoned land today—would take up the equivalent of at least a decades’ worth of human carbon emissions. It caused a furor, as it made it seem like climate change might be much easier to fix than we’d thought. The YouTuber MrBeast set up #teamtrees with a goal of raising $20 million to plant trees through the Arbor Day Foundation. As of 2020, the team has already planted over 22 million trees. The One Trillion Trees initiative (1t.org), launched at the World Economic Forum at Davos in January 2020, gained support from many world leaders, including then President Trump. A program called Ant Forest allowed users of the Alipay online payment platform in China to fund 100 million trees in that country alone.

  Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as it sounds. While tree planting is still an excellent solution, it turned out that there were a few errors in the trillion trees calculation. Correcting them shows that the benefits are closer to a year or two of emissions rather than a decade or two. Yes, tree-planting is great, and we should do more of it. We should also protect and restore forests that are in danger of being lost. As The Nature Conservancy argues, this is one of the most cost-effective natural defenses against climate change. Its Africa Forest Carbon Catalyst, for example, aims to avoid or reduce 20 million tons of CO2 emissions each year; restore or conserve 10 million hectares of African forest; and create 5,000 local jobs. Initiatives like Cities4Forests take a similar holistic approach, partnering large urban centers with “inner forests” in the city itself, “nearby forests” in the surrounding areas, and even “faraway forests” that sequester carbon and protect biodiversity. So far, sixty-three cities have signed up, from Accra, Ghana, to Detroit, Michigan.

  On their own, trees don’t offer a magic elixir or a get-out-of-the-climate-jail-free card. But when they’re incorporated into all of the other nature-based climate solutions I’ve already talked about, together they could add up to over a third of the reductions needed to meet our global 2030 target.

  ENGINEERING THE PLANET

  When it comes to climate solutions, though, the elephant in the room is solar radiation management, or SRM. It’s the idea of deliberately interfering with the Earth’s atmosphere for the specific purpose of altering its energy balance. In essence, engineering our entire home.

  One could argue that humans are in fact already geoengineering the planet with our emissions. As far back as scientists can track the geologic history of the Earth, there is no parallel for the sheer volume of carbon we’re pouring into the atmosphere every year. However, the terms “geoengineering” and “climate intervention” are usually applied to a situation where we are doing it intentionally.

  One way that can be done is to mimic the effect of a large volcanic eruption on the Earth, by injecting particles into the upper atmosphere. This increases the amount of sunlight that’s reflected back to space rather than being absorbed by the Earth, which in turn cools the planet. Another way would be to sprinkle cloud condensation nuclei—simple sea salt—in large areas over the ocean, to make marine clouds brighter and more numerous, so they reflect more of the Sun’s energy back to space.

  Both of these forms of SRM are scalable and adjustable. This makes them cautiously appealing to geoengineering proponents—and very appealing to opponents of climate action and carbon emissions reductions who often appear willing to approve any plan, however untested, if it will let them continue burning fossil fuels. It’s similar to the mentality that led people to tout unproven cures to coronavirus while pooh-poohing the tried-and-true practice of wearing masks.

  It’s concerning, though, that some of these methods are relatively affordable and well within the technological capacity of nations who are being disproportionately affected by climate impacts. What if one of these countries decided unilaterally to geoengineer the planet? That would be like conducting a Phase 1 vaccine trial with the entire human race all at once. Scientists have a fair grasp of some of the side effects, but certainly not all of them. And, as I’ve said already, this is the only planet we have.

  There’s no question that if we continue on our current pathway overconsuming fossil fuels, we may need all our options on the table. Making better choices over the past few decades would have been far more preferable. Given the risks the impacts pose, there may come a point where some would feel that this type of geoengineering could conceivably be justified. But it is clear that taking such a drastic step could leave us to deal with a whole slate of unintended and unanticipated side effects. And while geoengineering might temporarily drop global temperature, it wouldn’t do a thing about all the carbon dioxide that is building up in the ocean.

  Today, the ocean is 30 percent more acidic than it was a hundred and fifty years ago. Acidification decreases the amount of calcium carbonate in the water, a mineral that is one of the key building blocks for phytoplankton shells. Phytoplankto
n produce half the oxygen we breathe and form the base of the marine food chain. Clams, mussels, oysters, and coral need calcium carbonate, too. Sea creatures that grow shells can even see them dissolve in acidic conditions. Acidification’s impact on marine life threatens food security, livelihoods, and the global economy.

  Not only does SRM not help with acidification, but if it were to stop for whatever reason, the particles would clear out of the atmosphere in a matter of months to years—meaning that all the warming they had offset would be abruptly realized. The precipitous rise in temperature would be devastating. The “cure” being removed so quickly would almost certainly be worse than the disease.

  Studying geoengineering to determine whether or not it should even be included in our arsenal of options to combat climate change is wise; that’s why Harvard and Oxford have research programs dedicated to it. But it should not and cannot be considered as a first line of defense against climate change. We must reduce and eventually eliminate our fossil fuel emissions, as well as suck some of the carbon we’ve produced out of the atmosphere. Only then can we slow and eventually stabilize our current rate of warming.

  That’s why it makes all the sense in the world to reduce our emissions as fast as we can, as soon as we can: because, to paraphrase John Holdren, the more we do now, the less we’ll have to worry about the future, and the less risky the solutions we’ll need.

  17 TIME TO SPEED UP

  “The planet will survive. The question is whether we will be here to witness it.”

  CHRISTIANA FIGUERES AND TOM RIVETT-CARNAC, THE FUTURE WE CHOOSE

  “The most important thing an individual can do right now is not be such an individual.”

  BILL McKIBBEN TO KATHARINE, WHILE ON A PANEL TOGETHER

  We often picture the challenge of solving climate change as a giant boulder at the bottom of a huge hill. Only a few people are straining their backs to roll it up, and it hasn’t budged an inch. But in reality, as you’ve seen from the last few chapters, that giant boulder is already at the top of the hill. It’s starting to gradually roll downhill in the right direction. There are many millions of hands on it, pushing. Each one we add speeds it up a little more.

  We don’t have all the technology we need to go a hundred percent carbon-neutral tomorrow. But we do have what we need to get at least halfway there, and we know what to do to get the rest of it in place. Tried-and-true policies like cap and trade and carbon pricing, and targeted investment in research areas like liquid fuels and smart grids, will create the markets and help spur the innovation that will get us the remainder of the way there.

  At this point, it’s not a matter of whether. It’s a matter of when. And at our current pace, despite all the enormous progress that’s already been made, we aren’t moving fast enough—yet.

  It’s been more than half a century since those scientists first warned a U.S. president of the risks of climate change. Thanks to huge evidence-gathering and modeling efforts by the global scientific community, most countries in the world have pledged to reduce their emissions. Yet according to the Climate Action Tracker, as of 2021 current policies around the world would limit warming to a best-case scenario of just under 3°C, when we need to keep the rise to 1.5°C or at most 2°C to avoid disastrous impacts. Worldwide, replacing coal, oil, and gas is still happening ten times slower than what’s needed to meet climate goals. That’s not a lot of action for a threat that scientists have known about since the 1800s and have been warning people about for decades. So how can we speed things up?

  DIVESTING FROM FOSSIL FUELS

  The fossil fuel divestment movement began in 2010. Students in the U.S. urged their universities and institutions to scrub their endowments of fossil fuel investments and transfer these funds to clean energy and community resilience planning. From there, it spread around the world: from faith-based organizations, such as the Church of England, to dozens of cities, such as Copenhagen, Christchurch, Paris, and Sydney, and even entire countries, like Ireland. Leaders like Bishop Desmond Tutu and environmentalist Bill McKibben are strong advocates for divestment, and organizations such as 350.org and Fossil Free bring people together to encourage their institutions to divest. As Bill says, one of the most important things an individual can do right now is “not be such an individual.” Working together to make a large-scale improvement in our treatment of the global commons can be incredibly effective, and the divestment movement is a prime example of this.

  Don Lieber is a surgical technician who works in the operating room at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center in New York City—a “pass the scalpel guy,” he calls himself. As he heard more and more about the health care implications of the climate crisis, he found himself wondering, “Why on earth is the health-care industry not more active in this?”

  The American Medical Association and the British Medical Association have explicitly called for fossil fuel divestment as a public health imperative. So Don started a campaign to get MSK to divest its staff pension and retirement plans from fossil fuel holdings. But despite emphasizing the public health time bomb that climate change represents, he received a polite no, couched in terms of the financial responsibilities of the fund to its beneficiaries.

  So he collected signatures from doctors, nurses, and support staff asking the hospital for the option of investing their personal retirement portfolios in fossil free index funds. “If MSK doesn’t have the spine to commit to fossil fuel divestment,” says Don, “they should at least give the staff the option to do so.”

  Don respects the medical science performed at his workplace. “These are some of the most published cancer surgeons in the world,” he says. “I’m not trying to single my hospital out—I want all of the hospital systems to do this.” But the health care sector overall has been mostly silent on fossil fuel divestment, he maintains. “All we are asking,” Don says, “is that our institutions’ investment practices are held to the same ethical parameters that we, as healthcare professionals, pledge to in the Hippocratic Oath: ‘First, do no harm.’ ”

  Don’s not alone. Sustainable mutual funds are growing in popularity, and many others, from university faculty to business professionals, are starting to ask the hard but necessary questions about where their savings are being invested. Thanks to people like Don, many organizations have already chosen to sell or otherwise rid themselves of fossil fuel investments for ethical or moral reasons, due to the harmful impacts of fossil fuel use.

  Even large financial corporations are beginning to include mention of ethical concerns as motivation for divestment. Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s largest investment banks, announced in 2019 that it would no longer invest in Arctic oil exploration due to “harsh operating conditions, sea ice, permafrost coverage, and potential impacts to critical natural habitats for endangered species.” In 2020, Michael Corbat, the CEO of Citigroup, said banks should “have the courage to walk away” from clients who refuse to reduce their carbon emissions. And as part of the “green recovery” plan from coronavirus, twelve more major cities around the world, from Cape Town to Vancouver and including London, New York, and Los Angeles, announced they were divesting their pension funds from fossil fuels.

  As of 2020, over thirteen hundred organizations and nearly sixty thousand individuals, whose assets totaled over $14 trillion, had either already begun to or promised to divest from fossil fuels. Thirty-four percent of the organizations are faith-based, and 30 percent are philanthropic or educational institutions, emphasizing the importance of the ethical argument. However, 12 percent are government, another 12 percent are pension funds, and a small but growing 5 percent are for-profit corporations. That’s because it’s not only about ethics or reputation anymore; there are increasingly sound financial reasons to divest as well.

  KEEPING THEM IN THE GROUND

  A significant proportion of fossil fuel reserves need to stay where they are—buried in the ground—to meet the Paris targets. Specifically, up to 80 percent of known c
oal reserves, 50 percent of gas reserves, and 33 percent of oil reserves will need to remain unburned if the world is to have any hope of meeting the 2°C Paris target.

  Companies banking on the financial worth of these resources are increasingly facing the risk of being left with “stranded assets,” resources that they can’t use or sell. The cumulative value of stranded fossil fuel assets is estimated at up to $4 trillion, if rapid action is taken, and nearly double that if it is not.

  There’s also the growing risk climate change poses to businesses. On the front lines of skyrocketing payouts for increasingly devastating disasters, the insurance and reinsurance industry has been concerned about this for years. Other financial entities are finally starting to recognize these risks as well. In September 2020, for example, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission released a report stating that “climate change poses a major risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and to its ability to sustain the American economy… a major concern is what we don’t know.” Risk management firms are beginning to offer indices that allow companies to assess their vulnerability and risk, such as one by Verisk Maplecroft whose stated goal is to allow its users to “understand the exposure of your operations, supply chains, and investments to climate change–related risks.”

  Both of these factors—the risk of stranded assets and of climate impacts—are likely playing into announcements like the one made by Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock. It’s the largest asset manager in the world, with more than $7 trillion in investments. In a January 2020 letter to global CEOs, he announced the firm would drop investments such as coal that pose “a high sustainability-related risk,” adding that “the evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance.”