Our climate is constantly changing. And right now, we’re what’s changing it. What if we could find a way to stabilize it to ensure our survival long-term? What if we could create a thermostat for planet Earth? Here’s what that might look like.
TRANSCRIPT:
Throughout the history of this planet there have been countless natural disasters that have changed the climate. Supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts, disrupted ocean cycles, and now… humans.
Ooh, edgelord, saying humans are a natural disaster. Well… yeah. From the 4.5 billion year perspective of Earth, we are just another… thing that happened.
We are just the latest in a long string of events that upset the balance in the atmosphere and caused it to change. We didn’t mean to do it any more than a volcano meant to do it.
And if it wasn’t us, it would probably be something else. Eventually.
So if we really want to survive long term – and I’m talking LONG-term – here on planet Earth, it seems like it would behoove us to find a way to, you know, stabilize things.
What if we could regulate the climate – just like the thermostat on your wall – imagine a big dial that you could turn to raise and lower the CO2 level in the atmosphere and always keep it at just the right temperature.
What would that look like? How would that work? Exactly what would it take to create a true global thermostat?
PART 1: What’s the PPM, Kenneth?
If we’re going to create this whole system to keep the CO2 levels of the atmosphere in an optimal range, we need to first decide on that optimal range.
So whenever they talk about CO2 levels, they always compare it to “pre-industrial” levels because that was before we started digging stuff out of the ground and burning it to run everything.
We had been burning stuff to heat our homes for millennia, but the industrial age kicked it into overdrive.
They consider the Industrial age to be between 1760 to 1840. So, before the mid-1700s.
And that level is 280 parts per million.
Although, the argument could be made that there’s a better number, I mean just because that’s where it was doesn’t mean it’s the best in terms of giving us better crop yields and higher efficiencies and whatnot.
I mean one could argue that if we could take it way lower, the poles might freeze more water ice, causing the ocean levels to go down and create all kinds of new real estate property… in a few hundred thousand years at least.
Of course, that would mean that ice sheets would cover half of North America and Europe so it would probably take away as much land as it creates.
So, for the purposes of this thought experiment, that’s our thermostat setting, that’s what we’re going for, which means we’ve got to pull a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere. How we going to do that?
PART 2: Mining The Sky
So I’ve covered carbon sequestration methods before, I’ll link to the video here, there’s a lot of different ways of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, everything from planting forests to regenerative agriculture to construction materials that absorb CO2 to seeding the ocean with minerals to algae and seaweed…
All of which are things we should be doing… Well most of it anyway but for the purposes of this video, I’m talking about carbon capture.
So here’s the deal, a lot of people don’t like the idea of carbon capture, and for some very valid reasons, so let’s just talk about that and get it out of the way right off the bat.
First of all, there are two different things that get conflated a lot, there’s direct air capture and carbon capture and storage, or CCS.
CCS collects carbon dioxide at the source, so like a coal plant instead of just pumping smoke out the smokestack, they feed it through basically a carbon dioxide filter, and then that CO2 is sequestered in some way, maybe pumped underground or liquified into tanks and whatnot.
So CCS doesn’t reduce the carbon that’s already in the air, it’s an emissions mitigation strategy. And the fossil fuel companies LOVE THIS because it means they can keep on burning fossil fuels.
They’ve been lobbying for it and it’s a nice little loophole they can use to keep making money for as long as possible.
But for something they love so much, they sure do a crappy job of it.
Climate Town just did a video recently about this, it’s worth a watch, they point out how a ton of tax dollars were given to coal companies and only one out of 8 projects worked at all. And even that just barely.
Turns out, and nobody could have predicted this but you can’t rely on the fossil fuel companies to do the right thing. They’re just not going to.
So, rightfully, climate activists hate this idea because the fossil fuel companies use it like a get out of jail free card. I myself think it’s the right idea, obviously better to capture it than releasing it.
Like, how we’re still just pumping this stuff into the atmosphere is beyond me. But, I get the argument.
Either way, all that does is prevent more carbon dioxide from getting in the air. If we want to actually pull out the carbon that’s already up there, we need to talk about the other option – direct air capture.
This is where they collect air in these giant fans and actually remove CO2 from the air. And this isn’t exactly universally beloved either.
Some use the same argument as the one against CCS, that it gives fossil fuel companies permission to keep pumping more into the air, plus a lot of companies pay carbon credits to direct air capture companies as a bit of smokescreen for their own refusal to transition to cleaner technologies.
Plus these capture methods are very, very energy intensive. Which itself could have a large carbon footprint.
All valid criticisms, which I totally get, but there is one really good counterargument, which is… We done fucked up.
Earlier I mentioned that 280 to maybe 300 parts per million goal, well in case you’re wondering what it is now, it averaged at about 417.2 this year – peaked at 421.
That is 50% higher than pre-industrial levels. Even scarier, though, is that’s it’s higher than last year’s. Which was higher than the year before that. Which was higher than the year before that.
And not just higher, but higher in increasingly larger amounts. When they started tracking CO2 levels in 1958, it was climbing about one part per million per year. Today it’s closer to 2 per year.
- 2022 – 417.20
- 2021 – 416.45
- 2020 – 414.24
- 2019 – 411.66
- 2018 – 408.72
In other words, our CO2 emissions not only haven’t gone down, or even flattened out… they are still going up. And going up in accelerating levels. We are nowhere near handling this.
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve made a lot of progress in cleaning up our energy infrastructure, and that’s great. But in the words of Winston Wolf…
We’ve got a long way to go. In fact, we are currently going in the wrong direction, and we keep pressing the gas harder.
This idea that I’m proposing, this global thermostat thing, is absurd; I’ll be the first to say it. But what we’re doing right now is every bit as absurd.
I’ll tell you what’s absurd.
Building giant machines to capture carbon out of the air when you could just use trees.
It’s like that time when NASA spent millions of dollars on a zero-g pen and the Russians just used a pencil.
Ah, actually the pencil thing is a total fabrication, that never happened. But the tree thing, I’m actually glad you said something.
You know what’s made out of trees? Pencils.
Here’s the deal with trees.
Trees are great, we should be planting trees, and yes, they take in CO2 but they also need water. And some places are a little low on water these days.
Forests take up land and resources away from agriculture, which we’re going to need to feed 8 billion people in the coming years.
Forests need to be managed to prevent forest fires, and when trees die, which they will eventually die, the wood releases CO2 when it rots. Or catches fire and burns down your hometown.
Not to mention when we plant trees, we tend to plant rows upon rows of single varieties of trees, which creates a monoculture that’s extremely vulnerable to fungal infections and disease and blight.
All of which is to say, yes we need to be planting trees but they aren’t a panacea, and besides they’re one-way streets, it’s not a dial you can turn to adjust the climate when things go sideways, which is the whole point of this thought experiment.
Is there any other place you can be buddy?
Fine. I’ll go draw or something.
You do that.
With my Russian space pen.
They didn’t use a pencil, it’s shavings floated around and shorted out the electrical– Whatever he’s gone, anyway, there are three major players in the direct air capture space.
All of these companies use a similar process to capture carbon out of the air.
First, air is pulled in by giant fans. That air then flows through a carbon dioxide adsorbent material, that material is then processed, the CO2 is removed, and either stored away or used in various products or industries.
By the way, if you don’t know the difference between absorption and adsorption, absorption is when particles from one phase of matter enter into another phase of matter, so like if a gas dissolves into a liquid, that’s absorption.
Adsorption is when it sticks to the surface of the other phase of matter, but doesn’t go into it. Say, gas molecules sticking to the surface of a solid, like rock.
So some of these companies use absorbents that require a lot of heat and energy to get the CO2 out of the mixture, which is a downside, but the upside might be that they’re more efficient; they pull more CO2 out.
And others use adsorbents that more easily release the CO2 during processing.
So I don’t want to get too in the weeds on how all these companies do what they do, they’re all variations on this theme, what really matters is the price per ton of CO2 that they remove and what they do with it.
Let’s start with Climeworks. So Climeworks is headquartered out of Switzerland but they’ve been building plants in Iceland to take advantage of the geothermal energy there.
Which is something that does need to be talked about a little bit, these plants are going to need to be powered by renewable energy, otherwise we’re basically going to be burning so much fuel to power this that it’s going to defeat the purpose… But we’ll get back to that a little later.
Climeworks pumps the CO2 they capture underground where it mineralizes with basalt rock.
They do this through a partnership with a company called Carbfix and this is paid for by companies, governments, and individuals purchasing carbon credits.
So if say you had an international flight and you wanted to offset the emissions from the flight, you could pay Climeworks and would pull it out of the air and pump it underground. Just saying.
They opened their first commercial DAC plant in Iceland in September of 2021, it’s able to remove 4,000 tons of CO2 per year, they’re currently building a new plant that will remove 36,000 tons per year.
They plan to get that number up into the millions by 2030, and get up to a billion per year by 2050. Which would be awesome… if there were 36 companies doing that. Because we are currently emitting about 36 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.
Just in case you were wondering what the scale of this project I’m proposing would be.
Price-wise, Climeworks is in the $600 per ton range – they’re projecting it to go down to $200 per ton by the mid 2030s as they scale up.
Carbon Engineering is based out of Squamish, British Columbia Canada, they first started capturing in 2015, they have 2 pilot plants in BC currently capturing around 2000 tons a year.
They sell carbon offsets like Climeworks and store that underground but they also sell their CO2 on the market to places like soda companies as well as make synthetic fuel.
Those of course wind up back in the atmosphere eventually, making them more carbon neutral than carbon negative.
They have a giant plant in the works in the Permian Basin here in Texas that is expected to pull 1 million tons of CO2 out of the air every year, which sounds great, but one of the main uses of that CO2… is enhanced oil recovery.
This is where they pump CO2 into oil reservoirs, and use it to force more oil out of the ground, which will be burned and put right back into the atmosphere.
They also use natural gas as an energy source which isn’t great.
Right now they also are operating at around $600/ton, but they’ve been on record saying that they think they could get it down to $100/ton.
Global Thermostat has built a few pilot plants for direct air capture in California and Chile, they’ve got 2 commercial plants under construction in Oklahoma right now but all of these are in the early stages.
They’ve hit some business and legal snags along the way, I don’t know the details but they’ve had a little bit of a rough start.
These two Oklahoma plants are also going to be powered on natural gas and are expected to pull 2000 tons per year each, so 4,000 total. And it looks like they plan on selling their CO2 to create CO2 based fuel and for agricultural purposes. Greenhouses and such.
Of these three, I think the Climeworks model is the only one that will really serve the purposes of this thought experiment slash megaproject because it is 100% powered by renewable energy, it sequesters away 100% of the carbon it captures, and doesn’t put it back in the atmosphere or use it to dig more oil out of the ground.
But with new climate policies and pressure on companies to offset their carbon emissions, a ton of money is flowing into this space, which has of course has bred a lot of startup companies with their own takes on direct air capture.
Including:
- Heirloom Carbon (Heirloom, 2020),
- Mission Zero (Mission Zero Technologies, 2022),
- Sustaera (Sustaera, n.d.),
- Noya (Noya, n.d.)
- And Carbon Infinity (Modular direct air capture technology for net-zero, 2022).
These companies all have different ways of absorbing or adsorbing the CO2, for example there’s a company just creatively named Carbon Capture (About, 2022) that’s trying to lower costs by using molecular sieves.
Others are focusing on manufacturing small, modular, easily deployable DAC units which could bring down the cost for the end users.
One company called Carbon Collect is building what they call mechanical trees that passively pull carbon from the air with no need for pumps or fans.
It was developed at Arizona State University and they just stack hundreds of thin plates with adsorbent material on it and just let air flow over it for several hours, then pull the plates back in and pull the CO2 off of it… somehow.
They call this Passive Direct Air Capture, or PDAC, and it should greatly reduce the amount of energy needed. And they say a cluster of 12 trees could remove 1 ton of CO2 per day.
But the one I’ve been excited about for a while is a company called Verdox, which was spun off from an MIT lab that developed this technology that they call Electro-swing.
They basically run air over plates coated with nanotubes that when you run a specific current through it, attracts CO2 molecules.
Once you’ve captured all you can capture, all you have to do to release the CO2, is turn off the current. Then you pump that CO2 out and start the process all over again.
This works at ambient temperature, no need to heat it to several hundred degrees, there’s no moving parts outside the air pump.
In April of last year, they were one of 15 participants in the Carbon Capture X Prize to win the $1 million Milestone Award, I think that was out of 1300 entries, something like that. The winner will be picked this year and win an $80 million grand prize.
Really the only caveat with this technology is that nanotubes are expensive to produce, but they believe that at scale we’d be looking at about $50 per ton.
And I’m more likely to believe these guys on that price point, I think this technology could do that, especially once things scale up. And especially especially as carbon markets mature.
PART 3: This Little Carbon Went To Market
So when I say “carbon markets” there’s a couple of things I’m talking about here. One is the carbon credits and carbon offsets like Climeworks deals with as I was talking about before, the other is actually selling carbon dioxide to industries for use in products.
As governments around the world are trying to stick to the various climate agreements like the Paris Accords, they have begun incentivizing industries to reduce their carbon emissions.
This can be through carrots or sticks, depending on the country.
So the businesses have a choice, they can either reduce the amount of emissions they release, which requires a lot of retooling and adaptation and, you know, effort. Or, they can just pay a carbon offset to climate friendly companies.
And yes, this is something that Tesla benefited from for quite some time.
It’s kind-of like how for many years car companies got around fuel efficiency standards by creating one half-assed electric compliance model instead of, you know, actually making their cars more efficient.
The interesting thing about that analogy is that eventually electric cars became popular and hit a tipping point and are now kinda taking over the industry.
Maybe we’ll see a similar thing with carbon capture? Who knows. What we’re seeing in carbon capture right now is definitely analogous to the lame, half-assed electric cars from the past, that’s for sure.
But anyway, the trend toward offsetting emissions through carbon capture is only accelerating, which is why you’re seeing so many startups getting into that space.
Now the other side of the carbon markets, the actual bottling of CO2 and selling it to industries, this is all over the map.
In terms of locking down the CO2 and taking it out of the atmosphere, the worst of these options are is the enhanced oil recovery I talked about a second ago, because it’s actually enabling more CO2 to go into the atmosphere.
Not quite as bad are things like synfuels and carbonation for sodas, again these will put it right back into the atmosphere so it’s more mitigation than sequestration.
Then you’ve got CO2 for agricultural use in greenhouses to grow food and trees, this relies on a lot of factors including what happens to the plants that are grown with it, how the waste from the people and animals who consume it is handled…
How tightly the CO2 is managed, is there a lot of it escaping into the air again, that kind of thing.
There’s also CO2 for algae growth and production, which could be used for fuels or for plastics and all the stuff we normally use oil for.
Maybe the best use in my mind is using CO2 to cure certain types of concrete, essentially locking the CO2 down in our homes and buildings.
The problem with all these solutions is that it’s just not economically feasible when using CO2 from fossil fuel extraction is orders of magnitude less expensive.
So until we find some kind of killer application of CO2, some new technology that makes it actually cheaper to use the stuff captured from the air, this will remain relatively niche.
Now having said that, there are a lot of research facilities and startups working on new applications of CO2, in fact there’s a whole XPrize around it so maybe in the next decade or two there’s hope that this could become a major way to offset the cost of direct air capture.
But in the meantime, I think we have to rely mostly on the capture of CO2 as a publicly funded, government incentivized program. I don’t like it either.
Regardless, tons of money is flowing into the carbon capture space.
In April of last year, payment processor Stripe, Google parent Alphabet, Meta, Shopify and McKinsey announced they were teaming up to commit to purchase almost $1 billion worth
of carbon dioxide removal from companies that are developing the technology. A couple days later, Chris Sacca’s climate investment company, Lowercarbon Capital, announced a $350 million fund to invest in carbon removal startups.
So, with all of that in mind, for the purposes of this video I’m going to be somewhat optimistic and use a long-term cost per ton of CO2 capture at $50.
Just to get ahead of the naysayers here, what we’re talking about is a long-term, multigenerational megaproject. Yes, it will take some time, maybe decades to get down to $50, but at this scale I think you could see it even go below that in the long run. So for our purposes here, I’m going with it.
So now let’s run the numbers.
Part 4: Fire Up The Calculators
First let’s figure out how much carbon we need to take out of the atmosphere.
According to a couple of references I found – links down below of course – every part per million of Earth’s atmosphere is 7.81 Gigatons. Or 7.81 billion tons.
So, if we’re currently averaging around 417 parts per million of CO2 and we want to get down to, let’s just say an even 300, that’s 117 parts per million times 7.81, which gives us 913.77 Gigatons, or 913.77 billion tons we need to remove.
417-300 = 117 x 7.81 = 913.77Gt need to be removed.
913.77 billion tons of CO2 to get to 300ppm and pre-industrial levels.
At our $50/ton price point, that’s $45.68 trillion.
For the record at our current rate of $600/ton, that’s $548,262,000,000,000 ($548.26 trillion). Here’s hoping those investments bring down the cost quickly.
But we don’t have to spend all that all at once, like I said, this is a long-term megaproject, this will be spread out over time.
- Total: $45.68 trillion
- Over 10 years: $4.56 trillion/year
- Over 20 years: $2.28 trillion/year
- Over 50 years: $913 billion/year
- Over 100 years: $456 billion/year
For perspective, the total world GDP in 2021 was $96.51 trillion. So this would equal about 1% of global GDP every year for the next 50 years (.946%). Or about half a percent for the next 100. (.473%)
This seems… surprisingly feasible.
Like in my head I’m comparing this to the solar shades video I did where I talked about launching a bunch of shades to the L1 Lagrange point to cool the planet and that came out to quadrillions of dollars. I was expecting this to be something like that.
Also that one relied on technologies that don’t exist yet but for this one all the technologies do exist. They’re in their infancy and need to be massively scaled, but they are doable.
Now I am leaving something out here, this is all to get rid of the excess CO2 we’ve already put into the atmosphere, but as I said before we are still putting an excess 1-2 parts per million into the atmosphere every year. So we need to account for that.
If we averaged that to 1.5 parts per million, that would equate to about 11.7 billion tons per year, which at $50 per ton would equal about $585 billion – just to break even.
So to fill out the rest of that chart…
- $45.68 trillion total for removal
- $585 billion yearly for break even
- Over 10 years: $585B + $4.56T = $5.14T/year = 5.3% GDP
- Over 20 years: $585B + $2.28T = $2.86T/year = 2.96% GDP
- Over 50 years: $585B + $913B = $1.49T/year = 1.54% GDP
- Over 100 years: $585B + $456B = $1.04T/year = 1.07% GDP
A couple of pedantic caveats here, that GDP number will change over time, go up most likely so the percentage of GDP would actually go down – OR you could just peg it to a certain percentage of GDP to account for inflation over time.
So, somewhat feasible, possibly but this is still like a trillion dollars a year. Who’s going to pay for this?
I know some of you may be saying that we should make the fossil fuel companies pay for it because, you know, all the reasons, but the fact of the matter is… well, they totally could.
But, I mean, we’ve seen how they’ve handled CCS. Like I said earlier, they’re not going to do the right thing. Ever.
As much as we may want to punish them, if it’s going to work, the only feasible path forward is for the governments of the world to pay for it.
But you might say, “nobody’s going to get behind that.” One or two percent of the entire global GDP, that’s a massive amount of money. No government is going to be okay giving away that much money to some industry, right?
Well, turns out there is precedent for this.
Yes, there’s a good example, a modern day example of an industry that gets subsidized to the tune of trillions of dollars every year. Can you guess what it is?
It’s the oil industry.
Yes, according to the International Monetary Fund, global fossil fuel subsidies added up to $5.9 trillion in 2020, amounting to 6.8% of GDP, and expected to climb to 7.4% in 2025.
Yes, this industry that has profited $1-2 trillion per year for 50 years is currently just being given $6 trillion a year by the governments of the world. Just for being such swell guys.
So yeah. The money’s there if we really have the will to do this.
And I have to make the same point I make whenever I talk about spending on space, this money isn’t just thrown down a hole that disappears forever, that money goes to companies, who use it to pay their employees, who use that money to provide for their families and put it into the economy, and so on. It’s just as likely to create an economic boost than the opposite.
There’s also the argument that not doing something like this could cost a lot more in the long run when sea level rise starts really ravaging coastal cities.
So… how do we actually do this?
PART 5: This Is How We Do It
The cool thing about these Direct Air Capture plants is you can kind-of put them anywhere. But some places are better than others.
Because it doesn’t really matter where you pull the CO2 from, but what does matter is where you get the energy to pull the CO2, and what you do with the CO2 once you’ve captured it.
Like there’s a reason Climeworks picked Iceland as the place to set up shop with their plants, because there’s a ton of geothermal energy there and volcanic activity has left plenty of underground structures to pump the CO2 and mineralize it.
Around the world there are dozens of geothermal hotspots like Indonesia, The Philippines, Turkey, New Zealand, Mexico, Italy, the aforementioned Iceland and believe it or not, the top producer of geothermal in the world, the United States.
Geothermal is especially good for powering direct air capture plants because it’s carbon free – what’s the point in capturing carbon if you have to make more of it to do it? And you can directly use that heat in the processing of the CO2.
And I don’t think this gets talked about nearly enough, drilling geothermal wells could provide jobs for dispossessed oil workers.
So as our energy infrastructure changes, there will be less, “They took er jerbs.” and more, “They gave me a new jerb.”
Of course you can get clean power for these plants from hydroelectric sources and there’s always wind and solar.
The problem with wind and solar of course is it’s intermittent but also it’s going to take some pretty big wind and solar farms to power these plants. That takes up a lot of land and adds to the cost.
Might be worth it though at locations with good storage potential.
And we are going to need to store a LOT of carbon, and not every geothermal source is going to have the right combination of underground spaces made up of the right kind of rock for mineralization of that carbon.
So we’re going to need to find as many of the right places as possible and build plants nearby. We certainly don’t want to have to transport this CO2 all over the place in gas-burning trucks and ships. Again, defeating the purpose.
There is one gigantic place where we can easily store all the CO2, and this is not exactly without controversy but it absolutely could work – it’s the bottom of the ocean.
I talked a little while back about limnic eruptions, and how if a lake is deep enough, carbon dioxide can get trapped and pressurized under the weight of all the water above it, essentially carbonating the water.
In the case of lakes like Nyos and Monoun, this pressure can “overturn” and all the carbon dioxide can escape in an explosion, but the oceans are so big that there’s very little chance of that happening.
Still, it’s not great for the sea creatures and ecosystems that live down there. They need oxygen just like we do and putting that much CO2 into it might create massive dead zones.
This in turn could disrupt the ecosystems around it and affect some of the sea life that we rely on. But… If we’re okay with sacrificing some of that, there’s an intriguing idea.
You could create a floating plant powered by solar panels and maybe even wave power that passively or lightly fans air through an electroswing adsorber. The clean air gets pumped out, the CO2 gets pumped waaay down to the bottom of the ocean where the pressure locks it away and it eventually mineralizes on the ocean floor. These can made modular and, eventually, autonomous so they can be made as big as we need them to be and kept away from shipping lanes.
Could work?
Part 6: Hold Your Nose ‘Cause Here Goes The Cold Water
There are, of course, some caveats.
Like my little modular ocean capture idea there, the ocean is notoriously brutal on things like that, the constant wear and tear from the waves, the storms it would have to contend with, not to mention ocean creatures degrading it, barnacles and what not, it would require constant maintenance and upkeep, pushing its cost way above that $50/ton figure.
And speaking of that $50 number, that probably doesn’t include the storage part of the equation, or the transport of that CO2 around to its storage locations, which also jacks up the price.
But, the increased cost can be counterbalanced by extending out the length of the project. And it could be extended out as long as we want, this is meant to be a very long-term solution.
This isn’t something that we’ll be seeing benefits from immediately. In fact, many of us might never see this fully come to fruition. It would probably be a couple decades at least before we’re even capturing as much as we’re releasing every year.
There are also other questions like the albedo, has so much ice melted that the Earth will just continue to absorb more heat no matter how much CO2 we capture? Or does that mean the amount we need to capture goes up even more?
Also there’s the dreaded unintended consequences. The climate is a chaotic system that might respond in ways we don’t like.
It’s kinda like plastic surgery. The more you do, the worse it gets.
In fact, could go too far with it, so… This is going to be the really controversial bit…
In order to maintain the balance long-term… We actually might need to keep burning fossil fuels.
Hear me out…
If what we’re going for is a balance so we don’t get hothouse earth or snowball earth, then we need to be able, when needed, to put more CO2 into the atmosphere. Remove when we need, add when we need.
Well we can always spin up or spin down the capture machines but if we need to add more CO2… And we have totally dismantled all fossil fuel use… That could be a problem.
Now, regardless fossil fuel use is going to go down over the long term because there’s only so much of it. We will eventually run out of it.
So maybe if we reach a point that we can get completely off fossil fuels – which would require some technology we don’t currently have because there’s no way a 787 is going to fly on battery power right now – we could scale back the project and let the Earth do its thing. Maybe just keeping a minimum amount on standby just in case.
But still… Doesn’t it feel like this is something we’ll need eventually? If we really want to survive into the far future?
Like I said in the beginning, it’s not just about fixing the problem we caused, this is a volatile planet we live on, there will always be fluctuations and spikes and perturbations messing with the composition of the atmosphere.
And we know the sun will get hotter and hotter in the millions and billions of years to come, this is a way to protect ourselves from that as long as possible.
And before people talk about moving off to Mars or somewhere further away from the sun in the far future, wherever we go we’re going to have to terraform that planet to make it habitable. Maybe we should figure out how to do that here first?
Because that’s what we’re doing here. We’re terraforming Earth.
So why not start now? Because as we all know, humans are really good at planning long term… WHICH IS HOW WE GOT INTO THIS SITUATION IN THE FIRST PLACE.
So, that’s the global thermostat project. A total pipe dream that will never happen because it would require the coordination of hundreds of countries who all hate each other and can’t plan past the next election.
Unlike the solar shades Hail Mary idea, this one is actually feasible. Technologically and economically. The only thing holding it back is us.
So what do you think? You think it’s worth it to really pursue this idea? Or should we just accept the fact that we as a species are a flash in the pan and accept our inevitable doom? I know none of you have any opinions on this, I anticipate a very quiet comment section.
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