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I saw this tweet by Palmer Luckey the other day:
"The real secret of of global warming is that the climate can be whatever humanity wants it to be. Two dozen nations could each single-handedly send us all into an ice age."
He's right. It wouldn't be that hard to prevent climate change via geoengineering. In fact we did some geoengineering by mistake last year. New regulations limited the amount of sulfur that oceangoing ships could emit. This caused an increase in the global temperature.
So, if climate change is such a threat, why don't we do something about it?
Because, let's be honest, our current climate change mitigation strategies are doomed to fail and will only make us poor.
Even if the United States and Europe cut 100% of carbon emissions tomorrow, the climate is going to get hotter. China already emits about 3 times as much carbon as the United States. In the developing world, new coal plants are being built every day. 2024 will set a record for coal production, and 2025 will be greater still. And there is hundreds of years of coal left to be consumed.
Getting people to downsize their SUV to a Prius isn't going to fix the problem. Renewables are not the answer either, being both unreliable and requiring constant upgrades. We are using huge amounts of resources to build solar and wind capacity, but the lifetime of these projects is just a couple of decades. So we need more metals and more concrete, which will result in more emissions, not to mention the associated ecological destruction from strip mines.
Did you know that 8% of global carbon emissions come from the production of concrete, the same amount produced by all private passenger automobiles? Fantasies about electric cars solving global warming are just that.
To fully fix global warming, we need to reduce global carbon emissions by at least 90%, more likely 99%. Carbon in the atmosphere has been increasing since before 1800 AD.
So why are we spending trillions trying to nibble at the edges when we could spend billions and achieve much better results. We can cool the climate to an acceptable level while we wait for the carbon removal technology that is the only way to fully solve the problem.
How good is the evidence for sulfur-based climate control? Pumping a bunch of one chemical into the atmosphere is a great way to do something, or perhaps a lot of things all at once. We know what a pre-fossil-fuel planet looks like. We can’t be as confident in geoengineering. Further research will surely mitigate this, except…
A hundred years of climate research hasn’t managed to convince everyone that the problem exists, let alone what to do about it. Science is hard, and it’s harder when there are points to be scored. There’s boundless political capital in opposing any specific solution. Get ready to be branded an ecoterrorist, an atmofascist, a sulfurry.
Given all this, who is going to take the actual steps? Not the one world government. Not a lone superpower, because nuclear weapons are the ultimate veto. If you think Russia is stressed about Ukraine, wait until they hear we’re messing with THE SUN.
There’s always the Elon Musks of the world. But there’s also Sam Bankman-Frieds, convinced their version of the utilitarian calculus says this is the best idea and literally can’t go tits up. How much do you trust them to get it right the first time?
The science is undeveloped. We need to start small and monitor the changes and then iterate. Doing anything else is like trying to build a 3nm processor without first having gone through all the earlier generations. In a word: impossible.
This is of course the biggest hurdle. But the first step is to get people talking about the possibility of solving this. I imagine that, in the end, actions would be performed via a treaty similar to the Paris accords. Russia would be the biggest holdout given that they stand to benefit the most from a warming climate.
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