Sorry, I don't have any confidence at all in geoengineering solutions like removing carbon from the air or blocking the sun. This is nuts! It would cost a fortune, be ripe for graft, necessarily involve massive private corporations to do these things - who would then become a powerful lobby. There could be terrible secondary effects.
I wish to God that environmentalists could focus on real life solvable environmental problems- that actually effect the daily lives of people- especially in poor countries! How about actually doing something about plastic pollution and water pollution! The developed world has sent many of our most polluting industries- textiles, chemicals- to less developed countries and many of the poorest people are living in toxic soups of pollution. These are solvable problems!
But more broadly, just consider how different your reaction is to phytoplankton than to proposals to plant trees on land. Nobody’s scared of planting trees. Phytoplankton absorbs greenhouse gases in exactly the same way trees do! If you’re chill about photosynthesis on land, but scared of it in the ocean, well…it’s hard for me to really understand that gap.
Thank you for responding! My concern with the marine sea engineering would be that our interventions actually cause more harm than good. And the whole point of the carbon removal is to enable the world population to continue in its wasteful ways. Planting trees on land is well understood and been done by humans for millenia. How do we know we aren't going to further damage the sea? And my other question: what do we do about the interest groups we create by sending government money for these sort of schemes?
Please meditate on the tragic and horrible story of ethanol! Ethanol is an ecological holocaust in the American midwest. Millions of acres planted to GMO round up resistant corn, doused multiple times a season with round up and other chemicals - and it all ends up in car tanks. The most fertile soil in American is gradually being permanently contaminated. All thanks to government mandates for climate change, that engendered a powerful lobby ... So I am sceptical of the "solutions" to climate change - which remains a poorly understood phenomena.
A couple of things: first, please understand that thoughtful people are working through these concerns right now. We understand there’s a potential for negative outcomes, which is why we’re working through an explicitly stage-gated methodology where you hold a trial, monitor intensively for ecological impact, evaluate your evidence with a regulator and only proceed to the next stage if you’ve collected enough evidence to be sure what you’re doing is safe and effective.
If you google “Ocean Visions phytoplankton carbon solutions” you’ll find a very detailed write up on the state of the art here. Is it perfect? No, it’s not. But serious people have spent thousands of hours thinking through the question of how to do this stuff safely. The organizations pushing for this research — Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Environmental Defence Fund, USC, others— are pretty much all nonprofits run by people deeply concerned with the natural world. Nobody is rushing into an intervention Willy Nilly.
Also: YES! Everyone in this field is acutely aware ethanol was a disaster! It’s precisely because doing this on scarce farmland is plainly unsustainable that we want to shift to a solution that’s much, much more sustainable.
The point of targeting ocean gyres is that they’re so vast, you don’t need to alter their ecology very much to make a big difference in carbon fluxes. A gentle intervention that brings, say, the South Pacific gyre to the level of carbon transport you see naturally in the north Atlantic would be enough to capture billions of tons of CO2. (The North Atlantic is naturally about twice as productive than the South Pacific because it’s naturally fertilized by dust blowing in from the Sahara.) We’re not really talking about an intervention that would create a sharp discontinuity in marine ecosystems into a wholly artificial environment. We’re talking about going to parts of the ocean that currently host almost no phytoplankton and therefore absorb very little carbon and getting them to host a modest amount of phytoplankton (per unit area) so they can help absorb a lot more CO2 (overall.)
Is it entirely risk free? No. Nothing ever is. Is it way less risky than runaway climate change? It seems to me pretty clear that it is.
Thank you for your detailed reply. I just hope this is being done with great caution and humility. Although I am a lifelong and dedicated environmentalist- like you- and a longtime supporter of environmental non profits- I am not convinced that man made climate change is "runaway." I am very concerned about careerism in the climate field, many many scientists make a living publishing on climate change- but that doesnt make their conclusions true... But again, like you, I can only hope that this ocean modification science is done with humility and caution- and with mindfulness to self reinforcing loop of careers and profits from saying it works.
Quico, first off, I love your posts. You're the most scientific writer Persuasion has had. Second, I'm completely aligned with your moral views regarding poverty. Third, ocean fertilization has been my favorite geo-engineering (not a good term, but that's how it's seen) approach for two or three years.
I'm not sure about this, but I think the chances are that it would slightly de-acidify near the surface and help the corals — not truly important, but helpful with some earth-first types.
Nonetheless, I have a couple of rebalancing suggestions for your solution priorities. First, as your own graph shows rich countries have been decarbonizing while getting richer, which proves your correlations between poverty reduction and emissions are not as lockstep causative as you imply. There is room for significantly slowing emission growth in poor countries without noticeable negative impact on growth.
Next step. We should not bet the farm on ocean fertilization. Just as you say, it's quite iffy. And so is everything else, so I'm not going to offer the "right answer." But I organized and co-edited a book with articles by a dozen other economists (3 Nobel prizes) in which some of us proposed a solution that could cut emissions while reducing poverty — Global Carbon Pricing: The Path to Climate Cooperation (MIT Press). Not a great book as the academics dominated, but the central idea is solid.
The ideas: (1) pricing is the cheapest approach, (2) A we-will-if-you-will approach can overcome the tragedy of the commons, (3) Cooperation of poor countries requires "Green Fund," with distributions assigned on the basis of (E - Ei) where E is global average per capita emissions, and Ei is any specific country. This is more positive the poorer the country is, and quite negative for the US (we would pay).
Admittedly, this is difficult solution to sell, but so are they all. The best contributor was David MacKay — brilliant, well-connected, and not an economist, but a physicist (check Wikipedia). Unfortunately he died very young, but another brilliant non-economist, a close friend of his, is now working with me on this, and gaining more traction than we did. Check out Carl Rasmussen.
"There is room for significantly slowing emission growth in poor countries without noticeable negative impact on growth."
Oh 100%. To a considerable extent, this is already happening — the carbon-intensity of energy and the energy intensity of GDP both seem to be trending down. Population is too. All of the components of the Kaya identity are moving in the right direction. This is one important reason why we're on track for ~3 degrees warming, and not ~5.
It's just that those processes are slooooooow. And the variables involved all seem to me to respond much more to underlying technological change than to policy decisions. I just don't think there's much of a lever there to press on, for getting us down from a path to ~3 degrees to the path we ought to be aiming for, which is ~1.75 degrees.
"(1) pricing is the cheapest approach, (2) A we-will-if-you-will approach can overcome the tragedy of the commons, (3) Cooperation of poor countries requires "Green Fund," with distributions assigned on the basis of (E - Ei) where E is global average per capita emissions, and Ei is any specific country."
I mean, yeah! I get it! It works beautifully on a blackboard. Nordhaus's approach is the *correct* approach. It's just that you have to get Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin to sign on the dotted line, and...well...
Quico, thanks for a thoughtful reply, and I hope you'll keep thinking broadly. Calling a process that has already taken us from 5 to 3, slow, when fertilization took us from 3 to 3 over the same time period, seems like you might have your thumb on the scale. Both approaches could do a lot better, but we have little idea of how much is realistic.
"And the variables involved all seem to me to respond much more to underlying technological change than to policy decisions." That seems to be missing the point. A primary target of pricing is tech change, and yes that does respond dramatically to policy. Total American time in space = 15 minutes, when Kennedy decided to land on the moon. That took 8 years 2 months. Then US policy took it's foot off gas, and ... Or look at the rate at which the atomic bomb was developed. Totally policy driven.
Trump will be gone long before he can get in the way, and Xi will sign on because he's already nearly on board, won't have to pay into the Green fund, and has by far the largest motive for making this work. Putin, No. But he's a no one every climate proposal including yours.
If you look at the impact of price on non-tech factors, it's still pretty large, EU gas prices are the main reason their car emissions are 2/3 of ours. Long-term elasticities are far larger then short term.
But neither fertilization nor pricing is likely to be given a chance -- because everyone thinks they know what's the best approach, So don't bother with the others. I'm hoping you can part company with that camp.
"Calling a process that has already taken us from 5 to 3, slow, when fertilization took us from 3 to 3 over the same time period, seems like you might have your thumb on the scale."
Tough but fair!
But look, yeah, that was huge. I'm talking about the next 20 years, not the last 20. I don't think there's any more juice left in that lemon, but squeeze away if that's your thing!
In terms of going from 3 to 1.75, the lemon is all in mCDR. Is it likely to be given a chance? It will be, if I have anything to do with it!
I'll give it one more shot. My think is trying to be cooperative. After giving up on economic cooperation due to MacKay's death, I spent a bit of time help a friend who was into 4th gen nuclear, and then switched to fertilization. That actually 4 years ago. I offered you a potential tip on arguing for fertilization because I like to encourage people who are seriously trying to work on this. The last couple of months I've been helping Carl in my spare time because he's really smart (an AI grad student of Hinton) and has some new ideas for making price cooperation easier (the problem is not pricing, it's cooperation).
So there's no need to be snide about "if that's your thing!" (It's not). And writing off serious tech change between now and 2050, is an broadside attack on a lot of people who are on your side, but have a different view of what's possible.
And this is not the right time to be writing off the lemon. 4th gen nukes could very easily stop the atmospheric increase, which is much easier than zero emissions. AI, might prove to be very helpful with nuke, battery, and heat-pump design, not to mention genetically engineered, plants (for land our ocean) that sequester carbon faster. It's just so much harder to know about the next 20 years compared with the last 20.
And I do very much hope you succeed with mCDR.
So my final plea is this — hold your vision of the future a little more loosely, and extend some grace to those who share your values but not your certainty.
You’ve nailed the politics of this better than anything else I’ve read. Fingers crossed you’re also right about ocean fertilization; you make a convincing case for much more investment in it.
But “enough to capture a significant percentage of the carbon emissions humans make each year” is still short of what is needed to avoid catastrophe. That will likely require several dozen or hundred partial solutions, not one big thing, so I wouldn’t be dismissive of anything that isn’t a silver bullet. I also don’t believe that development in low-income countries need be anywhere near as carbon intensive as it was historically. And many additional innovations in less carbon intensive technologies in rich countries (where markets can reward the necessary R&D) often quickly spill over into developing countries.
"That will likely require several dozen or hundred partial solutions, not one big thing, so I wouldn’t be dismissive of anything that isn’t a silver bullet."
I get it that this point seems like plain old horse sense, and this view is *very* dominant in the climate space. Almost everyone agrees with you and disagrees with me on this point. Still, I think y'all are wrong and I'm right, and I'll tell you why:
Once you do end up with, say, 73 viable ways of capturing carbon and storing it long term, you will quickly realize that they each come with a price-tag, which means they can be ranked ordinally from most expensive to least expensive. Somebody will have to pay the bill for all this. And economic logic implies that higher-cost solutions are just going to get driven out of the market by lower-cost solutions, because nobody rational is going to pay $100 for a ton of CO2 removal when you could pay $20.
Now, of course you're right that we can't tell ex ante which methods are going to end up being lower cost — you end up finding out what the real cost is by implementing, which is what lets you realize those learning-by-doing economies, optimizing, etc. But I do think we have very good ex ante reason to guess phytoplankton is going to end up being the lowest cost option, because phytoplankton enjoys inherent efficiencies that other methods will never be able to match: the energy bill for the initial capture is zero, because it's photosynthesis and chloroplasts capture solar energy literally for free, and mass transport costs are also zero because it's literally just gravity — dead organic matter sinking to the ocean depths.
The beauty of phytoplankton is that both the things that jack up costs in other CDR methods cost exactly nothing. You just have to pay for the minerals you're going to add (pennies per ton of CO2 captured) and for the monitoring, reporting and verification (no idea what it'll end up costing, but plausible to think it'll be in the $5-$25 range, and tending down with scale.)
Again, I really hope this works as you expect. A $5-$25 a ton net cost sequestration method should obviously be utilized first. Just worried it may turn out to have limited scale at that (or any) price.
It's because climate is a very real crisis that it's so important to be honest about how the world actually does and doesn't work. Bravo Quico!
Sorry, I don't have any confidence at all in geoengineering solutions like removing carbon from the air or blocking the sun. This is nuts! It would cost a fortune, be ripe for graft, necessarily involve massive private corporations to do these things - who would then become a powerful lobby. There could be terrible secondary effects.
I wish to God that environmentalists could focus on real life solvable environmental problems- that actually effect the daily lives of people- especially in poor countries! How about actually doing something about plastic pollution and water pollution! The developed world has sent many of our most polluting industries- textiles, chemicals- to less developed countries and many of the poorest people are living in toxic soups of pollution. These are solvable problems!
Pretty much all the research into phytoplankton is being done by non-profits:
https://www.edf.org/media/edf-launches-new-research-program-phytoplankton-carbon-solutions
But more broadly, just consider how different your reaction is to phytoplankton than to proposals to plant trees on land. Nobody’s scared of planting trees. Phytoplankton absorbs greenhouse gases in exactly the same way trees do! If you’re chill about photosynthesis on land, but scared of it in the ocean, well…it’s hard for me to really understand that gap.
Thank you for responding! My concern with the marine sea engineering would be that our interventions actually cause more harm than good. And the whole point of the carbon removal is to enable the world population to continue in its wasteful ways. Planting trees on land is well understood and been done by humans for millenia. How do we know we aren't going to further damage the sea? And my other question: what do we do about the interest groups we create by sending government money for these sort of schemes?
Please meditate on the tragic and horrible story of ethanol! Ethanol is an ecological holocaust in the American midwest. Millions of acres planted to GMO round up resistant corn, doused multiple times a season with round up and other chemicals - and it all ends up in car tanks. The most fertile soil in American is gradually being permanently contaminated. All thanks to government mandates for climate change, that engendered a powerful lobby ... So I am sceptical of the "solutions" to climate change - which remains a poorly understood phenomena.
A couple of things: first, please understand that thoughtful people are working through these concerns right now. We understand there’s a potential for negative outcomes, which is why we’re working through an explicitly stage-gated methodology where you hold a trial, monitor intensively for ecological impact, evaluate your evidence with a regulator and only proceed to the next stage if you’ve collected enough evidence to be sure what you’re doing is safe and effective.
If you google “Ocean Visions phytoplankton carbon solutions” you’ll find a very detailed write up on the state of the art here. Is it perfect? No, it’s not. But serious people have spent thousands of hours thinking through the question of how to do this stuff safely. The organizations pushing for this research — Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Environmental Defence Fund, USC, others— are pretty much all nonprofits run by people deeply concerned with the natural world. Nobody is rushing into an intervention Willy Nilly.
Also: YES! Everyone in this field is acutely aware ethanol was a disaster! It’s precisely because doing this on scarce farmland is plainly unsustainable that we want to shift to a solution that’s much, much more sustainable.
The point of targeting ocean gyres is that they’re so vast, you don’t need to alter their ecology very much to make a big difference in carbon fluxes. A gentle intervention that brings, say, the South Pacific gyre to the level of carbon transport you see naturally in the north Atlantic would be enough to capture billions of tons of CO2. (The North Atlantic is naturally about twice as productive than the South Pacific because it’s naturally fertilized by dust blowing in from the Sahara.) We’re not really talking about an intervention that would create a sharp discontinuity in marine ecosystems into a wholly artificial environment. We’re talking about going to parts of the ocean that currently host almost no phytoplankton and therefore absorb very little carbon and getting them to host a modest amount of phytoplankton (per unit area) so they can help absorb a lot more CO2 (overall.)
Is it entirely risk free? No. Nothing ever is. Is it way less risky than runaway climate change? It seems to me pretty clear that it is.
Thank you for your detailed reply. I just hope this is being done with great caution and humility. Although I am a lifelong and dedicated environmentalist- like you- and a longtime supporter of environmental non profits- I am not convinced that man made climate change is "runaway." I am very concerned about careerism in the climate field, many many scientists make a living publishing on climate change- but that doesnt make their conclusions true... But again, like you, I can only hope that this ocean modification science is done with humility and caution- and with mindfulness to self reinforcing loop of careers and profits from saying it works.
Quico, first off, I love your posts. You're the most scientific writer Persuasion has had. Second, I'm completely aligned with your moral views regarding poverty. Third, ocean fertilization has been my favorite geo-engineering (not a good term, but that's how it's seen) approach for two or three years.
I'm not sure about this, but I think the chances are that it would slightly de-acidify near the surface and help the corals — not truly important, but helpful with some earth-first types.
Nonetheless, I have a couple of rebalancing suggestions for your solution priorities. First, as your own graph shows rich countries have been decarbonizing while getting richer, which proves your correlations between poverty reduction and emissions are not as lockstep causative as you imply. There is room for significantly slowing emission growth in poor countries without noticeable negative impact on growth.
Next step. We should not bet the farm on ocean fertilization. Just as you say, it's quite iffy. And so is everything else, so I'm not going to offer the "right answer." But I organized and co-edited a book with articles by a dozen other economists (3 Nobel prizes) in which some of us proposed a solution that could cut emissions while reducing poverty — Global Carbon Pricing: The Path to Climate Cooperation (MIT Press). Not a great book as the academics dominated, but the central idea is solid.
The ideas: (1) pricing is the cheapest approach, (2) A we-will-if-you-will approach can overcome the tragedy of the commons, (3) Cooperation of poor countries requires "Green Fund," with distributions assigned on the basis of (E - Ei) where E is global average per capita emissions, and Ei is any specific country. This is more positive the poorer the country is, and quite negative for the US (we would pay).
Admittedly, this is difficult solution to sell, but so are they all. The best contributor was David MacKay — brilliant, well-connected, and not an economist, but a physicist (check Wikipedia). Unfortunately he died very young, but another brilliant non-economist, a close friend of his, is now working with me on this, and gaining more traction than we did. Check out Carl Rasmussen.
"There is room for significantly slowing emission growth in poor countries without noticeable negative impact on growth."
Oh 100%. To a considerable extent, this is already happening — the carbon-intensity of energy and the energy intensity of GDP both seem to be trending down. Population is too. All of the components of the Kaya identity are moving in the right direction. This is one important reason why we're on track for ~3 degrees warming, and not ~5.
It's just that those processes are slooooooow. And the variables involved all seem to me to respond much more to underlying technological change than to policy decisions. I just don't think there's much of a lever there to press on, for getting us down from a path to ~3 degrees to the path we ought to be aiming for, which is ~1.75 degrees.
"(1) pricing is the cheapest approach, (2) A we-will-if-you-will approach can overcome the tragedy of the commons, (3) Cooperation of poor countries requires "Green Fund," with distributions assigned on the basis of (E - Ei) where E is global average per capita emissions, and Ei is any specific country."
I mean, yeah! I get it! It works beautifully on a blackboard. Nordhaus's approach is the *correct* approach. It's just that you have to get Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin to sign on the dotted line, and...well...
Quico, thanks for a thoughtful reply, and I hope you'll keep thinking broadly. Calling a process that has already taken us from 5 to 3, slow, when fertilization took us from 3 to 3 over the same time period, seems like you might have your thumb on the scale. Both approaches could do a lot better, but we have little idea of how much is realistic.
"And the variables involved all seem to me to respond much more to underlying technological change than to policy decisions." That seems to be missing the point. A primary target of pricing is tech change, and yes that does respond dramatically to policy. Total American time in space = 15 minutes, when Kennedy decided to land on the moon. That took 8 years 2 months. Then US policy took it's foot off gas, and ... Or look at the rate at which the atomic bomb was developed. Totally policy driven.
Trump will be gone long before he can get in the way, and Xi will sign on because he's already nearly on board, won't have to pay into the Green fund, and has by far the largest motive for making this work. Putin, No. But he's a no one every climate proposal including yours.
If you look at the impact of price on non-tech factors, it's still pretty large, EU gas prices are the main reason their car emissions are 2/3 of ours. Long-term elasticities are far larger then short term.
But neither fertilization nor pricing is likely to be given a chance -- because everyone thinks they know what's the best approach, So don't bother with the others. I'm hoping you can part company with that camp.
"Calling a process that has already taken us from 5 to 3, slow, when fertilization took us from 3 to 3 over the same time period, seems like you might have your thumb on the scale."
Tough but fair!
But look, yeah, that was huge. I'm talking about the next 20 years, not the last 20. I don't think there's any more juice left in that lemon, but squeeze away if that's your thing!
In terms of going from 3 to 1.75, the lemon is all in mCDR. Is it likely to be given a chance? It will be, if I have anything to do with it!
I'll give it one more shot. My think is trying to be cooperative. After giving up on economic cooperation due to MacKay's death, I spent a bit of time help a friend who was into 4th gen nuclear, and then switched to fertilization. That actually 4 years ago. I offered you a potential tip on arguing for fertilization because I like to encourage people who are seriously trying to work on this. The last couple of months I've been helping Carl in my spare time because he's really smart (an AI grad student of Hinton) and has some new ideas for making price cooperation easier (the problem is not pricing, it's cooperation).
So there's no need to be snide about "if that's your thing!" (It's not). And writing off serious tech change between now and 2050, is an broadside attack on a lot of people who are on your side, but have a different view of what's possible.
And this is not the right time to be writing off the lemon. 4th gen nukes could very easily stop the atmospheric increase, which is much easier than zero emissions. AI, might prove to be very helpful with nuke, battery, and heat-pump design, not to mention genetically engineered, plants (for land our ocean) that sequester carbon faster. It's just so much harder to know about the next 20 years compared with the last 20.
And I do very much hope you succeed with mCDR.
So my final plea is this — hold your vision of the future a little more loosely, and extend some grace to those who share your values but not your certainty.
You’re a brave man indeed to engage in nuance and I salute you.
You’ve nailed the politics of this better than anything else I’ve read. Fingers crossed you’re also right about ocean fertilization; you make a convincing case for much more investment in it.
But “enough to capture a significant percentage of the carbon emissions humans make each year” is still short of what is needed to avoid catastrophe. That will likely require several dozen or hundred partial solutions, not one big thing, so I wouldn’t be dismissive of anything that isn’t a silver bullet. I also don’t believe that development in low-income countries need be anywhere near as carbon intensive as it was historically. And many additional innovations in less carbon intensive technologies in rich countries (where markets can reward the necessary R&D) often quickly spill over into developing countries.
"That will likely require several dozen or hundred partial solutions, not one big thing, so I wouldn’t be dismissive of anything that isn’t a silver bullet."
I get it that this point seems like plain old horse sense, and this view is *very* dominant in the climate space. Almost everyone agrees with you and disagrees with me on this point. Still, I think y'all are wrong and I'm right, and I'll tell you why:
Once you do end up with, say, 73 viable ways of capturing carbon and storing it long term, you will quickly realize that they each come with a price-tag, which means they can be ranked ordinally from most expensive to least expensive. Somebody will have to pay the bill for all this. And economic logic implies that higher-cost solutions are just going to get driven out of the market by lower-cost solutions, because nobody rational is going to pay $100 for a ton of CO2 removal when you could pay $20.
Now, of course you're right that we can't tell ex ante which methods are going to end up being lower cost — you end up finding out what the real cost is by implementing, which is what lets you realize those learning-by-doing economies, optimizing, etc. But I do think we have very good ex ante reason to guess phytoplankton is going to end up being the lowest cost option, because phytoplankton enjoys inherent efficiencies that other methods will never be able to match: the energy bill for the initial capture is zero, because it's photosynthesis and chloroplasts capture solar energy literally for free, and mass transport costs are also zero because it's literally just gravity — dead organic matter sinking to the ocean depths.
The beauty of phytoplankton is that both the things that jack up costs in other CDR methods cost exactly nothing. You just have to pay for the minerals you're going to add (pennies per ton of CO2 captured) and for the monitoring, reporting and verification (no idea what it'll end up costing, but plausible to think it'll be in the $5-$25 range, and tending down with scale.)
Again, I really hope this works as you expect. A $5-$25 a ton net cost sequestration method should obviously be utilized first. Just worried it may turn out to have limited scale at that (or any) price.
Could very well be. (I intend to find out!)