After Geoengineering
After
Geoengineering
Climate Tragedy,
Repair, and Restoration
Holly Jean Buck
First published by Verso 2019
© Holly Jean Buck 2019
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-036-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-799-4 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-038-9 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Contents
Introduction. Desperation Point
Part I. Cultivation
1. Cultivating Energy
Flowers
2. Cultivating the Seas
Ghost Bar
3. Regenerating
Part II. Burial
4. Capturing
Pecan Tree
5. Weathering
Mountain
Part III. The After-Zero Society
6. Working
7. Learning
8. Co-opting
Part IV. Buying Time
9. Programming
10. Reckoning
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Introduction
Desperation Point
December in California at one degree of warming: ash motes float lazily through the afternoon light as distant wildfires rage. This smoky “winter” follows a brutal autumn at one degree of warming: a wayward hurricane roared toward Ireland, while Puerto Rico’s grid, lashed by winds, remains dark. This winter, the stratospheric winds break down. The polar jet splits and warps, shoving cold air into the middle of the United States. Then, summer again: drought grips Europe, forests in Sweden are burning, the Rhine is drying up. And so on.
One degree of warming has already revealed itself to be about more than just elevated temperatures. Wild variability is the new normal. Atmospheric patterns get stuck in place, creating multi-week spells of weather that are out of place. Megafires and extreme events are also the new normal—or the new abnormal, as Jerry Brown, California’s former governor, put it. One degree is more than one unit of measurement. One degree is about the uncanny, and the unfamiliar.
If this is one degree, what will three degrees be like? Four?
At some point—maybe it will be two, or three, or four degrees of warming—people will lose hope in the capacity of current emissions-reduction measures to avert climate upheaval. On one hand, there is a personal threshold at which one loses hope: many of the climate scientists I know are there already. But there’s also a societal threshold: a turning point, after which the collective discourse of ambition will slip into something else. A shift of narrative. Voices that say, “Let’s be realistic; we’re not going to make it.” Whatever making it means: perhaps limiting warming to 2°C, or 1.5, as the Paris Agreement urged the world to strive for. There will be a moment where “we,” in some kind of implied community, decide that something else must be tried. Where “we” say: Okay, it’s too late. We didn’t try our best, and now we are in that bad future. Then, there will be grappling for something that can be done.
This is the point where it becomes “necessary” to consider the future we didn’t want: solar geoengineering. People will talk about changing how we live, from diet to consumption to transportation; but by then, the geophysics of the system will no longer be on our side. A specter rears its head: the idea of injecting aerosols into the stratosphere to block incoming sunlight. The vision is one of shielding ourselves in a haze of intentional pollution, a security blanket that now seems safer than the alternative. This discussion, while not an absolute given, seems plausible, if not probable, from the vantage point of one degree of warming—especially given that emissions are still rising.
You may have heard something about solar geoengineering. It’s been skulking in the shadows of climate policy for a decade, and haunting science for longer than that, even though it’s still just a rough idea. But it is unlikely you imagined solar geoengineering would be a serious topic of discussion, because it sounds too crazy—change the reflectivity of the earth to send more sunlight back out into space? Indeed, it is a drastic idea.
We are fortunate to have rays of sunlight streaming through space and hitting the atmospheric borders of our planet at a “solar constant” of about 1,360 watts per square meter (W/m2) where the planet is directly facing the sun. This solar constant is our greatest resource; a foundation of life on earth. In fact, it’s not actually so constant—it was named before people were able to measure it from space. The solar constant varies during the year, day to day, even minute to minute. Nevertheless, this incoming solar energy is one of the few things in life we can count on.
Much of this sunlight does not reach the surface; about 30 percent of it gets reflected back into space. So on a clear day when the sun is at its zenith, the solar radiation might reach 1,000 W/m2. But this varies depending on where you are on the globe, on the time of day, on the reflectivity of the surface (ice, desert, forest, ocean, etc.), on the clouds, on the composition of the atmosphere, and so on. Because it’s night half the time, and because the sun is hitting most of the earth at an angle, the average solar radiation around the globe works out to about 180 W/m2 over land.1 Still, this 180 W/m2 is a bounty.
The point of reciting all these numbers is this: solar geoengineering amounts to an effort to change this math. That’s how a researcher might look at it, anyway.
From one perspective, it sounds like complete lunacy to intentionally mess with something as fundamental as incoming solar radiation. The sun, after all, has been worshipped by cultures around the world: countless prayers uttered to Ra, Helios, Sol, Bel, Surya, Amaterasu, and countless other solar deities throughout the ages. Today, many still celebrate holidays descended from solar worship. And that worship makes sense—without the sun, there would be nothing. Even in late capitalism, we valorize the sun: people search for living spaces with great natural light; they get suntans; they create tourist destinations with marketing based on the sun and bring entire populations to them via aircraft. Changing the way sunlight reaches us and all other life on earth is almost unimaginably drastic.
But there are ways of talking about solar geoengineering that normalize it, that make you forget the thing being discussed is sunlight itself. The most discussed method of solar geoengineering is “stratospheric aerosol injection”—that is, putting particles into the stratosphere, a layer of the atmosphere higher than planes normally fly. These particles would block some fraction of incoming sunlight, perhaps about 1 to 2 percent of it. Stratospheric aerosols would change not only the amount of light coming down, but also the type: the light would be more diffuse, scattering differently. These changes would alter the color of our skies, whitening them to a degree that may or may not be easily perceptible, depending on whether you live in an urban area. The distortion would also affect how plants and phytoplankton operate. Certainly, this type of intervention seems extreme.
And despite the extremity of the idea, it’s not straightforwardly
irrational. First of all, solar radiation is already naturally variable; a single passing cloud can change the flux by 25 W/m2.2 What’s more, solar radiation is unnaturally variable. Global warming is caused by greenhouse gas emissions—the greenhouse gas molecules trap heat, creating an imbalance between the energy coming in and the energy going back out. Since 1750, these emissions have increased the flux another 2.29 W/m2.3 This disparity between incoming and outgoing energy is what scientists call “radiative forcing”—a measure of imbalance, of forced change, caused by human activity. That imbalance would actually be greater—just over 3 W/m2—if not for the slight countervailing effect of aerosol emissions that remain close to the ground. Think about a smoggy day. The quality of the light is dimmer. Indeed, air pollution from cars, trucks, and factories on the ground already masks about a degree of warming. Total removal of aerosols—as we’re trying to accomplish, in order to improve air quality and human health—could induce heating of 0.5 to 1.1°C globally.4
So, from another perspective, because human activity is already messing with the balance of radiation through both greenhouse gas emissions (warming) and emitting particulate matter from industry and vehicles (cooling), it doesn’t sound as absurd to entertain the idea that another tweak might not be that significant—especially if the counterfactual scenario is extreme climate suffering. If you stretch your imagination, you can picture a future scenario where it could be more outrageous not to talk about this idea.
The question is, are we at the point—let’s call it “the shift”—where it is worth talking about more radical or extreme measures—such as removing carbon from the atmosphere, leaving oil in the ground, social and cultural change, radical adaptation, or even solar geoengineering?
Deciding where the shift—the moment of reckoning, the desperation point—lies is a difficult task, because for every optimist who thinks renewables will save the day, there is a pessimist noting that the storage capacity and electrical grid needed for a true renewable revolution does not even exist as a plan. For many people, it’s hard to tell how desperate to feel: we know we should be worried, but we also imagine the world might slide to safety, show up five minutes to midnight and catch the train to an okay place, with some last-minute luck. It can seem like the dissonance around what’s possible actually increases the closer we get to the crunch point; the event horizon. Some of this uncertainty is indeed grounded in the science. “Climate sensitivity”—the measurement describing how earth would respond to a doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations from preindustrial times—is still unknown. That means we don’t know precisely what impacts a given amount of greenhouse gas emissions will have.
However, basic physics dictates that this season of uncertainty is limited. The picture will become clearer as emissions continue, and as scientists tally up how much carbon is in the atmosphere. Nevertheless, examining the situation today provides useful insights that should be well known, but somehow are rarely discussed in venues other than technical scientific meetings.
At present, human activities emit about 40 gigatons (Gt) of carbon dioxide a year, or 50 Gt of “carbon dioxide equivalent,” a measure that includes other greenhouse gases like methane. (A gigaton is a billion tons.) Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have emitted about 2,200 Gt of CO2.5 Scientists have estimated that releasing another 1,000 Gt CO2 equivalent during this century would raise temperatures by two degrees Celsius—exceeding the target of the Paris Agreement—meaning that 1,000 Gt CO2 is, if you like, our maximum remaining budget (these are rough figures; it could be much less).6 Knowing that today roughly 50 Gt of carbon dioxide equivalent is emitted, it is evident that emitters are on track to squander the entire carbon budget within the next 20 years. Moreover, the rate of warming is still increasing. This means that if the rate of warming slows down yet emissions remain at today’s rate, in twenty years, two degrees of warming are essentially guaranteed.
What would it take to avoid this? To keep warming below two degrees, emissions will need to drop dramatically—and even go negative by the end of this century, according to scenarios assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Figure 1 shows a typical “okay future” scenario; one that would provide for a decent chance of staying within two degrees.
Figure 1. Median values from 18 scenarios evaluated by six models using shared socioeconomic pathways assessed in the next assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Data: Glen Peters / CICERO
Three key features are evident in Figure 1.
First, the “good future” scenario has emissions peaking around 2020, and then dropping dramatically. Dramatic emissions reductions are key to any scenario that limits warming.
Second, emissions go net negative around 2070. “Net negative” means that the world is sucking up more carbon than it is emitting. How is that done? While emissions can be zeroed via the mitigation measures we’re familiar with—using renewable energy instead of fossil fuels, stopping deforestation, halting the destruction of wetlands, and so on—to push emissions beyond zero and into negative territory requires a greater degree of intervention. There are two main categories of approach: biological methods, including using forests, agricultural systems, and marine environments to store carbon; and geologic methods, which typically employ industrial means to capture and store CO2 underground or in rock. Some approaches combine these, though: for instance, coupling bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. (We’ll walk through these different practices in detail later.)
But here, note a third point: carbon actually starts to be removed in the 2020s and 2030s, when emissions are still relatively high. Industrial carbon capture and storage (CCS)—the practice of capturing streams of carbon at industrial sites and injecting it into underground wells—is a crucial technique for accomplishing these levels of carbon removal. As of 2019, the world has only around twenty CCS plants in operation, a number that is almost quaint in scale. To begin removing carbon at the level displayed in Figure 1 implies scaling up the current amount of carbon stored by something like a thousandfold. By 2100, in this scenario, the world would be sequestering ten or fifteen gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent. And the scale-up begins right away.
The gentle slope of declining greenhouse gases looks so neat and calm. It is a fantasy described in clean lines; in the language of numbers, the same language engineers and builders and technocrats speak. This language lends weight to the image, making it seem less fantastic. However, this scenario relies on carbon removal technology at a scale far beyond the demonstration projects being planned today. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in its special report on 1.5°C, reliance on such technology is a major risk. But the same report indicated that all the pathways analyzed depended upon the removal of between 100 and 1,000 gigatons of carbon in total.7 In short, limiting warming to 2°C is very difficult without some use of negative emissions technologies—and 1.5°C is virtually unattainable without them.
Does this mean it is impossible to avert two degrees of warming? No. For we know plenty of practices that can be used to remove carbon. We can store it in soils, in building materials and products, in rock. After all, it’s a prevalent element upon which all life is based. It would be difficult to scale these practices under our current economic and political logic, as we’ll explore this book. But it’s technically possible to imagine a future like the one depicted in Figure 1—a future where the excesses of the past (our present) are tucked away, cleaned up, like a stain removed. Some call this vision “climate restoration”: the idea that we could use carbon removal technologies and practices to draw down carbon dioxide concentrations from the current 410 parts per million (ppm), down to the 300s, or even back to preindustrial levels. This vision undoubtedly strikes many as grandiose, and perhaps as unnecessary: after all, in many economies in the global North, emissions look to be plateauing or even declining.
If emissions do peak in the next decade, does that mean we’re safe?
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2030s
You’re sitting at the kitchen table. It’s hot. The radio says: “… and in Bonn today, negotiators hammered out a new agreement on differentiated responsibilities for carbon removal. We’re also hearing rumors of a blockchain-based system of accounting to track international carbon flows.
“Meanwhile, at the Detroit Auto Show, yet another manufacturer has announced that their fleet will be all-electric by 2032. Following the rollout of Tesla’s heavy trucks, Škoda has unveiled the design …”
You turn to your tablet, scrolling through your feeds as you sip your coffee. A picture of bright-red apples harvested from the student-run orchard: you press Like. Someone has posted an article with the headline “Emissions Peak Is Only a Plateau,” subtitled: “The Low-Hanging Mitigation Fruit Has Been Picked—Now the Hard Work Begins.” You want to read it and comment, so that the poster will know you’re smart enough to follow what they post—but it sounds like a downer.
If you think the actions on climate will basically work out, turn to the next page.
If you think it’s all just talk, performance, showmanship, turn to page 10.
2040s
Ten years, five months, and eighteen days later, you walk over to the kitchen table with fresh slices of slightly burnt toast. Your spouse doesn’t look up. “What are you reading?” you ask.
“It’s an article that looks at our success with climate change, and talks about how to apply it to public health and other global challenges.” They chomp on the toast, leaving crumbs on the table. “We actively phased out fossil fuel infrastructure, and improved energy efficiency. Afforestation, carbon farming, and wetland restoration policies were also huge. Historically unprecedented rates of land-use change to sequester carbon, three times faster than the conversion of forests to soybeans in previous decades.”
After Geoengineering Page 1