Here Come the Geoengineering Hucksters

Why do business people always fall for hucksters? Think of all the wealthy investors who were suckered by guys like Bernie Madoff. Were the suckers he took for a very expensive ride greedy, or were they just wishful thinkers?

Now Joe Nocera has fallen for the "geoengineering" scam that the fossil fuel industry is pushing to avoid having to do something real about climate change (or climate disruption, as some now want to call it).

Geoengineering is a gimmick that treats the symptoms of climate change (increased temperatures) instead of addressing the cause (too much CO2).

Nocera likes to call geoengineering "chemo for the planet." He thinks that because we're so greedy and short-sighted, trying to reduce the amount of fossil fuels we use by switching to clean sources will never work. So instead of solving the real problem, we should just take a pill and put a Star Wars band aid on it.

This is like morbidly obese people refusing to cut back on the amount of food they eat, and instead they take some magical supplement that the hucksters say will "burn the fat right off."

Just like the morbidly obese, Nocera has fallen for the magical supplement:

A second [method] is called solar radiation management, which uses techniques like shooting sulfate particles into the stratosphere in order to reflect or divert solar radiation back into space. This very effect was illustrated after the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991. Spewing 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide in the air, the volcano caused global temperatures to fall, temporarily, by about 0.5 degrees Celsius, according to Wagner and Weitzman.

Yes, according to this brilliant business journalist, the answer to carbon dioxide pollution is sulfate pollution!

But it's worse than that. Has Nocera been sleeping blissfully ignorant for the last 50 years? You see, Joe, for decades we had this problem called acid rain. The sulfur in the smoke from coal-fired power plants came back down to earth in the form of sulfuric acid. As you might recall had you taken chemistry, sulfuric acid is bad.

Acid rain kills fish. It prevents fish eggs from hatching. It kills shellfish and coral in the ocean. It kills trees and plants. It toxifies soil, making it unsuitable for farming. Acid rain eats away metal bridges, stone buildings, gravestones, concrete highways, and so on. Sulfur particles in the air cause health problems in humans, including bronchitis and asthma.

In short, acid rain causes lots of death and destruction and costs lots of money.

Because if we shoot sulfur particles into the stratosphere they will come raining back down. To make matters worse, we have to constantly shoot sulfur particles into the air, for as long as the concentration of CO2 is elevated. Which will be centuries, especially if we drill and burn oil until it's all gone. If we stop injecting crap into the atmosphere, the planet will start heating up drastically.

This makes Nocera's solution no solution at all, because it depends on us actively spending money to prevent something bad happening. Which is the basis of Nocera's entire argument for why we can't make ourselves stop burning fossil fuels in the first place.

Now, acid rain is one of the big success stories on the environment over the last 50 years. We have mostly eliminated the problem by making coal-fired power plants clean up their act. Now Nocera wants to intentionally put this crap in the air?

And the problem isn't just sulfuric acid falling from the skies. As we pump more CO2 into the atmosphere, some of it enters the ocean and forms carbonic acid. This makes the ocean more acidic, as described on an excellent episode of NOVA (sponsored in part by the Koch brothers!). Ocean acidification prevents sea creatures from incorporating carbonate into their shells. This is already killing coral and oysters. Worse, it's killing the tiny shelled pteropods and krill that form the basis of the ocean's entire ecosystem. All higher forms of oceanic life ultimately depend on those creatures for food.

And then there's the sheer hypocrisy of the entire climate denial camp. A big part of their argument is that human beings are simply too small to have any effect on global climate. But, they argue, if climate change were happening, all we'd have to do is inject sulfate into the atmosphere to change climate globally! Huh?!

Then there's international politics. What if Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Japan don't think that causing acid rain worldwide and killing off the oceans is such a good idea? Do the countries fouling the air with CO2 have the right to trash the environment of other countries with even more pollution? Would those countries be within their rights to bomb atmospheric sulfate injectors in countries like the United States, Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia? Are we willing to go to war with all of Western Civilization in order to keep profits rolling in for the most despotic regimes on the planet?

Nocera also hypes another "solution:" carbon capture. This, he says, "sucks up carbon from the air." The only problem is what to do with it once you've sucked it. The brilliant plan? Pump it into the ground! The oil and gas industry are already causing earthquakes across the country by pumping fracking waste into the ground. Now Nocera wants to compound the problem by pumping the crap we just burned back into the ground, but somewhere else.

Joe, you may not know it, but there already exists a technology that sucks up carbon from the air. They're called "trees." But humans have been steadily cutting down and burning trees for centuries to make way for cities and farms and oil fields, and often just for heat. Deforestation is a sizable part of the CO2 problem.

Fact is, fossil fuels are constantly declining in efficiency. We have to expend a lot more energy to extract fossil fuels from the ground as we resort to more esoteric techniques like hydraulic fracturing. Gone are the days where you just drilled a hole and oil came squirting out in a gusher. We have to expend energy to ship the crude around the world. We have to expend energy to refine the crude. We have to expend energy to ship the refined fuel to the destination. We have to expend energy to clean up the emissions. And now Nocera wants us to expend energy to sequester the pollution in the ground, blithely assuming that nothing bad will ever happen if we pump billions of tons of crap into the ground where it will potentially pollute aquifers (creating carbonic acid) and cause earthquakes.

Solar and wind power are already cheaper than fossil fuels in some parts of the world. The downside is that they're not as convenient. If we maximize use of renewables where it makes economic sense, wider adoption will drive down the price even further. That will spur future technological developments, eventually allowing us to power transportation with renewables.

We don't need to stop all fossil fuel use immediately. We just need to reduce our emissions so that we don't exceed the earth's capacity to absorb it.

The IMF estimates that the world spends $5 trillion to subsidize fossil fuel use. Shouldn't the businesses that are costing us all that money bear the financial responsibility for it?

Even worse, why can't a business journalist understand that?