Can We Engineer Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis?
Can We Engineer Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis?
Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:
On a windswept Icelandic plateau, an international team of engineers and executives is powering up an innovative machine designed to alter the very composition of Earth’s atmosphere.
If all goes as planned, the enormous vacuum will soon be sucking up vast quantities of air, stripping out carbon dioxide and then locking away those greenhouse gases deep underground in ancient stone — greenhouse gases that would otherwise continue heating up the globe.
Just a few years ago, technologies like these, that attempt to re-engineer the natural environment, were on the scientific fringe. They were too expensive, too impractical, too sci-fi. But with the dangers from climate change worsening, and the world failing to meet its goals of slashing greenhouse gas emissions, they are quickly moving to the mainstream among both scientists and investors, despite questions about their effectiveness and safety.
Researchers are studying ways to block some of the sun’s radiation. They are testing whether adding iron to the ocean could carry carbon dioxide to the sea floor. They are hatching plans to build giant parasols in space. And with massive facilities like the one in Iceland, they are seeking to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air.
As the scale and urgency of the climate crisis has crystallized, “people have woken up and are looking to see if there’s any miraculous, deus ex machina that can help,” said Al Gore, the former vice president.
As the risks became clearer, political and corporate leaders pledged to keep global average temperatures to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than before the Industrial Revolution. But for several months last year, the world briefly passed that symbolic threshold, sooner than many scientists expected.
Global temperatures are now expected to rise as much as 4 degrees Celsius, or more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century. That has given new weight to what some people call geoengineering, though that term has become so contentious its proponents now prefer the term “climate interventions.” The hope is that taking steps like these might buy some time at a moment when energy consumption is on the rise, and the world isn’t quitting fossil fuels fast enough.
Many of the projects are controversial. A plant similar to the one in Iceland, but far larger, is being built in Texas by Occidental Petroleum, the giant oil company. Occidental intends to use some of the carbon dioxide it captures to extract even more oil, the burning of which is one of the main causes of the climate crisis in the first place.