we all know climate change is getting bad. How bad? Can we prevent it from becoming catastrophic? (Choose your own definition of “catastrophic”.) Tell me your thoughts in the comments here — and then, if you’re in the Bay Area on September 28, you might enjoy Re:WIRED Green, our one-day event on how human ingenuity can tackle climate change. There will be talks, demos and discussions with some of the most interesting researchers, activists and entrepreneurs working on this issue. Which brings us nicely to the topic of this month’s update.
Swinging in front of the climate fences
People who call themselves climate optimists tend to say things like, Yes, it’s really bad, but people are pretty good at warding off really bad things. The Malthusian trap, the ozone hole, acid rain. Of course, “We’ve done it before, so we’ll do it again” may not be the logic you want to rely on when the fate of billions of people is at stake. And switching the entire global economy from fossil fuels is arguably a tad trickier than those other problems. (But who could have guessed that back then?)
At WIRED, we look at some of the more existing technology solutions quite often, and the story is usually something like, “This is promising, but there are some annoying trade-offs.” A good example that we wrote extensively about last December and last month is carbon capture and storage (CCS): chemically scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air and trapping it underground. Many experts agree that this is probably a necessary adjunct to pumping out less carbon. But the technology is expensive, difficult to scale, and — the bit that really gnaws — is turning into a gold rush for the same companies that drill and burn fossil fuels. Well, that’s capitalism to you.
Or take a slightly older CCS technology: trees. It would certainly help to plant more of them, but it will take decades or centuries for new trees to be as good at absorbing carbon as the rapidly disappearing old-growth forests. You may be able to genetically modify trees and other plants to suck up carbon faster, but spreading GM trees around the world without knowing the long-term effects makes people (rightly) nervous. On the other hand, it may take too long to grow more low-carbon trees in a non-GM way.
Then there are biofuels. But switching has knock-on effects, such as requiring more fertilizer to grow biofuel crops, which also causes emissions. Or low-carbon beef, but it’s still much lower-carbon than other meats, so marketing it as low-carbon could paradoxically encourage people to eat more of it and produce higher net emissions. Or growing specialty crops to burn as fuel while their emissions are captured and stored; but again you need more fertilizer and farming infrastructure.
All in all, we are not lacking in ingenuity. The technologies exist, including some that are not as controversial as the above. When applied correctly, they can keep the world warming below 2 degrees. What is missing? Mainly funding, and the political will to get countries to keep their promises. The climate bill passed in the US Senate on Sunday is a promising start.
