Okay, suppose some of the most
extreme voices warning of global warming are right. Suppose we really do face the inundation of much of the
world's coastlines in a generation or two. Even if, starting tomorrow, nobody ever burned a drop or a
gram of fossil fuel ever again, the carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere might
take hundreds of years to fall to pre-industrial levels. So simply implementing restrictions on
fossil fuels to reduce carbon-dioxide levels may not do the job fast
enough. What do we do in the
meantime? To use an automotive
analogy, if you're going too fast and you see that the road ahead of you ends
in a cliff, it might not be sufficient simply to take your foot off the gas. You might actually have to apply the
brakes. David Keith says we ought
to at least talk about applying the global-warming brakes. But the question I have is, how could
it ever get beyond talk?
Keith is a professor with
appointments at both the Harvard Kennedy School, where he teaches public
policy, and Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. An environmental engineer by training,
Keith thinks that "geoengineering" ought to be considered along with
reductions in fossil-fuel consumption as a way to reduce the effects of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere.
Geoengineering refers to intentional efforts to manipulate the
climate. So far, the only
moderately successful geoengineering projects have been cloud-seeding efforts
that arguably increased rainfall in some areas. But Keith is talking about a worldwide effort to do
something that will counteract global warming by artificially cooling the
planet somehow.
Interviewed last March by the CBC
(Keith is Canadian), he admitted that ideas such as spreading small sulfur
particles in the stratosphere to reflect solar radiation as a way of countering
global warming are a "brutally ugly technical fix." But he thinks such geoengineering
solutions should be on the table, rather than brushed aside scornfully, as they
are by many environmental activists.
Let's try to imagine how such a
geoengineering fix would work, not just technically, but politically. Many of the geoengineering solutions
that have been posed are not terribly expensive, globally speaking. We are talking about industrial
quantities of sulfur or other chemicals dispersed in the upper atmosphere, but
the cost in terms of the global economy is miniscule. There is no question that such a project could be mounted by
even one well-prepared industrial nation.
The question I'd like to examine is: could the nations of the world ever reach a consensus on
what geoengineering solution to adopt?
If we examine the track record of
united global action on the main cause of the carbon-dioxide increase, namely
the use of fossil fuels, history is not encouraging. The most significant effort in this direction is the Kyoto
Protocol, adopted in 1997. It is
technically an extension of a 1995 UN agreement that parties signing it will
reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases in accordance with certain goals
spelled out in the document. While
192 countries signed the accord, some of the most significant producers of
greenhouse gases either did not participate at all (e. g. the U. S. A., China,
India) or have not met their targets (e. g. New Zealand).
The only global environmental
agreement I can recall that actually worked was the way we kept chlorinated
fluorocarbons (CFCs) from destroying the ozone layer. CFCs were once used widely as refrigerant fluids (e. g.
under the trademark "Freon"), but in the 1970s, scientists figured
out that (a) these compounds lasted for a long time in the atmosphere and (b)
they catalyzed the destruction of the important ozone layer in the
stratosphere, which protects us from harmful UV radiation from the sun. The Montreal Protocol, which went into
effect in 1989, set its signatories on a path to eliminating the production of
new CFCs and phasing out their use by finding alternatives. By and large, the Montreal Protocol is
a success story in international technical agreements, because most of the
industrialized world signed on and actually did what they agreed to do.
Why can't we get such cooperation
with the global-warming issue? The
simple answer is, it would cost more.
Telling the world economy to give up CFCs was like telling a dieter to
give up the tutti-frutti milkshake he has every Shrove Tuesday. CFCs were a minor part of the global
economy compared to fossil fuels.
If we accept the most radical recommendations of those alarmed about
global warming and implement restrictions as fast as they want us to, well, the
point is, the world won't do it without something approaching a global police
state. Developing nations such as
China and India will not willingly forego the advantages of wider use of fossil
fuels to grow their economies. It
would take a world war and dictatorial economic domination by a single
global-warming-prevention entity to make the world go on a fossil-fuel
diet. And that doesn't sound like
a good tradeoff.
The thing that geoengineering
proponents like David Keith have going for them is that many geoengineering
proposals would cost a lot less than replacing fossil fuels with a sustainable
alternative. Whether geoengineering
would work is another question, unfortunately even more complicated than the
still-controversial question of exactly how bad climate change is going to get,
and what adverse effects it will have in the future.
Besides the technical issue of
whether geoengineering would work, I think there is an esthetic or
philosophical factor involved.
Many of those who advocate harsh restrictions on fossil-fuel use to
avert further climate change seem to have bought into the
"deep-green" assumption that humanity is really a net liability for
Planet Earth. Burning fossil fuels
represents meddlesome tinkering with what Mother Nature was up to naturally,
and geoengineering would be another step down that evil road of manipulating
the environment. Better we just
fold our tents, globally and economically speaking, and go back to living off
nuts and berries. The trouble with
that notion is that there would not be enough nuts and berries to go around
unless we keep burning fossil fuels, or find an energy-equivalent alternative that
won't bankrupt us. Such an
alternative is not yet at hand.
I admire engineers like David
Keith for thinking through important problems such as climate change to arrive
at possible solutions that might actually work, at least technically. Given the dismal track record of the
Kyoto Protocol, the chances of arriving at a truly global accord to implement
significant fossil-fuel reductions are vanishingly small. If some of the more dire climate-change
predictions come to pass, it might be easier to get international agreement on
a geoengineering strategy than it would on fossil-fuel reductions, especially
if the price is right.
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