NYTimes: A Responsible Way to Cool the Planet

[H simmens]



On the EVE of the UN meetings and the NY Climate week this article in today’s New York Times by Zeke Hausfather and David Keith argues for a small scale program of SAI to be initiated if and when policymakers makers decide to do so. They also provide criteria to limit the cooling that such an effort would result in achieving. 

I will now be making reference to this article in my introductory remarks at our panel discussion tomorrow in New York. 

This incremental approach is consistent with articles that David has previously published.  As far as I know it breaks new ground for Zeke. I don’t remember that when we had Zeke at an HPAC meeting a couple of years ago that he was willing to entertain any kind of SRM. 

What appears to be completely missing from this article and from almost all of what is written by SRM researchers and policy makers is the question of when. 

It is on this issue that HPAC differentiates itself as it calls for the world community to develop a plan to urgently deploy cooling as long as it is shown to be safe and effective, and of course in combination with accelerated emission reductions and large scale greenhouse gas removal - the Climate Triad. 

Herb

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/opinion/geoengineering-planet-cooling-sulfur.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nk8.Le5z.LZuSzsFENbLR&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Herb Simmens

Author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future

“A SciencePoem and an Inspiration.” Kim Stanley Robinson
@herbsimmens
HerbSimmens.com

[Michael MacCracken]

Hi Herb--I just wrote a comment on this on Climate Brink where the authors cite it and add more. I flat out disagree with worrying about regression to fossil fuels as the most serious issue with respect to climate intervention.

If one looks at world investment, by far the most investment is going into wind and solar, doing so as it is the least expensive source of electricity, starting to drop below 3 cents a kW-hr in the US (some say it may get to 1 cent per kW-hr), which is about the price of natural gas turbine generated electricity--but the delivery of such systems is way backlogged and solar and wind can go in now. Coal fired electricity in US is about 8-9 cents per kW-hr and it takes years to build a new plant--Trump keeping old ones going is proving very expensive. The market is going to drive a transition to the lowest price of energy. The present impediment keeping of order a thousand private sector projects from going forward is the lack of transmission capacity--and that can be fixed pretty quickly if we only made an effort to do so. The easiest approach is "reconductoring", so replacing existing high-voltage AC lines with the new type of wire that has of order 3 times the capacity--no need to wait a decade or more for rights of way, just use the ones we have. The second essential step is creating a national network (starting with a few links) of high voltage direct current lines buried in existing rights of way (railroads, highways, rivers, etc.) to move energy from where the solar and wind electricity is most efficiently created (many of these renewable resources are in red states) to the key demand centers (many of which are in blue states). Sandy MacDonald had an op-ed in The Hill about it in January (see https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/5114155-us-energy-revolution-supergrid/) portraying doing this as the equivalent of an Interstate Highway for electricity. Natural gas benefits from a pipeline network and coal for the railroad network--there needs to be a transport system for electricity. If you want to see what putting in a transmission line can do, use Google Earth to look just to the west of Antelope Valley, California. It is scrub desert land, and California putting in a transmission line for a few billion has led to the private sector (Buffet, Google, etc.) putting in $60B of solar farms, where they can harvest solar for of order 10+ times the income that a farmer makes on irrigated land and with much more labor required. And the life cycle costs of EVs are also lower than fossil fuel cars, not to mention non-polluting (really important in urbanized areas) and businesses and government operations will surely head that way even if it takes a bit longer for consumers.

So, what bothers me about the NYT oped is they of course want more aggressive mitigation, but that means replacing the discontinued fossil fuel sources and they make no mention of how to make that happen. Of course, geoengineering/SRM/climate intervention is not a complete solution, but if we do the right things, the market will keep the world from going back to fossil fuel energy (Trump keeping coal plants open is proving very costly--no business person will make that choice for financial reasons), and of course promoting renewable energy will greatly reduce the potential significance of termination shock. To forego intervention in the near-term and allow the increasing deaths and impacts and commitments to huge future problems from accelerated loss of mass from the ice sheets and the thawing of permafrost and release of GHGs is the real moral hazard to be considering--the authors of the oped in my view made an old out-of-date argument rather than really helping the world avoid catastrophic impacts from staying solely with the emissions reduction only approach--and I'd urge you to make the point.

Best, Mike

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