REFLECTIONS ON TEACHING GEOENGINEERING – Guest Post – Paul Wapner, American University | WGC

[Andrew Lockley]

http://dcgeoconsortium.org/2014/11/30/teaching-climate-geoengineering/

Extract

We slog through various literatures dejected by climate change’s magnitude and the darkness of possible futures. After weeks of depressing news—having examined why states, companies, and ordinary citizens have failed to marshal sufficient political will to mitigate greenhouse gases—we turn to geoengineering. All of a sudden, the classroom becomes animated. Hands start going up asking about the details of shooting sulfates into the atmosphere, the amount of sulfuric acid that would make a difference, the effects of such action on the ozone layer, and so on. Finally, it seems, students see light at the end of a climate tunnel, and awaken to the excitement of finding a way out.As a professor, I love to see such lit-up eyes. Nothing is more gratifying than engaging students in lively conversation about books that they’ve read and ideas that they think stand as genuine possibilities for improving the world. Teaching about geoengineering, it turns out, is really fun.

Most students supported further research on geoengineering and a little over half supported piloting a small-scale test in some part of the world.

After two weeks of studying various geoengineering scenarios, I took a poll. Most students supported further research on geoengineering and a little over half supported piloting a small-scale test in some part of the world. Keith and others had won. They got their cohort. At least my class, beaten down by the structural and behavior impediments to meaningful mitigation, grabbed onto geoengineering’s promise. They were ready if not willing advocates of altering the biophysics of the planet in the service of climate protection.

[Brian Cartwright]

I posted this comment to Professor Wapner's blog:

Professor Wapner, it doesn’t surprise me that your students latch on to the first glimmer of hope that you offer them. You say, “we need to stop the buildup of greenhouse gases. Period.” Well, I would suggest that “Period” excludes some other options. It excludes the possibility of repairing the damage we’ve done to the natural world by correcting the carbon cycle, which can be done by putting carbon back in soils where we humans have massively depleted it.

Wouldn’t your students perhaps also like the idea of carbon sinks such as ecorestorative agriculture, sequestering carbon in farmland, grasslands, and wetlands? There’s a lot of work to be done on the soil of our ailing earth before we need to resort to the more exotic methods of geoengineering.

Brian

[Robert Tulip]

Comments on Paul Wapner’s Reflections on Teaching Geoengineering

 

Dr Wapner provides a clear summary of many popular assumptions regarding geoengineering.  However, his ideas regarding the centrality of mitigation and the need for a “post carbon world” are fundamentally flawed, in my view.  Here are my comments on some of his statements in this article

 

Paul Wapner said: “As far as I am concerned, the wisest response to climate change has always been mitigation. We need to stop the buildup of greenhouse gases. Period.”

 

(My responses as bullet points)

·         New technology could enable conversion of CO2 into useful bulk products, including plastics, construction material, food, fertilizer and fuel.  That would turn CO2 from waste to resource. 

·         So Paul's term “period” is a statement of ideology, not a scientifically grounded observation, given that emission reduction is not the only way to stop CO2 buildup.

 

PW “…fertilizing the oceans with iron…will not halt the buildup of carbon and other greenhouse gases but simply turn away our gaze.”

·         That is overly rhetorical.  Ocean Iron Fertilization and other Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) methods could halt the buildup of Greenhouse Gasses. 

·         Eliding from a critique of SRM to an assertion that the same critique applies to CDR is fallacious.

PW: “…the biophysical straightjacket … climate change is already harming the most vulnerable on the planet and spells adversity for all life in the long run”

·         Our real straitjacket is not biophysical but political.  Climate change only “spells adversity” if we fail to work out how to recycle the waste carbon we add to the air and sea. 

·         Mining carbon from air and sea could open massive opportunities for growth into an unimaginably higher level of planetary wealth.

PW: “…. states, companies, and ordinary citizens have failed to marshal sufficient political will to mitigate greenhouse gases”

·         But that is because the political assumption behind the mitigation movement is that economic growth is bad and planetary salvation requires increased poverty.  That is a proposition that will only be supported by those who don’t understand it or who are insulated from it. 

·         The political will for climate change response through mitigation collapsed when people saw the underlying likelihood that carbon taxation means bigger government and less economic activity.

·         What is actually needed are methods to stabilise the climate in ways that also enable economic growth.  That means Carbon Dioxide Removal.

·         The whole concept of mitigation through reducing carbon emissions is equivalent to advocating sanitation by reducing defecation.  It won’t work.  CDR, by contrast, is about investing in R&D for profitable methods to use the carbon we emit.

PW: “—we turn to geoengineering. All of a sudden, the classroom becomes animated. Hands start going up asking about the details of shooting sulfates into the atmosphere”

·         I don’t believe that Solar Radiation Management is anything more than an emergency tourniquet to buy time until we work out effective CDR methods.  The long term problem with SRM is that it does not address ocean acid, and that is a potential biophysical time-bomb.  I wish this animation also applied for CDR methods.

PW: “Hawthorne’s short story, “The Birthmark.” …Aylmer gives his wife a potion that is supposed to sap the blood from her cheek but, as it begins to take hold, it works at her entire body since, it turns out, the birthmark is connected to Georgiana’s heart. In the end, Georgiana dies at Aylmer’s hand. Despite Aylmer’s assurances, his science fails. The story is a cautionary tale about scientific hubris and our confidence in remaking the world and ourselves.”

·         This caution is entirely appropriate.  However, it applies most profoundly to the vast experiment we are conducting by increasing the CO2 level through business as usual.

·         I think this risk of unforseen effects applies equally to SRM. I can’t see how it applies to CDR, which basically aims to achieve safe ways of regulating the global atmospheric balance.

·         Unfortunately, mitigating emissions is a fundamentally flawed conceptual framework for addressing climate change, given the political brick wall of economic interests.

·         The real hubris in Hawthorne’s parable is climate denial, with their wait and see attitude to global warming.

 

PW: “Climate change is about biophysical limits. It makes clear that we cannot burn fossil fuels and pump excessive amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without coming up against the earth’s ability to absorb such waste. Faced with this limit, we also confront a choice. Do we reformat the oceans, atmosphere, and soil so that we can continue living lives unawake to the physical world we live in,”

·         The term “unawake” I have bolded here is fallacious rhetoric. With CDR, it is entirely possible that human population and wealth could continue to grow in ways that enable increased biodiversity.   A new paradigm is needed that respects the need for global regulation of nature in order to sustain stable Holocene conditions.  Such regulation is all about being even more awake to the detailed reality of natural cycles.

PW: “or do we learn to live ‘in-place’—at a scale that takes seriously the planet’s organic infrastructure?””

·         Meaning, do we institute an authoritarian global state apparatus that reduces energy use and increases poverty in the name of climate science.  The political likelihood of such a scenario is non-existent.

PW: “Hawthorne teaches us that this is an existential question as much as a technological one. His story forces us to ask what it means to be human.”

·         Yes, the philosophical questions around planetary civilization need much more attention.  Increasing the level of carbon in the air is not sustainable.  But considering the assumptions at play here, the obvious logical next question is what is a practical way to reduce the carbon level.  Mitigation is not practical, so we have to turn to CDR, which offers the potential of a range of benefits and few risks.

PW: “My students have decided that being human means running roughshod over biophysical limits since, as they put it, what other choice do we have?”

·         Ignoring nature is only possible in the short term.  Medium term responses require scientific solutions that are physically possible.  On that score, CDR is a vastly better option than either SRM or emission reduction.

PW: “Politicians are unwilling to seek meaningful emission targets,

·         There is an authoritarian implication from this comment.  The reality is that governments are not going to cut emissions, they will only deliver vacuous spin like the Kyoto Protocol and the recent US-China agreement.  Such “targets” are worse than useless because they use the optics of progress to conceal the reality of business as usual.  Scientists will never acquire the military power or social licence to enforce “meaningful emission targets”.  The emission reduction paradigm is broken.

PW: “corporations are fundamentally committed to economic growth at all costs”

·         Not true.  As the reality of the McKibben stock price problem sinks in, with the basic truth that burning available reserves would cook the planet, the need for CDR will become a business imperative. 

·         CDR holds the promise that the fossil fuel economy can continue, as long as the burnt carbon is then recycled or stabilised in construction materials.

·         The phrase “growth at all costs” is an oxymoron, because if the cost is the destruction of the physical system, then the growth will stop.

PW: “ordinary citizens refuse to sacrifice their consumer lives for the promise of a stable climate.”

·       This theme of sacrifice illustrates the religious motivation behind advocacy of emission reduction.  We should aim instead to develop technology to remove the need for sacrifice.  A billion people in China agree with Deng Xiao Ping’s maxim that to get rich is glorious.  They have no appetite for sacrifice.

PW: “Geoengineering cuts through all that mess and offers a quick fix. The ‘fix,’ of course, is more of a junkie’s lament than a technologist’s dream. It speaks more to our addiction to coal, oil, and natural gas than to our desire to live fully as humans with meaningful limits.”

·       Equating coal to heroin may be a nice debating image, but it is empty of content.  In reality, the only thing that will stabilise the climate is negative emissions, through technological capacity to stabilise more carbon than we emit.  Even the IPCC has recognised this in its 2013 report. 

·       Once such CDR technology is developed, it may turn out that mining fossil carbon remains a valuable activity, as a source of infrastructure.

PW: “In the globalizing liberal world, limits are evil. They hem us in; restrict our freedom; and force us to pay attention to the world around us rather than simply our own desires. Geoengineering aligns well with the liberal world by telling us that we can keep going.”

·         This religious talk of evil just plays into the Naomi Klein attack on capitalism. 

·         Apocalyptic dreams about limits to growth causing a big crunch ignore the capacity of human ingenuity to solve technical challenges. 

·         Pitching the problem in existential philosophical terms of distorted cultural values actually picks up more on religious ethics than scientific evidence.

PW: “I suffer from hardening of the categories.”

·         Nice pun, but sadly true, given the strong ideological opinions expressed in this article.  The scientific spirit is the antithesis of dogma.  If we maintain emission reduction as a fixed faith, and endeavour to suppress debate and research on alternative solutions such as CDR, there is little basis for hope.

PW: “…our deepest, safest, and sanest orientation involves measured actions that directly address the causes of our problems rather than masking them. Distraction as strategy equals, in my book, immaturity.”

·         That is a telling statement against SRM, but actually provides a clear path to support CDR.  The cause of our climate problems is that there is too much carbon in the air.  Direct action requires reduction of the amount of carbon in the air.  Reducing the amount we add is only indirect, since it only delays (if at all) the arrival of highly dangerous and destabilising tipping points.  So CDR is in fact the only direct action to stabilise the climate.

PW: “In the future, eyes will light up and hands will rise to discuss the possibility of actually lowering carbon emissions, shifting to clean energy systems, and building a post-carbon world.”

·         This concept of a “post-carbon world”, and its related theme of decarbonisation of the economy, is not only unrealistic, but is actually harmful.  Instead we should be focussing on innovative ways to use carbon as a resource, and to recycle the excess carbon now in the air and sea.  I feel that advocates of emission reduction don’t comprehend the Sisyphian nature of their ideas, like pointlessly pushing a boulder up a mountain.   

·         Rather than optics-driven targets of emission reductions that will inevitably fade like mirages as we approach them, the real target we should have is to remove twenty billion tonnes of carbon from the air each year.

Robert Tulip

(Personal views only)

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From: Andrew Lockley <andrew....@gmail.com>
To: geoengineering <geoengi...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, 2 December 2014, 12:09
Subject: [geo] REFLECTIONS ON TEACHING GEOENGINEERING – Guest Post – Paul Wapner, American University | WGC

http://dcgeoconsortium.org/2014/11/30/teaching-climate-geoengineering/

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