Because the fossil fuel industry and its supporters have done everything they can to stall needed solutions to the climate crisis, some people say we must now engineer our way out of the mess we created. Many are promoting schemes that block sunlight from reaching Earth, reflect more of it back into space or absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
Have we really reached that point? Would blocking sunlight by putting reflective particles such as toxic sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere cool the planet? Or spraying seawater into the lower atmosphere to increase reflective cloud cover? How about thickening ice with pumped seawater? Building massive machines to suck carbon from the air?
What are the risks? What would be the unintended consequences?
A United Kingdom government office, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, is spending £56.8 million (about C$106 million) to explore some of these “climate cooling approaches” or “climate interventions.”
ARIA points out that “climate tipping points — abrupt changes in the Earth system that, if crossed, could have devastating and essentially irreversible consequences” are “distinctly possible over the next century.”
It notes, however, that, “There is no substitute for decarbonisation, which is the only sustainable way to lower the chances of such tipping points and their effects from occurring.”
Many scientists worry that these geoengineering plans are an expensive distraction from the need to cut emissions and that they could have severe unforeseen and undesirable environmental consequences.
As the Guardian reports, the Arctic and Antarctic are heating much faster than the rest of the planet, which has focused attention on ways to cool the poles. Melting ice exposes more dark land and water, which absorb solar radiation rather than reflecting it. Proposals include increasing ice cover by pumping seawater onto it or scattering glass beads onto the ice to reflect more sunlight.
New research published in Frontiers in Science suggests that methods being considered for polar regions are flawed and only treat the symptoms and not the causes of global heating.
“These geoengineering proposals are unimaginably expensive and risky for fragile polar environments,” said University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Rob DeConto, one of 42 scientists behind the analysis. “They also detract attention from the root cause of the climate crisis — the unabated burning of fossil fuels, something we know how to begin addressing using established technologies.”
The researchers conclude that money and effort would be put to better use in reducing the emissions that are the primary cause of global heating.
“We’re hopeful that we can eliminate emissions by 2050,” University of Exeter professor Martin Siegert, who led the analysis, said. “Anything that drifts us away from doing that will make the world less safe and less habitable.”
The Guardian reports that, in reviewing polar geoengineering schemes, researchers examined six criteria: “effectiveness, cost, scale and time issues, environment risks, governance challenges and the risk of raising false hopes.” The plans failed on all counts.
The researchers point out that methods such as pumping seawater onto polar ice and scattering tiny glass beads onto the ice are, respectively, “technologically, logistically and financially unrealistic” and “could be toxic to wildlife.”
Some are clearly designed to allow the destructive fossil fuel industry to keep operating. In Canada, the government has just announced plans for a costly “carbon capture, utilization and storage” project in the Alberta oilsands, hyping the plan as a way to “support a strong conventional energy sector while driving down emissions and emissions intensity.” But they just count production emissions, which are only a fraction of the deadly emissions from burning the fuels.
Cost for renewable energy and storage have plummeted, making these technologies far more cost-effective than fossil fuels — and they’re more efficient.
There’s no good reason to keep the polluting, climate-altering fossil fuel industry going, other than to put more money into the pockets of oligarchs and shareholders and give governments easy ways to make the economy appear healthy over the short term, while putting everyone’s health and survival at risk.
We may well be at the point where we have to consider drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of going all out on solutions that have already proven to be effective.
David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington.
Learn more at davidsuzuki.org.
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