Strategies

Dealing with Climate Change

Reducing, Removing Carbon, Cooling the Earth…

• A. Alternative energy ideas

• B. Reducing carbon from existing energy sources

• C. Removing carbon from the atmosphere

• D. GeoEngineering strategies to cool the Earth

• E. Population, Policy Strategies

A. Alternative Energy Ideas

Solar, Wind, Hydro, Geothermal

• Astrophysicist Frank Shu points out (Shu 2008) that the only energy sources which can compete in the sheer volume of energy which our society currently requires, are…

• --- solar photovoltaics

• --- nuclear power

According to Shu – Wind is too diffuse to be economical for

large scale power

• … except in the most favorable places, many of which are already being used

• (This conclusion is controversial, however). Local wind for a residence still makes sense, however

• Fossil fuel interests complain commercial wind turbines kill large numbers of birds.

• Evn granting for the moment that the climate denialists which make these claims actually care about birds, the claim is vastly untrue...

• According to Sovocool (2012), wind turbines kill 0.27 birds/Gwh, while fossil fueled power plants kill 9.4 birds/Gwh, or 50x greater. Even nuclear kills more birds (0.6 per Gwh) than wind.

For birds, wind farms are the least of their worries

• Hydroelectric is very cost effective, but most of the usable and economical sites are already dammed; it’s not scalable, and also is costly to local ecologies, and extremely expensive to remove dams once they silt up.

• Geothermal: in rare places it is high grade and very cost-effective, but most places you can only access average annual temperature, via digging many meters down with pipes. This is still quite useful to do for heating and cooling homes and should be more adopted than it is. No good for high-grade needs like fuel, transportation, etc.

Solar PV Accessible Insolation, Including Cloud Cover

Solar PV: Good…• Solar PV’s advantages:• --- rapidly getting cheaper• --- carbon nanotube-based solar may provide improved

power/cost ratios• --- rooftop panels allow distributed systems “off the grid”

and therefore • *** provide no easy targets with respect to national

security• *** allow energy independence and are the ultimate in

“local”, motivating their care by owners• --- few if any moving parts to break, only occasional

further investment (batteries mainly) once purchased• --- in warm climates, rooftop systems also lower heat

load to structures, lowering air conditioning costs. As the Earth warms, more and more of us will be in “warm climates”

Solar PV price/watt 1977-2011

Solar PV module costs 1985-2011

But Problematic – The Inconsistent Sun

• Power generation at the mercy of weather, and completely unavailable at night

• Power needs greater in cold climates, which are also where sun is weakest

• Requires better battery technology to be feasible for high powered society

• Still, given an existing power grid, rooftop solar can be a no-brainer for feeding energy into the grid and lowering carbon footprint for all, as well as lowering utility bills

Battery Technology

• How to power our transportation – cars, trucks, rail?

• A recent (Duduta et al. 2011) breakthrough in battery technology made at MIT is a hopeful sign. If it works as hoped, it may double the energy density of current batteries, and also make possible the ability to "fuel up" at the pump with an oil-like rechargable electrolyte much like we do with gasoline cars at the moment. Read about it here.

• A new all-liquid-metal battery technology is also promising very high storage densities at relatively low cost.

The Nuclear Option

• Nuclear reactors, to describe, are just steam engines that use something other than wood or coal to stoke the boiler. They use the heat generated by nuclear fission reactions of certain heavy elements.

• Nuclear has some advantages:• --- it’s “always on”, unlike solar• --- its carbon emissions are minimal (even including

mining the uranium or thorium currently)• --- it’s very energy dense and can supply a lot of power

in a small area, so is intriguing for use in technologies for pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Conventional Nuclear Reactor

Cooling and condensing steam back to liquid using cooling

towers

Nuclear – the Disadvantages

• All reactors are necessarily big and very expensive. No car-sized “Mr. Fusion” is on anyone’s horizon

• Safety - When they go wrong, they can go VERY wrong. Remember, in the real world, bad engineers get jobs too.

• They were economically viable only when the government stepped in to insure them. Are they economically viable when they must be privately insured? Any libertarian wanting to support nuclear should consider that. Is no private company willing to insure a nuclear power plant? If there are premiums to be collected over/above the claims to be payed out, why are private insurance companies not looking to exploit this opportunity? …or have they in fact run their own risk/reward numbers and decided it’s not worth it? (this is not sarcasm, I’m genuinely wondering).

• There may be solutions to some of these… read on.

Nuclear – the Disadvantages

• Nuclear Waste – conventional waste is radioactive for tens to hundreds of thousands of years. Stolen waste can provide the material for a “dirty bomb” with no technological savvy required, for terrorists. A “dirty bomb” can spread radioactivity packaged around dynamite (for example) far and wide which can be much more damaging than the dynamite alone can do.

• Merely the threat of using such a bomb can apply great political leverage. Even low grade nuclear waste therefore provides a very tempting target for terrorists.

• There may be solutions to these problems. Read on…

• Nuclear power safety standards and enforcement is poor and needs major upgrades. This will significantly increase the cost of building reactors

• These problems do not exist for wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal, and other renewables

The Homer Simpson Effect

• Nuclear Regulatory Commission employees caught surfing the web for porn while on the job (Washington Times article)

• Sleeping with the industry people (literally) they’re supposed to be regulating.

How Many Reactors Operating Today?

• As of March 1, 2011, there were 443 operating nuclear power reactors spread across the planet in 47 different countries [source: WNA].

• In 2009 alone, atomic energy accounted for 14 percent of the world's electrical production. Break that down to the individual country and the percentage skyrockets as high as 76% for Lithuania and 75% for France [source: NEI].

• In the United States, 104 nuclear power plants supply 20 percent of the electricity overall.

Breeder Reactors – The Solution?

• Breeder reactors convert long-lived radioactive by-products into power and into (relatively) short-lived radioactive by-products – requiring storage for ~several centuries, rather than thousands of years as with conventional reactors. They produce nuclear fuel as they run, and so are also fuel-efficient.

• Capital costs are ~25% higher than for conventional reactors. With the abundance of Uranium, they were not thought economical, however with the worries about radioactive waste storage, they are now more interesting.

• Supplies will exhaust with current designs in a matter of decades, but with breeders and intelligent design using Thorium, could last for well over 1000 years at current power needs (Shu 2011)

• Require a large starter of U235 to provide fast neutrons for fissioning other nuclei. U235 is rare (0.7% of natural uranium is U235), but available.

• For the waste to be safe after just a few centuries, requires very high grade separation of actinide series chemical elements.

• From the Yale 360 forum, this article argues in favor of Breeder technology, and this is a rebuttal

Should we give Nuclear another chance?

• It’s possible that nuclear has been given an unfair knock from a few bad accidents, and better oversight in engineering, and PRIVATE insurance, would insure lower odds of costly and dangerous accidents. It was, at one time, hailed as a clean and low-cost new power source…. before Chernobyl

• Chernobyl killed only 31 people directly, but estimates of excess cancer deaths from the radiation cloud range from 9,000 (U.N. and Atomic Energy Commission) to 25,000 (Union of Concerned Scientists) to ten times higher (Greenpeace) - it’s easy to see the correlation with “green”ness, but I myself am not in a position to say who’s most correct.

• Japan’s Fukishima disaster in 2011 is still being assessed, but was the only other “Level 7” nuclear disaster. Direct excess cancer deaths here are expected in the hundreds, although many argue this is too conservative.

• Mining of Uranium involves radon left in the tailings seeping into ground water, and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and here, this adds about 40,000 excess cancer deaths per year, worldwide.

However ALL these death rates Pale…

• … in comparison to deaths caused by fossil fuels, even without global warming’s eventual casualties

• Black lung, emphysema, cancer, heart disease, air pollution’s many other health effects.

• 13,000 deaths per year in the U.S. alone from coal dust• Even hydroelectric has a worse record than nuclear… A

string of dam failures in China once killed 230,000 people.

• Fossil Fuels kill 320 times more people per unit power produced than solar + nuclear combined…

• Add in the deaths global warming will cause show that arguments about nuclear safety, by comparison, are a non-issue

• Fossil Fuels (all) = 164 deaths/TWh

• Solar = 0.44 deaths/TWh

• Nuclear = 0.04 deaths/TWh

But – a Big Problem with Nuclear is Rapidly Escalating Cost:

Even more serious - the time to permit a 1 GW power plant: 13 yrs

for Nuclear vs. 1 yr for solar...

• Time we do not have.• During that time to permit, solar costs are

projected to continue to fall

Sobering as Nuclear’s Rising Costs Are…

• …They don’t include the cost of insuring the power plants against disaster

• Uninsurable?• Yes, says a study commissioned in Germany in

2011 (here) …• …finds that insurance would cost as at least as

much as the electricity produced ($0.20/KwH), at a bare minimum, on up to 15 times the price of the electricity produced ($3.40/KwH)!

A Lecture by Frank Shu in 2011

• Discusses the advantages and disadvantages of alternatives to “business as usual” and climate disaster

• Bottom line, solar is expensive (but he doesn’t mention that costs are dropping rapidly, nor include externalized costs!!), carbon capture and sequestration he therefore concludes is the short term solution, and nuclear using breeders is the longer term solution, both to extend the limited nuclear fuel resources, and to “burn” existing nuclear waste.

• He does not mention nuclear cost escalations, does not mention the tax and dividend strategy which totally changes the cost arguments.

• Still, it’s a very worthwhile lecture on the details of how to do nuclear properly

• Lecture Nov 2011 to U. Michigan students, (43 min)

My Thoughts• First some disclaimers: (1) I’m no nuclear expert, and ideological emotions cloud

both sides of this pro/anti-nuke debate, so far as I can tell. (2) As I emphasize in Chapter 0, Nature doesn’t give a damn about my opinion, or yours. She only cares about the Truth. That said, here goes…

• The dangers of global warming induced disaster rises with every new day of research that comes in. Beyond replacing fossil fuel energy currently, we MUST think seriously about removing existing CO2 from the atmosphere on a large scale. Carbon neutral will not save us from serious and permanent climate change. I suspect the only feasible way of powering the large energy needed to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere may be nuclear power. Breeder technology is probably best, as it makes the most use of existing isotopes and insures the long term safest nuclear waste.

• What should power the grid into which your rooftop solar pumps its power? Perhaps nuclear, but again – ONLY if it can be privately insured. If insurance companies refuse to insure, that’s a bad indication. Others make good arguments that a proper balance of renewables, especially wind, could provide a stable grid.

• A de-centralized power grid, minimizing high tension lines from juicy terrorist-target big power plants, is a necessary goal, with power generated by rooftop solar as much as possible, and perhaps cellulosic or algae-based fuel in hybrid vehicles as a carbon-neutral strategy for transportation, where high power density is essential. There is a place for nuclear… whether that place is big or niche, remains uncertain.

• Fossil fuels need to be abandoned. The world’s naïve sentiment seems to be – “OK, maybe so, we’ll inch towards other power sources, but only so long as we don’t have to make any real sacrifices.” This attitude is a prescription for disaster!

Rapidly Dropping Energy Costs are Making a Huge Impact in Germany

Shifting from Conventional Utilities to Distributed Energy

Ownership and Generation• Good article (2014) here. Summary:• “Vattenfall, a Swedish utility with the second-biggest

generation portfolio in Germany, saw $2.3 billion in losses in 2013 due to ‘fundamental structural change’ in the electricity market. The problem is well documented: high penetrations of renewables with legal priority over fossil fuels are driving down wholesale market prices -- sometimes causing them to go negative -- and quickly eroding the value of coal and natural gas plants. At the same time, Germany's energy consumption continues to fall while renewable energy development rises.”

• All it took is strong legal framework. Government commitment to a renewable future.

• “To make matters worse for (conventional fossil fuel) utilities, their commercial and industrial customers are increasingly trying to separate themselves from the grid to avoid government fees levied to pay for renewable energy expansion. According to the Wall Street Journal, 16 percent of German companies are now energy self-sufficient -- a 50 percent increase from just a year ago. Another 23 percent of businesses say they plan to become energy self-sufficient in the near future.”

B. Reducing Carbon from Existing Energy Sources

• We produce 32 billion tons of CO2 per year… ideas for capture:• Using microalgae to remove CO2 from coal flue gas. Acidic flue gas reduces

CO2 uptake greatly.• The Economics of CO2 Separation and Capture (Herzog MIT, late ’90’s)• Other processes have been considered to capture the CO2 from the flue

gas of a power plant -- e.g., membrane separation, cryogenic fractionation, and adsorption using molecular sieves – but they are even less energy efficient and more expensive than chemical absorption. This can be attributed, in part, to the very low CO2 partial pressure in the flue gas. Therefore, two alternate strategies to the “flue gas” approach are under active consideration – the “oxygen” approach and the “hydrogen” or “syn-gas” approach.

• Herzog estimated that by 2012 CO2 removal from coal flue gas could cost as little as 1.5cents per kWHr (hasn’t worked out that way).

• Gasify’ing coal allows up to 65% of the CO2 to be captured, according to industry sources. Are such “industry sources” to be trusted? I don’t know…

• IPCC Report on Carbon Capture

C. Removing Carbon from the

Atmosphere

Plant Trees; have evolved over millions of years to extract CO2

and sequester it as hydrocarbons• Advantages:

1. Low tech! Given the political will, millions of people could be employed immediately to plant trees with minimal training. This is vital – we need IMMEDIATE solutions in order to avoid long term disaster

2. They have evolved over millions of years to extract and sequester carbon from the atmosphere. They’re good at it!

Planting parties – fun! Build a sense of shared effort towards our future

But, Tree Planting Looks to be Too Little and Too Late

• --- Where do we plant them? The reason most of our forests are gone is that we wanted that land to grow crops and pave over for cities and houses. Over 90% of all arable land on Earth has already been converted to agriculture.

• --- In a rapidly changing climate, can we plant trees in a place where they will thrive for decades to come?

• --- Worse, tree planting will only help a little: This IPCC report, described more digestably in this article, finds that planting trees will only sequester about 1.4 gigatons of CO2 per year; vs ~50 gigatons of human-generated CO2 emissions.

• In other words, less than 3% of current emissions.• It turns out to be even trickier…..

Trees do more than take up CO2

• The dark color of forests means they absorb more solar energy than the grasses that would replace them, and according to one study, actually heat the Earth, with the effect stronger at higher latitudes. (Bala et.al. 2006)

• Especially true in the far north, where winter snow is highly reflective while dark conifers absorb sunlight.

• There are three other effects of trees that both cool climate:• --- 1. Evapo-transpiration; taking water from the ground and evaporating in

leaves into the air absorbs the latent heat of evaporation from the environment• --- 2. This evaporation also promotes the formation of low clouds, which also

cool climate• --- 3. Trees take up CO2 out of the atmosphere to build their tissues

• So there are 3 cooling effects, and one heating effect of trees. Finding out the net of these was the subject of the Bala et.al. study. See summaries here Lawrence Livermore Labs 2006 study, and also here.

• Lee et.al. (2011) claim that the cooling effect of clearing high latitude forests is not just theoretical, but shown in real data.

• Bottom Line: Reforestation is best in the tropics to lower middle latitudes. From latitudes of the northern U.S. northward, reforestation might actually have an albedo-related heating effect which competes with the cooling due to absorbed CO2.

Simulated temporal evolution of atmospheric CO2 (Upper) and 10-year running mean of surface temperature change (Lower) for the period 2000–2150 in the Standard and Deforestation experiments. Warming effects of increased atmospheric CO2 are more than offset by the cooling biophysical effects of global deforestation in the Global case, producing a cooling relative to the Standard experiment of ≈0.3 K around year 2100. Bala et.al. 2006.

Simulated cumulative emissions and carbon stock changes in atmosphere, ocean, and land for the period 2000–2150 in Standard (A) and Global deforestation (B)

experiments. In Standard, strong CO2 fertilization results in vigorous uptake and storage of carbon by land ecosystems. In the Global case, land ecosystem carbon is lost to the atmosphere as a result of global deforestation. Most of this

carbon is ultimately reabsorbed by grasses and shrubs growing in a warmer CO2-fertilized climate at year 2100. Of the land ecosystem carbon in the

Standard simulation that is not present in the land biosphere in the Global case at year 2100, 82% resides in the atmosphere and the remaining 18% in the

oceans.

Let’s Ponder The Implications

• Before thinking about clear-cutting boreal forests, note that the released carbon goes into the atmosphere and the oceans

• The resulting greenhouse heating effect in the atmosphere is slightly less than is the expected cooling due to the more reflective grasses (and seasonal snow) that replace trees.

• However, from reading the papers, it’s not clear that they have included the fact that there is little or no snow to be reflective in spring and certainly summer, especially as temperatures soar in the Arctic

• Also, the carbon going into the ocean worsens acidification

Natural Vegetation Changes due to Global Climate Change

• Port et al. (2012) model expected rising CO2’s effects on vegetation for 300 years

• Find fertilization due to rising CO2 causes boreal forests to spread north, deserts to slightly shrink.

• By including the rise in carbon sequestered by CO2-fertilized plants, the reduced greenhouse warming is 0.22 C

• 0.22C is only a tiny fraction of the net ~7 C rise in global temperatures

From Port et al. 2012

U.S. forests are currently taking up carbon in excess of releasing it). This is as expected on land that has had most of its forests already cut. Halting

further tree cutting would sequester carbon even more than currently. This is even more true in the tropical rain forests where clear cutting is rampant.

However, in the far north, lowered albedo might raise global temperatures as much as sequestering CO2 would reduce them, if Bala et al. are correct.

Deforestation and the Ocean

• Other vegetation change simulations give similar results• Note in the previous graph that in the global deforested

case, the ocean takes up much more CO2 than in the ‘standard’ case. While global temperatures may not change much by 2150 between the ‘standard’ and ‘global deforested’ cases, the oceans suffer much more by deforestation, and that CO2 must further acidify the ocean.

• Planting mid and high latitude trees to take up carbon should perhaps be seen more as a strategy for minimizing ocean acidification and its dire consequences, and not as much a direct global warming solution.

Artificial Trees – Currently an evolving research project with promise to remove CO2 from the

atmosphere

Some Resources on this Idea

• Lackner video lecture on our Carbon dilemma (53 min) at SUNY Stonybrook

• Video interview (5 min)• Good quantitative overview of the carbon

dilemma, from DOE and Lackner• Demonstration video of artificial tree, BBC

2009• NovaScienceNow video 2008 (12 min)• Yale Environment 360 op/ed

Some Bullet Points on the CO2 Capture ideas of Lackner et al.

• Need 7 typical (real) trees just to pull out of the air the CO2 generated by one human being (476 lb/yr)

• We’re injecting the equivalent of 126 billion people’s worth of CO2 into the atmosphere

• Pulling CO2 by Lackner’s resin is very energy intensive. This is why I suggest nuclear may be the way to power them.

• Since CO2 rapidly moves through air, can pull it out from anywhere. The resin idea works poorly at low temperature and in high humidity; Therefore, site them in deserts at mid latitudes for best results.

• Pack the “trees” around nuclear power plants above carbon sequestration sites

• Now – the American Physical Society’s evaluation (2011) and a summary: Bottom line, uneconomical until all large point-source carbon emitters are already thoroughly scrubbed.

• But Lenton & Vaughn 2009 conclude: “In the most optimistic scenarios, air capture and storage by BECS, combined with afforestation and bio-char production appears to have the potential to remove 100 ppm of CO2 from the atmosphere…”

• (BECS= Bio-Energy with Carbon Sequestration)

• …We need to scrub CO2 out of the existing carbon energy sources, and also pull and sequester CO2 out of the atmosphere. Both, at the same time, and rapidly abandon fossil fuels altogether.

• Even if we end all CO2 emissions immediately, global temperatures are already high enough to melt a significant fraction, and perhaps nearly all, of the Earth’s ice, given a few centuries of melting. Global sea levels would rise many 10’s of meters, submerging nearly all of the Earth’s great cities where presently sited.

• The characterization of CO2 removal from the air as a “non-starter” – is a non-starter. We need to “start” all of the above.

The real point should be – we need to do it all – Immediately.

An early and perhaps overly rosy quantitative evaluation of the

Lackner idea…

• Can remove CO2 a thousand times faster than real trees

• Emits only 200g of CO2 for every kg of CO2 removed from the air

• Each “tree” costs about the same as a new car, and removes 90,000 tons of carbon per year.

Compare Lackner’s Artificial Trees to Real Trees

• Real trees: 7 trees to remove 1 human’s worth of CO2 production (476 lb/yr)

• Lackner’s “tree”: claim - 1000x more efficient than real trees.

• Would need 100 million Lackner trees to remove as much CO2 as we are emitting

• Would need 100 billion real trees to do the same.

• Source for these figures is here

Let’s Run Some Simple Figures…

• 100 billion additional trees would require:• At 33 ft x33 ft = 1000 ft2 per tree as a ballpark rough

number, means • 1000 ft2 /tree x 100x109 trees = 1014 ft2

• = Area of United States = 1.06 x1014 ft2

• In other words, we’d need to plant additional real trees on a tree farm as large as the United States to soak up all the CO2 emissions. That sounds very hard to do

• If Lackner’s claims are correct, we’d need only 1/1000 of this area, or about ¾ of the area of Los Angeles County, if we still allow 1000 ft2 per artificial tree. This sounds do-able… IF Lackner’s claims are correct

Where to put the carbon is still an issue…

Injecting CO2 into underground porous spaces

• Norwegians have been putting

1 million tons of CO2 per year back into the ground undersea. • The Utsira Sand has pore-space volume of ~600 km^3. 6 km^3

would be sufficient to store 50 years emissions from ~20 coal-fired

or ~50 gas-fired 500 MW power-stations.

….but• Remember that China alone is stoking up 1 coal-

fired power plant PER WEEK. • It gets worse… "

Global Coal Risk Assessment: Data Analysis and Market Research," released on 11/20/2011, estimated there are currently 1,199 proposed coal plants in 59 countries. China and India together account for 76 percent of these plants.

• The United States is seventh, with 36 proposed new coal-fired power plants.

This is despite the buzz about natural gas as the new energy source (“thanks” to fracking)

Artificial photosynthesis

An electrochemical cell uses energy from a solar collector or a wind turbine to convert CO2 to simple carbon fuels such as formic acid or methanol, which are further refined to make ethanol and other fuels.

• Very energy intensive, but recent discovery of a catalyst – an ionic liquid electrolyte (Rosen et.al. 2011) may make it energetically viable

• Process involves converting CO2 into (poisonous) carbon monoxide as a first step. Safety issues?

Capturing CO2 by way of Accelerated Weathering of

Limestone• Rau et.al. find this a viable process for capturing CO2 from fossil fuel

power plants, converting it to calcium bicarbonate through the reaction…

• Cost estimated at ~$25/ton of CO2 sequestered

• http://aftre.nssga.org/Symposium/2004-09.pdf• If these costs can be realized, this looks relatively economical• What to do with the calcium bicarbonate? It only exists as an

aqueous solution at standard atmospheric conditions, so the volumes required mean it would have to go into the oceans, presumably. How would this affect ocean chemistry?

Rau method w/ outflow to the ocean results in minimal pH and pCO2 effects vs. letting

atmospheric CO2 directly diffuse into surface waters

Rau Process is the Most Promising CO2 removal mechanism I’ve yet found for scaling up to GeoEngineering scales

• Requires ready source of limestone, so could only be done on large scale from certain coastal locations

• Results in equilibrium pH change in ocean, after 1000 years, of -0.0012 per 30B tons CO2 processed. (30B tons/yr is current rate we’re injecting CO2 into atmosphere) (my calculation), and this is acceptable in terms of its effect on ocean life (compare to ocean slide show on pH rate of change today)

• More figures and power requirements should be done, but the basic paper provides enough to do this – it’s worth a careful examination, if/when we get serious about removing atmospheric CO2 before it’s too late.

Related: Add CaCO3=Calcium Carbonate Powder Directly to the

Ocean?• Harvey et.al. 2012 suggest this, although it would take

decades to have an effect on fighting acidification, and it would be tiny

• Would (marginally) help the ocean absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, but plenty of limestone is already in contact with the oceans along many shorelines worldwide

• 10% of the Earth’s surface is covered by limestone.• Add CaCO3 to upwelling areas, sequester an additional

0.3 billion tons of CO2 per year (1% of what we add to air by fossil fuel burning).

• Would seem to be a pretty minimal effort, and Stanford’s Caldeira agrees

• Bottom line – doesn’t look promising

Drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere and using it to make carbonates - limestone rock (Belcher

et.al. 2010)• … a process which happens naturally by ocean life (but too slowly,

and cannot happen at all in a too-acidic ocean such as rapid CO2 rise is creating).

• Major problems to be overcome; the amount of energy required in the process, scaling up to the levels needed to affect our atmosphere, sourcing calcium, and cost, among others.

• Given that humans have injected an additional 1.2 trillion tons of CO2 over the past 250 years, the Belcher et.al. process would require ~2.4 trillion tons of CaCO3, and at 2.71 g/cc density of calcium carbonate,

• This would require building 8x1017 cc's of rock, or a cube 1 million centimeters on a side, which is equivalent to a block the height of Mt. Everest (30,500 ft on a side) from sea level.

• That's also going to require a lot of calcium. Calcium is common, but mostly it is found as - calcium carbonate! Destroying CaCO3 in order to make CaCO3 is questionable, except that we might hope to use low-carbon energy (nuclear) to make this round trip(?)… that’s frankly very speculative at this point.

• This is NOT the most promising strategy

Start Smaller?• To instead immediately drop current CO2 atmospheric levels from 400

ppm to 350 ppm would required a cube of calcium carbonate of only 22,180 ft on a side; still higher than any mountain in the Western Hemisphere.

• At current production rates of ~30 billion tons of CO2 per year, it requires an additional cube-shaped mountain 7,100 ft on a side every year.

• Is it possible to build "scrubbers" for the atmosphere that could accomplish such a vast task? Where do we put it all - the ocean? We'd better make sure ocean acidification levels don't reach levels (as they will this century, on our current trajectory) that begin to dissolve existing oceanic calcium carbonate. When that happens, the problems we have been presenting so far will pale by comparison.

• Maybe besides putting it in the ocean, we could take a clue from the ancient Egyptians… There is something satisfying about visualizing oil company executives conscripted to toil under the hothouse conditions on 21st Century Earth building the Great Carbon Pyramids - pyramids of calcium carbonate (or calcium bicarbonate, as the case may be) miles high, sufficient to clean up our atmosphere. And, at wages comparable to those of the poor souls who built those at Giza, Egypt. I'm sure there will be little problem finding people who would donate the land just for the satisfaction of watching them toil.

Creating carbon fuels on-the-fly, rather than mining fossil fuels

Gasoline and gasoline substitutes are attractive because…• --- transportation vehicles (trucks, cars, trains) require very high energy

density power sources, and gas is hard to beat. • --- we have existing infrastructure to deliver• --- require little modification to existing vehicles to utilize• But….• Corn-based biofuels make little sense. They consume 30% more energy in

growth/manufacture than they give. Other problems:• --- commandeer valuable farmland which could go to food• --- vast acreage of tropical forests are cleared to produce sugar cane, palm

oil, and cereal grains destined for ethanol. Clearing tropical forests adds both heat and CO2 to the atmosphere

• --- biofuels leave soils poorer, are supplemented with artificial fertilizers, which add nitrous oxide and other pollutants to the atmosphere in their manufacture, and are heavy water users.

• --- they nevertheless are being pursued, incentivized by government subsidies for growers.

• --- accounting for carbon flows is deeply flawed on the part of the proponents of corn and sugar ethanol biofuels. This strategy is not carbon neutral

Good: Cellulosic Ethanol

• A Berkeley study published in Science (Farrell et al. 2006) finds the cellulosic ethanol has significant advantages over fossil fuel in the making of gasoline

• Cellulosic ethanol many times more efficient and lower carbon footprint than corn-based or other ethanol’s.

(A) Net energy and net greenhouse gases for gasoline, six studies, andthree cases. (B) Net energy and petroleum inputs for the same.

Small light blue circles are reported data that include incommensurateassumptions, whereas the large dark blue circles are adjusted values that use

identical system boundaries. Conventional gasoline is shown with red stars, andEBAMM scenarios are shown with green squares. Adjusting system boundaries

reduces the scatter in the reported results. Moreover, despite large differences innet energy, all studies show similar results in terms of more policy-relevant

metrics: GHG emissions from ethanol made from conventionally grown corn canbe slightly more or slightly less than from gasoline per unit of energy, but

ethanol requires much less petroleum inputs. Ethanol produced from cellulosicmaterial (switchgrass) reduces both GHGs and petroleum inputs substantially.

Better: Microbe-based fuel producers

• Bio-engineered bacteria at MIT produce isobutanol – a burn-able fuel. It appears it may be feasible to scale this up to industrial scales.

• Algae-based diesel production. The company Algenol claims to be able to produce over 6,000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year, compared to corn’s rate of 370 gallons per acre per year. That’s 15 times more!

• Algae-based fuels may be viable, as judged in this paper on alternative energy economics and investments

Biodiesel from Algae

From Algenol’s website

Vertical hangers better utilize space, but lose some incoming sunlight

Related: Utility-Scale Solar Shades of Plants

• This is a problem with current massive solar farms… they are incompatible with the local ecology

• Better: Research at UCSC on solar cells which are transparent at wavelengths needed by plants, and placed much higher, minimizing local ecological damage

• See local news

We have TOO MANY people competing for TOO FEW resources on this finite

planet• However, a major point is that ANY method of

producing significant quantities of biofuels are going to have a major impact on raising prices for competing resources. For ethanols, the dilemma is “food-vs.-fuel”, and for cellulosic it is (to some extent) “everything-vs.-fuel”…

• Cellulosic ethanol led to price rises in pulp such that Mexicans were unable to buy tortillas, and wood pellet factories pricing dairy farmers out of the market for sawdust.

All Biofuels Share a Common Problem

• They emit CO2 back into the atmosphere!

• At their most perfect manifestation, they are at best “carbon neutral”.

• That’s not good enough. However, it’s certainly better than the vastly “carbon positive” fuels we have going currently

So, we’ve had alternative fuels employed now for going on 20 years. How are we doing on reducing CO2

emissions? Answer: CO2 is not going down, not staying level, nor merely increasing linearly… rather, it

continues to accelerate upward.

Maybe we need more Drastic Measures…

D. GeoEngineering

• Launch billions of “butterflies” to the L1 point, to block sunlight. Must be actively controlled to keep them there. (Angel et al. 2007)

Or… Move one or more asteroids to the L1 Lagrangian point between us and Sun, and sputter dust off of it to attenuate sunlight

Tug an asteroid to the L1 Lagrangian Point, keep it there

and blast off dust to block sunlight from Earth?

• A related idea which avoids having to launch occulting objects from Earth is to nudge a suitable asteroid or asteroids into a proper orbit so that we can blast dust off of it and let the dust be a partial absorber of sunlight.

• This would seem quite dangerous to attempt and far too difficult to engineer. But you can read the paper (Bewick et al. 2012) and see what you think. You can read more opinions here.

• There is precedent, in that there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence that comet impact(s) / debris associated with the Taurid Meteor Shower may have been the culprit which initiated the Younger-Dryas cooling 12,900 years ago which reversed the exit from the last great Ice Age and cooled the Earth for an additional 1000 years (Napier 2010 and references therein)

Injecting Reflective Aerosols into the Stratosphere

• This would mimic the effect of large volcanic eruptions in their climate effect, and so we are confident they would indeed cool the planet

• My (cynically sarcastic) thought – why not just encourage through direct subsidies, the construction of more coal mines, coal plants, with very tall smoke stacks??

• Let’s make the world’s air look like China’s!• Oh, I forgot – we already subsidize fossil fuel

corporations in the amount of $1,000,000,000,000 in 2012 alone (source)

Are These Shade Strategies Really a Solution?

• Huge problems:• 1. Sulfate aerosols are toxic (sulfuric acid) and would come down

out of the stratosphere on a ~few years time scale• 2. Energy required to get the sulfates up there. Dozens or hundreds

of cubic kilometers of material raised into the stratosphere• They cool only daytime, not night time temperatures• 4. Astronomers would not be happy (but, they’re not a significant

voting block, so just forget about them)• 5. Aesthetics – permanently smoggy hazy skies everywhere.

Anyone who’s lived in a smoggy city like I have, wheezes just thinking about it, and finds this pretty depressing.

• 3. Most serious – ALL shade strategies only cool the planet, they do nothing to help the problem of CO2-induced ocean acidification

• Radiative forcings of GeoEngineering strategies (Lenton & Vaughn 2009)

Can We Get Off Fossil Fuels? In Some Countries - Yes

E. Population, Policy Strategies

Policy, Legal Solutions• Politically, there are very obvious steps which

can and need to be taken immediately. The oil and mining companies will continue to cause environmental damage as long as they don't have to pay for it.

• These political solutions do not require brilliant people to make difficult scientific breakthroughs, they "only" require political courage. Our global political systems are clearly not very good at empowering people with intelligence, political courage, and integrity. But that's an even tougher problem, perhaps, than climate.

Externalized costs must be converted to true costs

• Externalized costs is a vast and pervasive flaw in the laissez faire paradigm. What would fossil fuel companies have to charge for their products if they were forced to pay for…

• --- the destruction of a significant amount of the 217,490 miles of the planet's current coastlines?...

• ---the costs of insurance premiums caused by escalating weather extremes (which I've already linked here)?

• ---the costs of the wars to be fought over food as climate zones shift too rapidly for agriculture to adapt to?

• ---the cost of destroying the ocean's ecosystems through acidification by CO2?

• --- Compensating most of the world’s population for rendering uninhabitable the land they live on now?

• This list could go on, of course…. What if those costs were then returned, dollar-for-dollar, directly to those who will pay those costs - all of us, and our children? This would provide overwhelming incentive to drastically cut CO2 emissions and scale up non-fossil energy sources such as nuclear and photovoltaics.

Subsidies to fossil fuel corporations

• Global subsidies to fossil fuel companies is estimated in 2012 to have risen from $775 Billion to $1 trillion, although precise figures are difficult to know because so many countries hide the figures.

• These should end. Immediately.

Population Incentives

• Consider; if the larger problem is a planet living beyond its carrying capacity, how wise is it to provide tax credits for adding more population, as we do in the U.S.?

• Child tax credits should be eliminated, and additional tax imposed for having additional children.

Consumption vs Income

• It will always be true – if you want more of something, tax it less. If you want less of it, tax it more. Therefore…

• Eliminate all income taxes and fund government strictly through consumption taxes (progressivity could still be added in as a secondary step)

• Motivate the reduction in consumption and instead motivate saving and therefore capital investment in the changes which must be made

The Carrying Capacity of Earth - Reducing Population• Burning through in a few hundred years the Earth's store of fossil

fuels - an inheritance which took many tens of millions of years to create, is symptom of a larger problem. We on Earth have been living far beyond the ability of the planet to sustainably support.

• Humans and our domesticated livestock have gone from being 0.1% of the biomass of all land vertebrates 10,000 years ago to now being 97% today.

• We're losing 1% of the Earth's topsoil every year, due to typical agriculture practices. Topsoil is irreplacable on anything but geologic time scales.

• World population will reach 9.5 billion by mid-century. Our planet can, with current technology, support this many people sustainably only at a standard of living equivalent to today's Ethiopia, according to a number of studies at Stanford University (links here and here).

• Ethiopia, with one of the harshest standards of living on Earth.

Ethiopia – a place of widespread grinding poverty

Correlation: Intelligence vs. the Willingness to Tolerate Short-term Discomfort for Long-term

Reward• I'm haunted by the results of the classic Stanford

"delayed gratification" studies (and here) of children, which show that the willingness to delay gratification for ultimately larger reward in 4-year olds is predictive of later measures of intelligence and success in life.

• We as a planet behave like the immediate gratification 4 year olds in these studies, preferring to eat through our seed corn now rather than clearly acknowledge what that means for our future.

• What's interesting about the studies is that the choice is so easily grasped by all (1 candy now, or 2 candies if you wait a bit), that it is not a test of the ability to understand what is being asked…

• It is a test of the willingness to pause and make real in one's mind what the future will hold, vs. simply avoiding that awareness in order to indulge short-term wishes.

Reducing Population size has another aspect…reducing the size of existing people! Obese people

use up excess resources just like additional people do. Enough corporate-promoted junk food, please!

Also relates to delayed gratification studies

Game Theory Says – We’re Doomed

• A study applying Game Theory and Nash equilbria (remember, “A Beautiful Mind”?) finds that climate negotiations will fail. Experiments with real individuals verified this.

• When given realistic rules and choices, including a certain amount of uncertainty as to when we hit the tipping point and climate catastrophe is inevitable, competitive negotiators will not do the right thing.

• Why? Selfish interests, trying to get the other guy to make the carbon sacrifice instead of you.

• In a system of competitive players within a global atmosphere, mutual assured destruction is the result.

• Read the details here

Along the Same Lines…

• A History of Climate Change Negotiations in 83 seconds… (you’ll laugh, you’ll cry)

The Problem Goes Deeper Still

• The Culture of Growth as THE Primary Value and Goal to Achieve Human Well Being

• Endless growth on a finite planet must end. We have reached that point.

• Efficiency increases, better insulation, more renewable energy sources, etc etc... only make the problem WORSE - not better. Despite huge improvements in the technologies of efficiency and steep drops in the cost of solar panels, the rate of CO2 and methane release is not only not decreasing, not only is it not staying the same, not only is it not trending upward merely at a constant slope - it's actually accelerating. Why?

• The reason is that we are taking those savings and simply using them to indulge in additional uses which further desecrate the planet that must support us all.

Nolthenius’ 2nd Law: A value will attract exploitation, thus degrading it until it is

no longer an attractive value• This is analogous to the thermodynamics of heat. The

heat equation expresses this same idea. Heat (degradation) flows in to a non-degraded area at a rate corresponding to the gradient (i.e. how “great” the value is)

• Ponder why, when freeways are widened, the traffic quickly grows and the freeway is again clogged. Freeway widening only encourages more people to use the freeway, when instead, health and well-being would be improved better by cycling, walking.

• Another example – wonderful places to live: only end up attracting people to the point that the “quality gradient” is extinguished – the town, the land… degrade until it is no longer desirable enough to attract more people to it. I’ve watched this happen in Santa Cruz during my 28 years here. It’s still a more desirable place than most, and so I expect the degradation to continue.

What is needed is a change in cultural values.

Happiness, genuine well-being, must be re-thought

by the average voter

• See “The Conundrum” by David Owen• I’m going to stop here. This is getting to be

too deep to go further for this limited course! I hope I’ve stimulated you to think further….

• Let’s get out there and make the world better – there’s lots of work to do

Key Points - Strategies• Shu (2008); only Solar PV and Nuclear can provide practical large scale non-

fossil power• Solar requires high quality battery technology to go “off grid”• Solar has many advantages: know them.• Existing point-source CO2 emitters are more economical to scrub than is the

atmosphere• CO2 and high temperatures are permanent, unless CO2 can be removed rapidly

from the atmosphere• Artificial trees to scrub CO2 from atmosphere – must be sited in mid-latitudes• Artificial trees; rapidly evolving, require high energy input, probably nuclear• CO2 must be removed from atmosphere before it is absorbed by the ocean, or

ocean life in peril and climate change truly permanent• How much world power supplied by fossil, and by non-fossil• Renewable sustainable present technologies can support world’s current

population only at a standard of living equivalent to that of Ethiopia. Or, at current income distribution, can support about 2 billion people.

• Most promising carbon-neutral bio-fuel source appears to be algae-based• Reducing atmosphere CO2 from 400ppm to 280ppm by making calcium

carbonate would require a Mt. Everest sized cube• Game theory experiment show: climate negotiations will fail due to perceived

selfish interests• Tragedy of the Commons, plus the Culture of Economic Growth as the top

societal value, insures environmental degradation for all.