A recent discussion on climate change in american scientist began with this dramatic question “Is it worse to be swallowed by the sea or tormented by hunger?”
Why this stark and seemingly unrelated choice?
The answer lies in the intimate relationship between energy consumption by human beings and their personal well-being. More technically in economic terms, GDP growth in nations since the start of the Industrial Revolution, now almost two centuries ago, and energy use are closely related, and many theorists argue persuasively that the relationship is causal: How much the more energy available to you, the more good you probably are.
The converse of this is also true: that a significant amount reduction in energy use, particularly in developing countries, is likely to condemn the citizens of those countries to continued poverty or, at the very least, a much, much slower path to prosperity.
And yet, if the threats posed by climate change are real: the destruction of polar ice caps, the inundation of vast coastal urban environments as the oceans rise many feet as water is added by melting ice polar, and a host of other catastrophic fallout to significant increases in average global temperature, then we may be faced with a stark choice between promoting cheap energy (derived from fossil fuels, which add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere), or moving toward a global emission reduction, perhaps as much as 85% by mid-century, with a concomitant deep reduction in world GDP.
The central problem of the dilemma thus posed arises from the enormous gap between wealth in Europe and America compared to the poverty experienced by citizens in most of Africa and Latin America. If the world opts for reducing emissions and reducing global GDP, developed nations will suffer disproportionately. Under some scenarios, attempting such a solution to the climate crisis may result not just in a global recession, but in total global economic collapse.
Unless, of course, we can find a way to have our cake and eat it too.
Can we find ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere cheaply, thus allowing us to continue burning fossil fuels without further polluting the atmosphere with higher levels of greenhouse gases?
This is precisely the limited question explored in a new Amazon Kindle Single, Marc Gunther’s Suck It Up: How capturing carbon from the air can help solve the climate crisis. In this eBook, Gunther begins by briefly recapping the history of our still-evolving understanding of the global climate crisis (a “crisis” that is by no means unanimously accepted by all scientists) and several promising new methodologies, some backed by sponsors. wealthy like Bill Gates, for the “direct recapture of carbon” from the atmosphere.
What is “direct carbon recapture”? The simplest example of this is what occurs naturally in plants. Green plants “inhale” carbon dioxide as their basic food source, convert gaseous carbon within chlorophyll cells, and produce food products in which carbon is bound together in large molecules to form solids, in sugars and plant starches, for example. . Plant activity, in fact, is the most important existing operating mechanism for the removal of carbon dioxide from our atmosphere, and has been for millions of years. And yet our burning of fossil fuels has been adding carbon dioxide to our air faster than rainforests can remove it.
The technologies now being examined by Bill Gates, Edgar Bronfman, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, and many others have evolved over the past twelve years or so, dating back to 1999, when a Columbia University physicist named Klaus Lackner wrote the first paper on carbon extraction. dioxide from the air using simple and cheap chemical processes. Lackner later created his own start-up, Kilimanjaro Energy, to take his ideas to market.
Most of the cutting-edge start-ups are working on proprietary methodologies that share a common goal: to absorb gaseous carbon from the air and combine it with hydrogen to create carbon solids and power this process without adding more carbon to the atmosphere. depending on solar, wind or nuclear power for their operating factories.
In a recent interview, Kilimanjaro’s Ned David described a method of capturing carbon dioxide using algae, single-celled plants with a voracious appetite for carbon, which they absorb directly from the water. The algae produce, among other things, oils that can be converted to diesel-like compounds for fuel. Companies like Boeing are closely watching Kilimanjaro Energy, along with the Pentagon, both organizations with a vested interest in developing new fuels for commercial and military jets, especially if they can be produced domestically, eliminating the geopolitical supply risk associated with many sources. of crude.
Even the optimists expect a long and difficult road ahead. In the near term, gaseous carbon dioxide already has an existing market, a valuable commodity in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) projects where it is injected underground to push oil molecules out of tight geological formations and into the earth. surface, where the collected crude can be sent to refineries. Prices reaching $100/tonne of CO2 for this purpose are not unheard of. And once underground, carbon dioxide tends to stay there, outside the atmosphere, for thousands of years.
Needless to say, many in the environmental movement view all of this with a great deal of skepticism. A member of the National Resources Defense Council recently expressed concern that venture capitalists and other backers may be more concerned with finding markets for CO2 than removing it from our air, with too much emphasis on charting a path to make it these new technologies are marketable. The fear is that these efforts will lose their focus on carbon reduction and drift away from their environmental mission towards purely commercial objectives.
Marc Gunther has written a readable eBook that is about the length of a very long Atlantic Monthly article from a generation or two ago. It is a brief but valuable introduction to a complex topic. Gunther is a contributing editor at FORTUNE magazine and a senior writer at GreenBiz. He frequently writes about business and sustainability.