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Quico Toro is Director of Climate Repair at the Anthropocene Institute, a contributing editor at Persuasion, and writes the Substack One Percent Brighter.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Quico Toro discuss outdated ideas within environmentalism, why we need to decarbonize—and how technology can save us.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Let's start with one misperception that many people have—and that you've corrected, at least for me, recently—which is that a lot of the future of climate and climate change is going to depend on the actions of countries like the United States or France or Germany. Why is that the wrong assumption?
Quico Toro: Yeah, I think these ideas stick around long past their sell-by date. We’re stuck with this mental model where we think industrialized, rich countries in the West are where the emissions mostly come from. That was true a generation ago. That’s how it was in 1970—70% of emissions came from rich countries, and about a third came from the developing world. Now, that’s flipped. It’s actually just 30% of emissions that come from rich countries, and almost all the new emissions are coming from developing countries. I mean, China and India are an important part of that, but the rest of the developing world is, too. The really important part of this is when you look at emissions growth, because emissions are falling in the developed countries—slowly, but they are falling. But in the developing world, they’re growing really fast. So for every one ton of carbon dioxide that the rich countries stopped emitting in the last 15 or 17 years, developing countries have added five. It just puts a different perspective on the way we talk about emissions reductions, because we often hear people say, well, you know, emissions reductions have to come first, we have to reduce our emissions—and we do have to reduce our emissions. But it’s easy to think that that will solve the problem, or that if we do that, we’re home free. That’s just very far from being the case.
I don’t really have a lot of leverage over decision-making in Indonesia and in Brazil and in China and in the places where emissions are continuing to grow, where they’re still building coal-powered power plants. So it brings me to this realization that I think a lot of people resist, because we haven’t been taught to think about it this way—but we need to come around to understanding that emissions reductions are: A) outside of our control—the ones that really matter—because they’re not in the countries where the people who listen to this podcast live, mostly; and B) they’re just not going to be enough. So we need to look at other pathways to make the climate safe for everybody. And they do exist. It’s just that we don’t usually talk about them so much because we’ve gotten conditioned to think about climate as an emissions-reduction problem, which is actually a small part of it.
Mounk: That’s really interesting. Let’s spell out, first of all, what that should mean for emission reduction policies in Western industrialized nations. One of the problems here is obviously one of free-riding and of coordination. The very structure of emission reductions is such that most of the action happens at the policy level, at the national level. There are 200 countries around the world, and so any one country reducing its emissions doesn’t make much of a difference in the overall picture. So it’s easy to free-ride on the efforts of others.
One way to resist your conclusion is to say that Western countries remain very powerful. It’s possible to convince the Chinese public or Chinese decision-makers that it’s really important to deal with the climate as well. Over time, we’re going to be able to put together this international coalition. The first step in putting together that international coalition is for us—who have historically emitted the most carbon—to give a good example, to show that we act in good faith, that we’re actually able to reduce our emissions without courting economic catastrophe. That’s what’s going to bring other countries on board. What’s wrong with that kind of steelman version of why we should persist in prioritizing the reduction of emissions in the West, even though most of the emissions today aren’t coming from those Western countries?
Toro: There are two issues with that. First, and most importantly, that would have made sense as the line 30 or 40 years ago when there was still time to stay within a reasonable-ish carbon budget. But that ship has sailed. We are now way above 400 parts per million in CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere. That is highly unsafe. And stopping emissions will not bring carbon concentrations down. They’ll just stop them rising—but they’ll stop them rising from the point where they are now, which is already an unsafe level of emissions, higher than CO₂ concentrations have been in a million years and with consequences that are unpredictable. So even if we could wave a magic wand and stop all emissions right this second, that wouldn’t give us a safe climate. It’s too late for that.
That conversation, on the one hand, is fine. We do need to obviously bring down emissions over time. But it’s just the wrong conversation. It’s a distraction from what we actually need to be concentrating on, which are other techniques to make the climate safe for people, for future generations. That’s going to go through directly cooling the planet, but also through drawing out emissions that are already in the atmosphere now, which is something that we don’t talk too much about, but which is possible. That’s what I spend most of my time thinking about—how to open up the conversation and how to open the Overton Window about the climate solutions that we are ready to discuss in public, about techniques that have been quietly worked on by scientists for a long time but that haven’t really permeated the mainstream of the climate debate. We’re out of time. We have to do it.
Mounk: So in principle, it’s obvious. If the problem with climate change is the amount of carbon in the air, then there are two ways of dealing with that. One is to emit less carbon. The other is to find ways to manage the carbon that is in the air—by binding it to elements that will stop it from fueling the greenhouse effect, and so on. It seems to me like there are two sets of objections to that.
One is about the technical feasibility, about the potential side effects, about ways in which those technologies could go wrong. I want to get to those in a moment. But the second objection, I think, is actually the one that drives the reaction to this more deeply. And it’s perhaps more instinctive and more inchoate. It’s that somehow this is the wrong solution. That we are sinning against nature by emitting all of this carbon. We’re somehow doing something wrong. We’re messing with nature. So the right solution must be to stop sinning against nature. The right solution must be to stop emitting carbon. It just doesn’t feel like the right kind of solution, even before you get to those technological objections. I think many of the listeners to this podcast are going to have some version of that reaction, or are feeling like, hang on a second, you’re looking for this cop-out. Why is that the instinctive response of many people who think about this?
Toro: That’s definitely right. I think it goes into the long history of the environmental movement and of environmental thinking, which in many ways has supplanted Christian ethics in the imagination of a lot of people in the West. That feeling of there’s something deep that we’re born with that is wrong, that we’re doing wrong, that we can’t help but do wrong—I grew up Catholic. I know what that is. That is the doctrine of original sin. In Christian doctrine, that’s very deeply ingrained. We’ve secularized, but somehow the same mechanisms that make us feel guilty for having been born, and make us feel that we continue to sin simply by existing—well, they’ve latched on to this separate thing.
Another aspect of it is that the environmental movement, as such, grew out of this sense of alienation from capitalism—this sense that we had gotten all this amazing abundance and all this prosperity from a market economy, but it had left us hollow inside and dirty, and it had come at this terrible cost to our relationship to nature. So this made us feel that capitalism was kind of wrong. I understand those cultural barriers are there. I sort of don’t care though. The reason I don’t care is that I’m from a developing country. I’ve done development work in some of the poorest places in the world—in South Sudan, in Uganda, in places where people really are on the edge of the viability of agroecological systems to keep them alive, and where another one or two degrees is going to just kill them. So I get it—that this makes you feel weird.
But the real sin here is not you feeling bad about your relationship with the ecology. The real sin is you condemning hundreds of millions of people in the developing world to live in agroecological conditions that are unviable. That is a serious problem. Your feelings are going to have to take second place to these much more pressing concerns, for me. Reversing climate chaos is a necessity. Keeping you feeling good about your relationship with ecology is a luxury. That’s why I also think that a lot of these solutions that I’m talking about will have to come through the developing world and will have to be implemented in the developing world by scientists from the developing world, with the support of developing world publics. Because you know what? In the developing world, people don’t have these hang-ups. People are not that alienated from nature. People are not bored with prosperity—because they’re still poor.
Mounk: It’s one of the really interesting ways in which the environmental movement is coded in our contemporary politics as left-leaning or progressive, right? On the whole, if somebody says, I really care about the environment, you’re going to guess that they vote for a left-wing party rather than a right-wing party. That is in part because left-wing political parties have often made that a bigger part of their agenda. But it strikes me that many of the political instincts that drive the environmentalist movement are actually very small-c conservative. The analogy here, to me, is: when you think about sex outside of marriage—sex before marriage—for much of human history, that really did have disastrous consequences. Sex led to pregnancy, and when you have women being pregnant—particularly in societies that are very poor, where they don’t have earning power of their own outside of some form of socially sanctioned relationship that provides for that offspring—that is likely to lead to destitute children and destitute women. So for much of human history, one sensible solution to this was to create mechanisms that made it very unlikely that people would have sex outside of marriage or before marriage.
This was not just some kind of strange moralistic instinct—it actually was necessitated by the realities of that social world that weren’t easy to change. Conservatives persisted in saying, well, the solution continues to be to restrict people having sex outside of marriage, even once the technology changed. It was progressives who said, well, hang on a second, actually, now that we have birth control and we have the pill and we have all those other kinds of things, perhaps we no longer have a need for those social norms. Perhaps we can actually have a society that deals with those problems in a very different kind of way.
Like this analogy, if you don’t have the technologies to take carbon out of the air or to restrict how the carbon that is emitted is going to fuel climate change, you really do have to cut down on the emissions of carbon. But if there is a technology that allows you to get around that constraint, then the progressive position should be: let’s try and make that work. Let’s try and enforce that. That might have some side effects. The pill has some side effects. The fact that some of those traditional constraints on sexuality have gone away has had some bad side effects as well. But we clearly feel quite comfortable with the idea that, on the whole, that has led to a better equilibrium.
Is that a fair analogy?
Toro: I think that’s right. I think what’s funny about it is that conservatives have always had an ethic: I think Jonathan Haidt calls it an ethic of dignity, or of the inviolability of sacred spaces and the sacredness of the body, and things like that. So they’re more comfortable saying, even if there’s not a consent problem, sex is still sort of inherently dirty. People on the left tend to have more of an ethic of harm reduction—so you can show that there’s no harm. But they still have these instincts that nature is sacred and inviolable and that it shouldn’t be polluted. But they don’t like to think of it in those terms. So if you can show them that there are necessarily no harms to some of these techniques, they kind of sputter and don’t know what to say next, because they haven’t come to grips with the fact that they are expressing these feelings of reverence for the sacredness of nature. I think that’s actually a really fun and bright analogy.
Mounk: Alright, so let’s get into the meat of this—because it’s one thing to say that the only objections are these kinds of strange, misplaced, mostly conservative moral concerns. It’s another thing to make plausible that there are, in fact, technological solutions that are going to help deal with carbon after it is emitted, and that are not going to have these disastrous, unforeseeable side-effects. What are some of the approaches that scientists are looking at for how we can deal with carbon in a way that is realistic, cost-effective, and doesn’t have side effects which are very hard to predict?
Toro: I think the hottest area of research in this is definitely marine carbon dioxide removal. It’s this idea that the oceans are absolutely vast—70% of the surface of the Earth—and thousands of times the mass of the atmosphere is in the ocean. The oceans already contain 41 times as much carbon dioxide as the atmosphere does, and already absorb about a quarter of the CO₂ that people produce. As a matter of carbon accounting, it’s easy to see that a small uptick in the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon safely could draw down quite a large amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—and make it really thinkable that you can not just stop climate change, but reverse it. You could go back to the climate that we had in 1900, or even in 1750, with apparently relatively benign techniques that have to do with increasing the alkalinity of the ocean. The ocean is getting more acidic, and the more acidic it gets, the less carbon dioxide it can absorb. That’s very benign and straightforward, and a lot of companies are looking at ways of doing this.
It is expensive, though, so there’s another set of techniques that I tend to be more excited about that use marine photosynthesis. You can just rely basically on micro-seaweed—so, phytoplankton-like photosynthesizing microorganisms—or big seaweed, or some combination of them.
Photosynthesis is the way that nature regulates carbon dioxide, and photosynthesis at sea is just an enormously powerful driver of the carbon cycle naturally. Most of the big swings in carbon dioxide concentrations in Earth’s history come from cycles of activity in marine photosynthesis. So that seems to me kind of like a no-brainer. Bizarrely, we find ourselves in a situation where some people oppose even research into this stuff. They’re scared that researchers are going to look into it and realize that it works—and then where will we be? But I think that the atmosphere around this stuff is definitely changing. There’s a little boom in research into these marine CDR techniques. Personally, I’m an optimist. I don’t have any doubt that 20 years from now we’re going to look back and we’re going to think, wow, that global warming freakout we had in the beginning of the century—that was a bit overstated. It turned out that it was perfectly possible to deal with these techniques. And they’ve had some side effects.
But a lot of those side effects will turn out to be positive rather than negative. Some might be negative—but they will not be negative the way that rendering all of the tropics uninhabitable is negative.
Mounk: There’s some precedent for that kind of resistance and for that kind of change. When you go back 20 years in the environmentalist movement, there was a big debate about whether we should exclusively be looking at mitigation or whether we should also be engaging in adaptation. What that meant at the time was: do we just focus on reducing carbon emissions, or do we also think about how to stop higher sea levels from flooding big coastal cities? The argument at the time was that you really cannot do any form of adaptation because that’s just giving in. Adaptation might make people think that the consequences—for example, of rising sea levels—are going to be less disastrous than they would otherwise be. That’s going to stop us from actually engaging in the kind of mitigation efforts that we need. Adaptation for a while was—as I understand it—a real taboo in the environmentalist movement. A lot of people argued that it was a mistake. At this point, investing money into making sure that cities adapt to bigger heatwaves in the summer, to higher levels of flooding, etc., has become an uncontroversial, progressive-coded policy. This seems to have a similar structure, where a lot of people are opposing researching these topics because they’re saying this is going to give people this false promise that we can fix it in other ways, and it’s going to take pressure off attempts to emit less carbon. That’s why we mustn’t do it.
But I think you’re right that, very likely, some people are going to be funding this research. Some people are going to be doing this research. Some of these methods are so easy to do and so cheap to do that people are going to be tempted to engage in them if the climate veers toward more catastrophic territory. So not doing the research in advance—not figuring out how to do that best and how to do it safely—seems to me like a much bigger risk. Let’s get a little bit into these specific technologies, and I want to cover a range of technologies that I think you favor, and also cover one of the most famous technologies—sometimes called geoengineering—that has taken the most pride of place in this discussion, but that I think you’re seeing a little bit more skeptically.
Let’s start with the oceans. Photosynthesis. For those of us who don’t remember our high school biology lessons, what role does photosynthesis play in this? Why does so much of it happen in the ocean? How on earth can we influence how much of it happens in the ocean?
Toro: Anything you see around you that is green and growing—any tree, shrub, grass—the reason it’s green is that the pigments inside plants that combine sunlight with the air to create the plant itself are capturing carbon dioxide. Those pigments happen to be green. So that’s why the green movement really should be called the photosynthesis movement. Most of it happens in the ocean, just because there’s more ocean than land—and because there are a lot of photosynthetic organisms in the ocean. The closest estimate I’ve seen is one billion, billion, billion—so one with 27 zeros—of these tiny microorganisms all around the ocean, which sounds like a lot, and it is a lot, but they’re each very small. They have been declining in number for at least the last 50 years, probably longer. Just the nature of what plants do—and what seaweed does—when they capture sunlight, when they combine sunlight with carbon dioxide, is to take carbon dioxide out of circulation and turn it into their own bodies.
That’s what a tree is. I think people are quite comfortable with the idea that if you plant a tree, that will—in a small way—absorb carbon dioxide and make things better. The problem with trees is that there’s just not enough space to put the numbers that we would need. This is why I think more and more researchers are looking at the ocean as a natural place to do this. In particular, because it turns out that there are large sections of the ocean—and when I say large, I mean possibly as much ocean surface as twice the size of Asia or three times the size of Africa—where there’s very little growth and not a lot of photosynthetic activity or anything else. Everything in the ocean ends up eating either the photosynthesizing plankton or something that ate the photosynthesizing plankton. It’s the base of the food web. So if there’s no plankton, there’s just no life.
Researchers have known since the early 1990s that the reason a lot of the oceans have very little life is that the waters there are deficient in iron. They’re just too far from land. So if you’re near land, you’ll just get some dust from the land blowing over the sea, and they’ll have a bit of iron. But photosynthesis doesn’t require a lot of iron—it actually requires a very small amount of iron, just not zero. So it turns out that in these very large areas—called subtropical gyres—of the sea that are far from the ocean, there’s just zero iron, and therefore there’s very little photosynthesis. So it’s been hypothesized for a long time—and I think people are looking at it more and more seriously—that if you just add very small, trace quantities of iron, you can provoke these large photosynthesizing phytoplankton blooms that will then—some of it—sink to the bottom of the ocean and just lock the carbon there. People have been tinkering with this idea for the last 40 years. There is now a large trial being proposed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which is this blue-chip research institution associated with the U.S. government, to try to do a large trial off the coast of Alaska, in international waters, and to try to establish a scientific methodology for measuring how much of the carbon dioxide actually gets locked away permanently.
Mounk: So what you’re saying is, there are these large parts of the ocean that really don’t have any life in them and that don’t have any plant growth in them. One way to change that is to drop some iron particles into those parts of the ocean. And the hope is that those iron particles are going to be enough to stimulate new growth. What’s likely to grow is plankton or seaweed or other kinds of things. One of the great side effects of that is that it captures all of this carbon. Is that probably right? If so, is that doable at scale? How expensive would an undertaking like that be? What are the potential side effects that we have to worry about?
Toro: So you said the hope is that this will happen. It’s not a hope—we know it’ll happen, because this has been tested in open ocean trials 13 times now. The other thing is that because you need very little iron, you get these big ratios, these big leverage effects. I was talking to the guy who’s running the Woods Hole experiment, Ken Buesseler, just the other day, and his estimate is that for one ton of iron sulfate in the ocean, you can capture 10,000 tons of CO₂. Not all of the 10,000 tons will end up at the bottom of the ocean—and their job is to figure out what percentage of that will end up being captured for at least 100 years—but that’s what their whole research effort is about. So those kinds of leverage ratios—10,000 to one—make this very attractive. We’re not talking about some engineered, exotic, nanoparticle, expensive thing. This is an industrial feedstock that we’ve been manufacturing at scale for a hundred years. You put it in farm fertilizer. The manufacturing already exists. I’ve seen calculations that for less than 0.1% of the current worldwide production of iron sulfate, you could seed the entire ocean gyre. So you wouldn’t even have to increase the production of iron sulfate. It wouldn’t increase fertilizer prices on land. We’re not talking about a lot of material.
Let’s look at the cost per ton of carbon dioxide capture. By the end of the century—or by the middle of the century—you want to be capturing at least 10 billion tons per year. It’s an unimaginably large amount of CO₂. Unless you have these big leverage ratios—these 10,000 to one ratios—10 billion tons of material is just too much stuff. It would just become impossibly expensive to do with many of the other mechanisms that have been hypothesized. But the National Academy of Sciences, in a report on marine carbon dioxide removal from a couple of years ago, hypothesized that just the iron needed to capture a ton of CO₂ would cost less than 40 U.S. cents. So 40 cents for a ton—versus some of the more high-tech methods being proposed now, which can be up to $400, $500, sometimes $1,000 per ton—versus 40 cents just for the iron. Of course, it costs more than just the iron. You also need the ships, you need the verification, you need the environmental impact assessment. But still, you’re in a different order of magnitude of cost, which makes it much more realistic that, by the middle of the century, you’re going to be able to be doing this at scale.
Mounk: Let's do some math here for one second, Quico. Let's say that if the cost of the iron is $0.40 a ton, you can do it for $1 a ton once you factor in the cost of actually dispersing it and the ships and whatever else.
Toro: Let's just say $10.
Mounk: Say $10. How many tons a year did you say that we need to capture through this technology by mid-century?
Toro: About 10 billion tons.
Mounk: So this basically comes out to a cost of 100 billion per year, which is a very, very significant cost. But by the standards of what governments are already spending on climate change policies and by the standard of what the global economy is likely to be by 2050, that is very small, correct?
Toro: A hundred billion dollars is what Germany has spent on a hopeless attempt to decarbonize—just its one economy. A hundred billion dollars a year is a tenth of the Pentagon’s budget. On a global scale, it’s super affordable compared to some of these other techniques. Now, we want to then talk about side-effects and ecological impacts—but that’s where I think this technique gets really interesting. You have to remember that the mechanism you’re using to do this is to stimulate the bottom of the marine food web. So we have very good reason to believe that the main ecological side effect is going to be an increase in krill, fish and whale populations in the ocean. That is not a bad thing. Some people working in this field propose iron fertilization mostly just for the ecological benefits—forgetting about the carbon stuff. The carbon stuff doesn’t even need to be the point here. This can be a whale restoration method. This can be a fisheries restoration effort. So the side effects are not necessarily bad.
Mounk: What does that mean for our ability to emit carbon without doing damage to the environment and inducing further climate change? Presumably, there is a certain amount of carbon that’s already in the air that we have to deal with. But the more carbon we emit, the more of this kind of storage is going to be necessary. With each year in which we emit additional carbon, we would need additional carbon storage in the ocean to make sure that that additional carbon being emitted doesn’t have a damaging effect. Is this a transitional solution, which allows us to make sure that we don’t have runaway climate change in this century, and allows us to make sure that countries in Africa and Asia, are able to develop industrially at a rapid pace—which is very important for people there to be able to have good lives, food on the table, electricity in the homes, and so on and so forth? But we will still eventually need to wean ourselves off of carbon, because the carrying capacity of the ocean is eventually going to run out. There are only so many whales that we can create with this policy. Or does this effectively obviate the need to stop basing the human economy on carbon for the foreseeable future?
Toro: Well, I think all the indications we have are that once countries reach a certain level of wealth and development, they start to become less carbon-intensive. We’ve seen that across the developed world. The problem is that poorer countries, as they’re trying to reach that level of development, are under strong pressure to produce as much energy as cheaply as possible. For now, that ends up forcing them into this carbon pathway. If we had a century to get more of the developing world to the level of development where they’re ready to devote more resources to decarbonization, then we could—on a much more reasonable timescale of one to two centuries, which is still, in geological terms, very short (but in human terms, not)—end up decarbonizing. You need to decarbonize for climate reasons, but you need to decarbonize for a much more basic reason—which always gets left out of this conversation and really shouldn’t be—which is that burning coal and natural gas and oil will kill you through particulate matter in your lungs. We store the waste from these energy sources in the air, we breathe them, and then it makes us sick. Literally millions of people each year die, and tens or hundreds of millions are made sick by particulate pollution. From my point of view, that is the real reason to stop using them. That is the biggest harm that these energy sources cause. We’ve lost sight of that, which I think is highly unfortunate. We are doing it. Developed countries are drawing down their carbon emissions now. It has been impossible—you can ask John Kerry about this next time he’s on the show—ask him what it was like negotiating with the Chinese about their coal power plants. It’s impossible to get them to sacrifice their economic national interests to this nebulous long-term goal of carbon drawdowns. They just wouldn’t do it.
Mounk: Let me understand why you are not advocating, in that case, for a different kind of solution to climate change that is also not captured by the kind of nostalgia of, we just have to forgive our sins to nature and go back to the 1950s. That is to say: we’ve had a lot of investments in clean energy, solar panels are much cheaper and much more efficient than they were 10 years ago, there are all of these kinds of alternative sources of energy—and if the price continues to fall as rapidly as it did for the last 10 or 20 years, that’s going to take care of the problem. One of the reasons why a country like Kenya faces this very genuine trade-off between their economic growth—which is an important moral imperative—and making sure that they don’t build coal plants that emit a lot of carbon into the climate, is that a coal plant continues to be cheaper and easier for Kenya to build. If that was no longer the case—if Kenya, which is in a rich climate, could get ahead just as quickly by installing a bunch of solar panels—then we wouldn’t even need all of this newfangled stuff in the oceans. Why is it that people who care about the environment, like you do—who are open to technological solutions, like you are—shouldn’t be focusing on those kinds of renewable energies, rather than on what they might regard as untested technologies to do with making seaweed grow?
Toro: Look, I’m a “both and” kind of guy, not an “either or” kind of guy. Kenya—and developing countries in general—should be doing that. At this point, when they sit down and they do the math, they realize that trying to decarbonize their grids requires investments in batteries that make prices just uncompetitive. I pray every morning that battery technologies—some of these exotic new solid-state batteries that are being researched out there—are going to come through. They would solve the problem. In 20 or 30 years, I really hope that this has been a solution that we found. Those remain speculative in a way that the iron fertilization isn’t speculative. That’s never been shown not to work in the lab. So I think we need to advance on many tracks at the same time. It’s just that I don’t think we need another batteries-and-solar advocate out there—because there’s thousands. They’re the center of the conversation. What our focus on those kinds of solutions is doing right now is displacing any talk of other solutions that we will need to create that kind of safe atmosphere bridge between now and the time that you’re able to go big on things like solid-state batteries. I don’t know if that answers the question.
Mounk: Just to make sure I understand this—the idea is that, at the moment, solar panels have become much cheaper and we should be rolling them out. This is a big hope for the future of how we’re going to deal with the climate. The problem is that, at the moment, we don’t have the cheap storage of energy to make sure that they are a solution at scale. If you end up with an energy grid in which the ratio of solar is too high right now, when you’re in winter or a few days without sun, you’re at a moment when there’s a particular surge of need for electricity. Perhaps it’s the summer and it’s sunny, but it’s so sunny that everybody has their AC cranked up really high so solar is not going to be able to deal with that problem. Perhaps it might in 50 or 100 years. But we need a bridge in order to get there. Am I summarizing that correctly?
Toro: That’s exactly right. These weather-dependent renewables do well up until a certain threshold of how much of the electricity comes from them. Once you start to get north of 35–40 percent of a grid, they bring a lot of instability—because on those sunless days or those no-wind days, suddenly you need to get your power from somewhere else, and then power prices go way up. Sometimes you have brownouts. For industrial users, this is a nightmare, because now you don’t know what your power bill is going to be. So then industrial producers move out, and then voters get upset because you lose jobs. There are a series of problems associated with intermittency and with the way that today’s renewables are dependent on the weather that I think we didn’t really think through before we started to go big into these technologies. I think a lot of jurisdictions have gotten their fingers burned. One thing that I hasten to add—that shouldn’t be left out of this—is advanced geothermal. It really would solve this problem. Geothermal does not depend on the weather. Some of it is getting very good and quite cheap. So that’s definitely a solution that we need to look at. And of course, nuclear, which is—right now—the one source of reliable, safe, zero-carbon electricity that we know how to do at scale. All of these things need to happen at the same time. They are happening at the same time. But my fear is that they cannot happen quickly enough to prevent tipping points—having to do with the AMOC, the circulation patterns in the Atlantic that keep Europe habitable; that have to do with permafrost loss in Siberia—that could set off a really self-reinforcing spiral of rapid heating. We’re getting quite close to some of these tipping points. So we need to cool. We’re in emergency mode here. We need rapid CO₂ drawdown. So if you’re in that kind of emergency, I just don’t see how we’re in any position to be ruling out potential solutions because they make us feel weird.
Mounk: One of the rapid solutions that has been discussed prominently in the past—but seems to have faded a little bit from the conversation—is what was called geoengineering. If you remember, when that volcano in Iceland erupted and flights were disturbed from Europe to the United States for a long time, one of the impacts of that was that it had a significant cooling effect. That is because if you have additional elements of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere—as you did after this volcano erupted—more sunlight is going to be reflected back out into the atmosphere, and that is going to cool global temperatures. So the idea here is similar to what you’re talking about in the oceans. It doesn’t take a ton of those particles of sulfur dioxide additionally in the atmosphere to have a relatively significant cooling effect. It’s not very difficult technologically—you basically just have to retrofit planes to fly at high altitude and emit some of those particles. Like your proposed solution, it doesn’t take a global compact of 200 countries agreeing on this. At least technologically, it would be relatively cost-effective for one large or a couple of medium-sized nations to carry out. This was one of the proposals that people had for how to bridge this period of emergency. Why is it that you seem less excited about that than the other technological alternatives? Why do you think that has faded a little bit from the conversation about the climate?
Toro: It’s a funny one, the solar radiation management stuff—which is what they call it now, because people get scared when you say the word geoengineering. It’s a funny one in that, technically, we sort of know it would work. But it would really mask the warming, because it wouldn’t do anything to address the basic drivers of warming. It wouldn’t draw down the gases in the atmosphere that are heating the planet. It’s definitely temporary—it's not a solution. It’s kind of a palliative in the meantime. So that’s one thing that I think gives people pause. The reasons I’m less excited about it than some of these other solutions are two, basically. First, I think it has a much harder road to public acceptance. You sound like a crazy person when you advocate this stuff. You just sound like a Bond villain. I don’t see any way to get around this. The more you try to explain the science, the weirder it sounds, and it just gives too many people the heebie-jeebies. So I think it would end up being very divisive socially. Then, if you yank it—if it becomes so divisive that you suddenly stop it—then you get all the warming all at once that you had been masking. People call this termination shock. It’s a real concern. You can see it making things worse. But the real Achilles’ heel with this is that I disagree that one or two countries could go it alone. I think if you did this, it would create huge international tensions, because some countries would definitely be winners and some countries would be losers. There’s been a lot of work showing that there are many scenarios in which either China is a winner and India is a loser, or India is a winner and China is a loser. They’re both nuclear-armed neighbors at each other’s throats with unsettled borders. If you add something like this, you can just see things spinning out of control. So the geopolitics of it seem dicey. But mostly, it wouldn’t really solve the problem in the long term.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Quico explore possible objections to ocean iron fertilization, and ask what an abundance agenda for the environment and for climate change would look like. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
