I’m bullish on geoengineering being a solution for climate change if it actually gets to the point where the effects are severe and onerous enough to overcome the squabbling and risk-aversion of most countries.
Volcanoes demonstrate that stratospheric sulphur injection works, the laws of thermodynamics themselves ensure that there’s no real way that solar shades can’t work, and those are interventions that are quite easy to scale up or down quickly if shown to have undesirable effects.
Sails up at Lagrange points would cost ~$100 billion USD per NASA estimates, but those are old and probably don’t account for the enormous cost-savings on offer thanks to SpaceX, and that really isn’t all that much money in terms of a serious space program.
Cheaper energy would allow us to directly remove CO2 from the atmosphere and lock it away, or we could mine and distribute fine layers of olivine rocks to weather and capture CO2 in the process. The time to have gone all out on nuclear, averting the current travesty, would have been 30 years ago, but with solar and wind being cost-competitive with fossil fuels, nuclear still has a role in baseload power generation. That’s without cracking fusion of course, if that happened we’d hardly need to worry about energy every again.
Since there are multiple independent and complementary ways of assuaging Climate Change, with some being cheap enough to be affordable for even Third World countries, I really lose no sleep over it. When it becomes a glaring problem, not a mere nuisance like it is today, then it will in all likelihood be solved, even if it occurs outside the framework of multilateral unanimous consensus so craved by activists today.
It estimates between $5-10 billion a year to counteract expected temperature rise, which is an absolute pittance. There are municipal governments in the US that have conducted more expensive infrastructure projects.
On olivine weathering:
“Potential and costs of carbon dioxide removal by enhanced weathering of rocks”
I am worried that given Covid-19, even in the event of a climate disaster, governments are so ineffective that we will not be able to do geoengineering. But it seems like a very effective solution, and she will appreciate being able to learn about and maybe spread awareness of it in her circles. And it certainly seems much more tractable than multilateral unanimous consensus! Thanks!
Part of the COVID response is China being willing to put serious effort into COVID zero. If in 20-30 years the Chinese government believes that warming is a serious issue and China benefits from cooling the world down, they are likely going to take action.
With geoengineering there’s a dynamic where a country that unilaterally decides to do geoengineering has the potential to get a lot of power if the international community acknowledges that they manage the ideal temperature. That dynamic pressures other countries in taking action as well.
Adjusted for inflation the US spent $257 billion on the apollo project which was basically a prestige project. Starship class rockets and other innovations likely reduce the $750 billion by an order of magnitude so that the geoengineering project would be cheaper for the Chinese than the apollo program was for the US.
From the Chinese perspective, it would be a great prestige project that builds up space capabilities and adds a lot of geopolitical power.
I’m bullish on geoengineering being a solution for climate change if it actually gets to the point where the effects are severe and onerous enough to overcome the squabbling and risk-aversion of most countries.
Volcanoes demonstrate that stratospheric sulphur injection works, the laws of thermodynamics themselves ensure that there’s no real way that solar shades can’t work, and those are interventions that are quite easy to scale up or down quickly if shown to have undesirable effects.
Sails up at Lagrange points would cost ~$100 billion USD per NASA estimates, but those are old and probably don’t account for the enormous cost-savings on offer thanks to SpaceX, and that really isn’t all that much money in terms of a serious space program.
Cheaper energy would allow us to directly remove CO2 from the atmosphere and lock it away, or we could mine and distribute fine layers of olivine rocks to weather and capture CO2 in the process. The time to have gone all out on nuclear, averting the current travesty, would have been 30 years ago, but with solar and wind being cost-competitive with fossil fuels, nuclear still has a role in baseload power generation. That’s without cracking fusion of course, if that happened we’d hardly need to worry about energy every again.
Since there are multiple independent and complementary ways of assuaging Climate Change, with some being cheap enough to be affordable for even Third World countries, I really lose no sleep over it. When it becomes a glaring problem, not a mere nuisance like it is today, then it will in all likelihood be solved, even if it occurs outside the framework of multilateral unanimous consensus so craved by activists today.
Any links?
A 2006 study quotes $750 billion for the shades:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1859907/#__ffn_sectitle
This was well before drops in launch costs, and once the Starship is up and running, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cost fell close to an OOM.
There was another, more informal proposal that estimated $20 billion, but from what I’ve heard it had overly optimistic projections for the time.
On the topic of sulfur injections:
“The cost of stratospheric aerosol injection through 2100”
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aba7e7
It estimates between $5-10 billion a year to counteract expected temperature rise, which is an absolute pittance. There are municipal governments in the US that have conducted more expensive infrastructure projects.
On olivine weathering:
“Potential and costs of carbon dioxide removal by enhanced weathering of rocks”
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa9c4
I am worried that given Covid-19, even in the event of a climate disaster, governments are so ineffective that we will not be able to do geoengineering. But it seems like a very effective solution, and she will appreciate being able to learn about and maybe spread awareness of it in her circles. And it certainly seems much more tractable than multilateral unanimous consensus! Thanks!
Part of the COVID response is China being willing to put serious effort into COVID zero. If in 20-30 years the Chinese government believes that warming is a serious issue and China benefits from cooling the world down, they are likely going to take action.
With geoengineering there’s a dynamic where a country that unilaterally decides to do geoengineering has the potential to get a lot of power if the international community acknowledges that they manage the ideal temperature. That dynamic pressures other countries in taking action as well.
Adjusted for inflation the US spent $257 billion on the apollo project which was basically a prestige project. Starship class rockets and other innovations likely reduce the $750 billion by an order of magnitude so that the geoengineering project would be cheaper for the Chinese than the apollo program was for the US.
From the Chinese perspective, it would be a great prestige project that builds up space capabilities and adds a lot of geopolitical power.
https://www.livescience.com/16070-geoengineering-climate-cooling-balloon.html
Not sure why this wasn’t looked any further.