On Geoengineering
Albedos of different roof types
I largely agree with what Ryan Avent is saying here—the appeal of geoengineering solutions to global warming is largely illusory. That controlling carbon emissions is hard is obvious because there are real proposals on the table to do so, leading to real pushback, real multilateral negotiations, real compromises, real problems, etc. Relative to that, a hypothetical geoengineering scheme can be made to look pretty good. But you have to compare like to like. On international coordination, for example, it’s actually a lot easier for me to imagine China agreeing to binding emissions targets than to imagine China agreeing to let the United States conduct a doomsday weather control machine or us agreeing to sit idly by while China launches a satellite capable of blotting out the sun.
On a non-insane level, the idea of trying to build machines that suck CO2 out of the air and then somehow store it is pretty clearly worth researching. That said, trees already do this quite well and our tree-planting technology is fine. Rather than wait around for the hypothetical “artificial trees” of the future why not just plant more trees? It seems to me there are lots of places in America where trees could be growing but aren’t.
Which comes around to the overarching point that the term “geoengineering” often obscures more than it reveals. There’s a world of difference between offering financial incentives for people to build high-albedo roofs and building a miles-long hose to pump sulfur into the upper atmosphere. Do I get to be a bold contrarian thinker if I propose that surface parking lots should have more tree cover? Somehow it seems I don’t. But it makes much more sense to focus on practical deployments of proven technology (trees, white paint) than on trying to dream up the most fantastical possible solution.
56 Responses to “On Geoengineering”
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October 19th, 2009 at 8:54 am
Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun.
October 19th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Can someone explain the high albedo roof thing to me? I’m not familiar with the policy behind this.
October 19th, 2009 at 9:13 am
This is very true; if you think we’ve had trouble with the politics of climate change handling so far, just imagine how it will be when someone wants to control the climate in mad scientist fashion.
That said, it’s also *well* past time the west started going past knee-jerk luddism and overuse of the precautionary principle in talking about climate engineering. A world in which it’s sane for the US to pressure India and China – poor countries currently undergoing some of the greatest economic and humanitarian miracles ever – to reduce emissions even if that means less development, is also one where third world countries have every right to ask why that option is preferable to actively controlling the planet’s temperature knob.
If you suggest to India that we not build too many CO2 spewing tar roads and that we should invest in public transport to the point of curtailing the aspirations of our people to own tiny cars (even as you continue to own large ones), you had better provide excellent reasons for why we shouldn’t also try to at least delay the worst effects of climate change by a couple of decades, say by spewing sulphur into the atmosphere. Let’s remember too that the development/environment tradeoff for the third-world isn’t what it is in the west – if the price of creating a hundred thousand jobs in Bengal is to endanger a species of shrimp, I’m not only comfortable making that decision, I *demand* it be made. I’m not asserting that all these games are zero-sum, but those too are seen in their full share, and an honest account admits to their ubiquity.
October 19th, 2009 at 9:20 am
Planting more trees ought to be considered a form of Geoengineering. (BTW, Google spell check doesn’t seem to think Geoengineering is a word. Oh woe is us.)
October 19th, 2009 at 9:23 am
On international coordination, for example, it’s actually a lot easier for me to imagine China agreeing to binding emissions targets than to imagine China agreeing to let the United States conduct a doomsday weather control machine or us agreeing to sit idly by while China launches a satellite capable of blotting out the sun.
Since when does China get a veto over U.S. technological development? Or vice versa, for that matter?
October 19th, 2009 at 9:30 am
When it comes to blotting out the sun, the veto takes the form of war.
October 19th, 2009 at 9:32 am
According to the department of energy, world wide CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels is at 27 billion metric tons per year (in 2004). How much carbon can a forest absorb per year? The EPA estimates between 0.6 and 2.6 metric tons of C per acre per year (http://www.epa.gov/sequestration/rates.html) averaged out over 120 years when forests typically reach saturation (they emit as much carbon as the absorb per year).
CO2 is about 30% carbon so call it 9 billion metric tons of carbon released per year through burning fossil fuels. So, at best we need to plant 3.5 billion acres of forest. That is roughly 2 amazon rain forests. And that won’t reduce the levels of carbon in the atmosphere, just keep pace with carbon emissions in 2004. We emit more carbon now.
Seems like we need a lot of trees to make a dent.
October 19th, 2009 at 9:35 am
Yes, because technological developments always stay at home, which is why we’re so unconcerned with Iran’s pending nuclear capability. None of our business.
October 19th, 2009 at 9:35 am
When it comes to blotting out the sun, the veto takes the form of war.
If China blots out the sun, America will fight in the shade.
October 19th, 2009 at 9:40 am
Well, to some extent, lobbying/negotiating with China and India is a very effective strategy – Coal is an internationally traded commodity, so the price of coal based electricity is set by the price of coal, while the cost of nuclear power is almost entirely set by the insane amounts of man-years it takes to build each plant, so talking China and India into going “all nuclear power, all the time” for their electricity sector is likely to result in a all round win, as they get cheaper electricity by substituting chinese and indian construction labour for coal, and the world gets rid of the asian brown cloud.
(if you think asia is going to be powered by wind and renewables under *any* circumstances, why then I have a tower in paris you might be interested in buying..)
I dont belive trying to talk them out of acquiring a PC, a cute adorable overhyped phone/musicplayer/ect and all the rest of the consumer goodies for every citizen is going to go over nearly as well. The poorer nations will get onboard with plans for combating climate change to precisely the extent they precive said plans to be in their selfinterest, so any plan that includes them staying poor are just flat out going to fail.
October 19th, 2009 at 9:44 am
When it comes to blotting out the sun, the veto takes the form of war.
This sounds like a great movie. Better than raining meatballs or whatever the frack is at my local multiplex.
October 19th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Have you ever seen the sunset at 3 p.m.?
October 19th, 2009 at 10:04 am
Someone correct me if I’m wrong – and God knows I often am – but I recall reading somewhere a while back that WHERE trees were planted had an impact as well. The way I remember it, planting trees in higher latitudes such as New England had relatively little payoff, and was in some cases a net damage, while the true payoffs were for trees closer to the equator, such as reforesting the Amazon. I could be mistaken, though.
October 19th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Would it help to paint all of those surface parking lots white? Or does the production of white paint emit a lot of carbon?
I think if there was ever a problem that demanded a technocratic (and thus non-democratic) solution, this is it.
October 19th, 2009 at 10:08 am
I can’t remember where I read it, but I seem to remember someone claiming that if in a city like New York, there were more trees and the streets were lighter in color, the temperature would be cooler and thus more energy could be saved. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were more small scale steps like those that could make a difference. None of them strikes me as sufficient to be the only solution, but then, that probably wasn’t the point. We know how to plant trees and how to pave roads. If the logistics work out, why aren’t we doing more of this now? Is it really so outrageous to suggest that we hire people to do projects like this? I can’t imagine it’d be very expensive, and if it does nothing else but improve air quality for local residents and make neighborhoods seem more beautiful, isn’t it worth it?
October 19th, 2009 at 10:12 am
It seems to me there are lots of places in America where trees could be growing but aren’t.
Not really, at least on the scale of millions of acres. As Bill McKibben’s 1995 piece in the Atlantic, the Eastern US has substantially reforested, which is good news from a carbon control point of view so far as it goes, but we can’t do that twice. The Great Plains and the Southwest are not going to turn into forests no matter what, and planting trees on a few suburban lawns is not going to make the difference.
October 19th, 2009 at 10:12 am
This is very true; if you think we’ve had trouble with the politics of climate change handling so far, just imagine how it will be when someone wants to control the climate in mad scientist fashion.
Every time someone talks about geoengineering, I shudder in thinking about the ecological disaster that is New Zealand (yes, New Zealand is pretty, but that is because you are only looking at the flora). Every single time they brought in some new animal (cats, possums, deer) into the habitat, the animal did not do what they expected and proceeded to destroy the ecosystem even further.
October 19th, 2009 at 10:13 am
The idea that geo-engineering would be effective is counter intuitive for me the same way global warming is somewhat counter intuitive. The earth is about 70% ocean, of the land area, about 75% has been altered already by humans. It is a little surprising that sporadic activity on just 22% of the global surface can have such an impact on the composition of the atmosphere or could have a significant impact on the heat absorption or retention properties of the earth as a whole.
I will follow the evidence where it leads and it is what it is, but in both cases, global warming and geo-engineering, there is a hint of excessive anthropocentrism.
October 19th, 2009 at 10:13 am
While it’s true that trees sequester carbon (largely by incorporating it into biomass), doesn’t most of the carbon simply get re-released when the trees die and decay? If you want to use trees to create a new long-term carbon sink, don’t you need to have a program to store the tree biomass?
Fossil fuels represent millions of years of stored biomass/sequestered carbon. If you want to use the same process that created those fuels to re-sequester the carbon, you’d better allow a few million years.
October 19th, 2009 at 10:19 am
The Great Plains and the Southwest are not going to turn into forests no matter what
The Southwest would have MUCH more forest and cover vegetation than it does if Las Vegas and Southern California did not exist, which is my proposal for geo-engineering that actually would solve our problems.
October 19th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Walker,
The problem with New Zealand is totally different. Animals that evolved in larger ecosystems typically have an advantage over those that evolved in smaller ones. Hence, the takeover by introduced species. This is not analogous to the geoengineering issue.
Granted, my enthusiasm for geoengineering is partly due to my fondness for technological solutions, but mostly due to my pessimism that we will be able to reduce greenhouse emissions enough. The particular approach I am most excited about is the idea of sucking carbon directly out of the atmosphere. Planting trees is great, but I don’t think it will be enough.
Getting international coordination for geoengineering sounds like the least of our problems.
October 19th, 2009 at 10:49 am
If you want to use trees to create a new long-term carbon sink, don’t you need to have a program to store the tree biomass?
Perhaps we could use these “trees” as a building material, we could even live in large residential structures made out of these “trees.”
October 19th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Perhaps we could use these “trees” as a building material, we could even live in large residential structures made out of these “trees.”
Well, assuming we are proposing that the trees are to function as carbon sinks, we could ask (a) how much of the biomass of the trees is represented by the lumber in the houses after we’ve stripped off branches, leaves, bark and waste material, (b) given that houses don’t last forever, how do we use them as a permanent carbon sink if their constituents are eventually going to decay, releasing their constituent carbon, (c) how much carbon are we going to release during the process of building these houses, and finally (d) what about the fact that most houses, during their lifetimes, are massive net creators of CO2 (for heating, powering, etc.)?
October 19th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Most of the tree’s mass does go back into the atmosphere, but not all. Soil stores a large amount of carbon. The older the forest, the deeper the soil. It isn’t just forests either. Parts of the American prairie had four feet of topsoil, rich in organic matter, when it was first settled. Most of that is gone. If we can find agricultural techniques that increase topsoil, rather than reduce it, that would be beneficial.
These are very small, and slow measures, though.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:07 am
Cool Roofs: – Because cool roofs save both money and energy, in October 2005 they became part of the prescriptive requirements of California’s energy code.
Urban Heat Island: – in respone to Brian J’s comment about cooling off cities by more light colored roofs and pavements.
It’s all good, folks. Simple, common sense solutions.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:16 am
“While it’s true that trees sequester carbon (largely by incorporating it into biomass), doesn’t most of the carbon simply get re-released when the trees die and decay? If you want to use trees to create a new long-term carbon sink, don’t you need to have a program to store the tree biomass?”
Partially. Also, chlorophyll is damn slow at what it does. So the idea of “artificial trees” or scrubbers to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and shove it either underground or at the bottom of the sea. May be a long-term problem over millenia, but given medium-term-turning-into-short-term problem of AGW, it looks pretty frickin’ good.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:18 am
What I don’t get is why the proponents of geoengineering think we have the political capability to get funding for a Big Ol’ Sulfur Spewer project through Congress, when we can’t manage to even get reasonable CAFE standards? Prove to me that Inhofe will be willing to spend the billions to pay for an untested technological boondoogle for a problem he doesn’t believe in. Even if large-project geoengineering DID make sense technologically, we couldn’t do it politically.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:26 am
“funding for a Big Ol’ Sulfur Spewer project through Congress”
That’s because everyone agrees geoengineering is dirt-cheap. Making targeted efforts to change the planetary ecosystem is not expensive, just tricky and potentially dangerous. Think how cheap it would be to make a new ozone hole if we wanted, for example.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Brian J.
Perhaps this is what you’re thinking of?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=tropical-forests-cool-earth
“Forests, after all, cool the atmosphere by drinking in carbon dioxide from the air. A new study, however, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that forests’ other climatic effects can cancel out their carbon cleaning advantage in some parts of the world. Using a three-dimensional climate model, the research team mimicked full global deforestation and also studied the effects of clear-cutting in different regions of latitude, such as the tropics and boreal zones. Apparently, these natural carbon sinks only do their job effectively in tropical regions; in other areas, they have either no impact or actually contribute to warming the planet. In fact, according to this model, by the year 2100, if all the forests were cut and left to rot, the annual global mean temperature would decrease by more than 0.5 degree Fahrenheit.”
October 19th, 2009 at 11:43 am
Wow! What an array of stupid ideas!
Let’s start with the idea that the poorest countries, as they become deserts or permanently flooded mangrove swamps because of global warming, will demand that global warming continue so they can get their share of cars. And this is phrased as them demanding that the US do a geoengineering climate fix. Because we always do what the poorest nations tell us to.
As usual, there’s one guy, Doug @ 18, who simply never got the message.
Next, the “death by a thousand cuts” for planting trees. Seems that planting trees might not, on its own, solve the entire problem immediately. Oh well, on to something, like filling the atmosphere with a sulfuric fog that cuts sunlight below the levels needed for agriculture and drenches us with acid rain- that oughta do it!
Do trees die and release carbon? Well, some do, and others live for hundreds, or even thousands of years. Is planting trees a form of geoengineering we could be doing right now for a fraction of what we spend on weapons each year? Yes.
The interesting thing here is that strategic studies by the military are seeing AGW as a security threat. It may take a coup by the military to displace our dysfunctional oligarchy and institute meaningful and practical geoengineering measures like planting trees.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Well, we will have plenty of opportunity to plant those trees, as the pine beetle in the Pacific Northwest and Rockies – which is not at plague levels directly due to the fact that, as the winters have gotten progressively warmer, the pine beetle larvae are no longer being killed off – is killing the trees off on an industrial scale.
From the Denver post:
“A pine beetle infestation is spreading from the mountains into southern Wyoming and the Front Range, and all of Colorado’s mature lodgepole pine forests will be killed within three to five years, state and federal officials said Monday. The bark beetle infestation ravaged 500,000 new acres of forests in Colorado in 2007, bringing the total infestation to 1.5 million acres — almost all of state’s lodgepole forests — according to the latest aerial survey. The infestation has now worked its way north and east, including an increase of more than 1,500 percent in the acreage affected in Boulder and Larimer counties.”
In Wyoming: “85 percent to 90 percent of the mature lodgepole pine — about 750,000 acres — will be dead in the Medicine Bow Mountains of southern Wyoming in the next three to five years.”
Funny – when the spotted owl was saved, rightwingers jumped up and down about the economic impact, and how the environmentalists were killing off jobs. Yet they aren’t jumping up and down about the economic impact of global warming which, unlike saving the spotted owl, destroyes forests – stripping out both the economic benefits of lumbering and of recreation. It is as if they really could care less, as long as the petro industries paying for the think tanks keep on sending them the ready. But no – that would imply that they were and are corrupt finks.
In other news – the forests in the artic are expanding. But alas, this isn’t good news – they are expanding because the tundra is melting, thus releasing methane into the air, in a sort of replay of the Eocene event that spiked one of the world’s most rapid temperature rises.
.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:58 am
@16 Tree Canopy coverage from Boston to Washington is down 50% over the past century, and 25% in the past 25 years. Much of the anthropogenic warming from the paleolithic to industrial era is due to the cutting down of temperate forests in places like Europe.
1.5 billion trees are planted in the US every year. So the numbers Matt is calling for isn’t that big of a stretch. For temperate trees over a 60-70 year period it’s something like 2-5 pounds per year is fixated in the tree (depends on type, age, and location), so one can see how it’d add up. As one can see doubling the tree production would have had us meet Kyoto (assuming those trees survived a normal life).
While this is not a permanent solution, converting more of our more unproductive lands into forests to fixate carbon could buy us decades to find more long run solutions to our energy problems. The program could be extended if the trees were converted into something like diamonds then reburied (removing them from the carbon cycle). Genetic engineering could assist in producing better carbon fixating plants.
But why stop at the forests? Perhaps other large scale environmental reclamation projects could be enacted, like restoring swamp and wetlands, or saving the rain forest, or incentives for technological solutions involving carbon sequestering. Perhaps some revenue neutral tax could be enacted. A ‘carbon tax’, if you will, that pays people who sequester or fixate carbon away from the atmosphere from the people who put more carbon into the cycle.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:59 am
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that Carbon is not the only Greenhouse gas causing these problems.
Water vapor is also a Greenhouse Gas. This is one reason that Hydrogen is not a good alternative: burning hydrogen creates water vapor.
Now I don’t have the numbers, but I am with Matt on this one, let’s move forward carefully and purposefully.
The Republican plan is right out of the Simpsons, ‘Let’s burn down the observatory so this will never happen again!’
October 19th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
It’s not just that geoengineering might be cheaper — it’s that it might avoid a free-riding problem and might in principle be done unilaterally.
biggerbox, the other reason why we can’t get reasonable CAFE standards through Congress is that “reasonable CAFE” is a contradiction in terms. There are a lot of different regulatory schemes that might theoretically be equivalently optimal (e.g., taxes & quotas under certainty), but dictating the minimum average efficiency of cars is not one of them.
October 19th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Rather than wait around for the hypothetical “artificial trees” of the future why not just plant more trees?
Isn’t that Freeman Dyson’s plan?
October 19th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
“That said, trees already do this quite well and our tree-planting technology is fine. Rather than wait around for the hypothetical “artificial trees” of the future why not just plant more trees? It seems to me there are lots of places in America where trees could be growing but aren’t….. Do I get to be a bold contrarian thinker if I propose that surface parking lots should have more tree cover?”
Matt, One of your drollest posts ever.
And your larger message should not be lost in the humor: Do simple things first. Then, if you need to, go back and do the difficult. Cherry pick. Low-hanging fruit. etc etc
October 19th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Isn’t that Freeman Dyson’s plan?
Yes, and Freeman Dyson is a crazy person. I’m glad people are finally waking up to this fact.
and planting trees on a few suburban lawns is not going to make the difference.
alkali, what about planting trees on a hundred million suburban lawns? Could that be part of an overall global warming mitigation plan?
October 19th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
To paraphrase something posted on dsquared’s site, it may be that planting lots of trees will only offset 0.1% of global carbon emissions, but the solution to global warming is made up of lots of things that will each only offset 0.1% of global carbon emissions.
October 19th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Just to clarify, I’m not against planting trees, which I imagine would be a fine thing. I’m against thinking that planting trees gets us out of dealing with the heart of the problem, which is that burning massive amounts of fossil fuels alters atmospheric chemistry in complex and highly damaging ways.
I’m also dubious of the notion of trying to fix things through large schemes aimed at pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere; atmospheric chemistry involves many more things than CO2, and looking at CO2 in isolation is an invitation to unpleasant unforeseen side effects.
The best option is to stop dumping all the fossil fuel byproducts (of which CO2 is just one) into the atmosphere. I’d prefer to concentrate on that rather than on largely irrelevant efforts to plant some trees, or on half-assed attempts to pull a small subset of the byproducts out of the air in the hopes that doing so doesn’t actually make the problem worse.
October 19th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
#2,
High albedo roofs means they reflect a lot of light, unlike black roofs, which absorb a lot of light and associated heat.
October 19th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
No one gets a $10 million grant to study white paint. Artificial trees, sure. The primary objective of any solution is that it has to be expensive. Second, it shouldn’t make obvious sense. Otherwise a bunch of dirty Indian villagers would have thought of it.
If you can meet these two criteria, you ensure that you’ll never find a commercial market for your idea, thus guaranteeing that the government has to pick up the tab. Homeless Ph.D.s might go work for Iran, after all.
October 19th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
no, no, no. it’s not trees that do the bulk of CO2 removal from the air, it’s the blue-green algae in the top two inches or so of the planet’s oceans. and they die off in great numbers during even somewhat slight temperature fluctuations. and these result from huge, massive, systemic patterns of weather and temperature being altered over long periods of time. planting more trees and making little towers that suck CO2 away is nice and all, but will not make so much as a dent in the problems we are facing. we’re 50 years behind on doing what needs to be done, at least. if what we need – keeping sufficient numbers of these blue-green algae alive and photosynthesizing in that top layer of the ocean, can even be done.
October 19th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
While it’s true that trees sequester carbon (largely by incorporating it into biomass), doesn’t most of the carbon simply get re-released when the trees die and decay? If you want to use trees to create a new long-term carbon sink, don’t you need to have a program to store the tree biomass?
You can just bury the trees and drastically slow the re-release of the carbon into the atmosphere.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
onceler,
I thought it was your job to speak on behalf of the trees. Or is it only trufula trees you care about?
October 19th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Large scale geoengineering is attractive like many cover articles in Popular Mechanics/Science, because it’s always in the future. It’s politically useful, because it soaks up time during climate change discussions. It’s useful to some businesses because it offers an added rationale for not changing their business model.
Nobody with the power to act takes these ideas seriously, or they’d put their money where their mouth is, and I don’t mean BS pilot projects.
To get out of our climate hole, easiest and most likely to succeed solutions are to stop digging. Large scale geoengineering just offers to line the bore with concrete as we get deeper.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
I want both real and artificial trees. Real ones are more efficient at the sucking-up of carbon than we will probably ever be able to engineer. Artificial ones can probably do other things more efficiently, like sequester that carbon directly into nanotubes/graphite composites for purposes of building real, green infrastructure.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
[...] the nature of the debate; geoengineering is fantastical, when it really should be boring. It is, as Yglesias points out, something like giving people a $100 tax credit to paint their roofs white. It is planting more [...]
October 19th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
I think it’s safe to say that deforestation is part of the problem and reforestation certainly can’t hurt.
But it would be foolish to say that’s the whole solution. Planting forests can recapture the carbon that was released into the atmosphere when those forests were first cut down. But the worlds forests can only hold so much carbon, and there’s no way to re-capture the carbon that was released from the burning of fossil fuels.
So some kind of “artificial tree” that sequestered carbon in a form where we could store or bury it (as the worlds oil supply once did) would still be a good idea.
But yeah, the most useful thing you can do when you’re trying to fill a hole is to quit digging. It’s plausible that geoengineering can return atmospheric carbon levels to something like pre-industrial levels… but not if we keep polluting as we are.
October 19th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Matt, the biggest flaw in your statement is the failure to recognize that China’s central planners, and most of China’s most innovative capitalists, have recognized green and sustainability technology must be China’s world leadership manufacturing core. The US allowed others to take leadership in sustainability, but no one places a higher priority on long term sustainability than China.
China’s leadership needs to look no further than the US to see democracy is unable to cope with the complexity of sustainability, so they are determined to hold onto the one tool that gives them the power to implement their sustainability principles: capital[ist] punishment.
Seriously, China is far ahead of the rest of the world in aggressively pursuing high efficency coal power (not always fully implementing the maximum pollution controls, but coal power efficiency in China is higher than in the US and thus pollution in China can easily beat the US – China can easily beat EPA standards set by the US four decades ago while US coal plants still don’t comply), advanced nuclear reactors that are safer, cheaper to run, and producing less radioactive waste (the US has proposed and China is doing while the US dithers and holds to the nuclear past), and China is firmly committed to both mnufacturing and deploying solar and wind capital equipment.
October 19th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
I believe in anthropogenic global warming, and that it’s a serious problem. But talk of “controlling carbon emissions” is moot. Isn’t the curve of CO2 emissions resulting from Peak Oil pretty much isomorphic with what the most enthusiastic Kyoto promoters call for? The amount of fossil fuel extracted annually will fall by 50% over the next few decades regardless of what government does. $12/gallon gasoline will do more to reduce consumption than all the carbon taxes ever imagined.
October 19th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
It strikes me odd that there isn’t a market for varied reflective paint coatings. That’s what UV resistance often is, for instance – instead of absorbing UV into the underlying layer, it reflects it evenly. We don’t see IR or UV, so a paint or material that reflects it looks the same to us.
It’d be awesome if we had IR reflective coatings we could just spray onto roofs. Not that we already don’t, because we do, but…
October 19th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
[...] 1. Ryan Avent on why geo-engineering would be hard to pull off, and Matt Yglesias. [...]
October 19th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
[...] 1. Ryan Avent on why geo-engineering would be hard to pull off, and Matt Yglesias. [...]
October 19th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
White paint we can do. White paint would require subsidies, tax breaks and/or kickbacks. We can to that. We are good at that. But trees. Forget it. Too many veto points.
Large scale reforestation projects would require legislation for either funding federal works programs or direct government payments to private tree planting concerns. It would require coordination at the federal level. Both the Obama administration and the Republican Party are in complete bipartisan agreement that coordinating the best interests of the United States at the Federal level smacks of Socialism and is therefore unacceptable.
Better to wait and let China do it for us. China will be soon using the $2.5 trillion we owe them to acquire US territory in order to build electric automobile plants and other such green businesses. Perhaps we can persuade them, or beg them, to build these factories in the middle of new growth forests.
October 20th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
# biggerbox Says:
October 19th, 2009 at 11:18 am
What I don’t get is why the proponents of geoengineering think we have the political capability to get funding for a Big Ol’ Sulfur Spewer project through Congress, when we can’t manage to even get reasonable CAFE standards? Prove to me that Inhofe will be willing to spend the billions to pay for an untested technological boondoogle for a problem he doesn’t believe in. Even if large-project geoengineering DID make sense technologically, we couldn’t do it politically.
Seriously? I think that lots and lots and lots of Congressmen and -women would vote for it, if it meant earmarking funds for their buddies back home! I mean, look at how they build military hardware!
October 20th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
[...] Matt Yglesias and Ryan Avent on [...]