Fixing the Climate

and I'm Joe McCormick. And uh, we're going to pick up our conversation about climate change and what is what can we possibly do about it to help mitigate it or because in the previous episode we talked a lot about how um global warming is real and that it could have detrimental effects on everything stuff in the future. Yeah, and that it's being somewhat powered by the stuff what

we do. In other words, people are causing a rapid acceleration of a more rapid acceleration, a more rapid acceleration of the warming trend of the Earth, and therefore we could we could be in some deep water because of sea level rises. So we wanted to talk about what we could possibly do to help them address this. Well, Um, so people are talking are having this public discussion about

whether humans are actually causing climate change. Uh, let's assume this argument just does not get resolved enough to stop us from adding more and more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and or that the way that society works, it's really hard for us to cut our dependency on things that create carbon dioxide emissions, like cars, power. I like electricity a lot myself personally. All those things, Yeah, they add to the problem. So, uh, what happens if we get

way down in that hole? Is there any way for us to get out? All right? So this is a great question to ask because I have seen in the past people who where I are climate change deniers, if you want to use that term, or they were. They didn't deny that climate change was happening, but they denied that there was anything realistic that we would do because they didn't want the impact for it to be, you know,

a negative economic impact or negative impact to lifestyle. In other words, they didn't want their lives to be compromised by the fact that there's this massive thing going on. So they said, I'm not worried because science will fix it.

Technology will fix it. There's also a little bit of research that's been done into the economics of climate change and global warming, and people have said that in developed countries at any rate, um the innovations needed to deal with the warming weather will create um more jobs and

more money. Well and there in those specific areas. There's also the economic argument about how developed countries can have the luxury of investing in tech anologies that would remove a dependence upon carbon emitting technologies, whereas developing countries would not necessarily have that same luxury, and denying an entire huge segment of the world's population access to the same sort of comforts that we enjoy in other parts of the world seems harsh when you remember that carbon contains

a lot. You know, you can get a lot of energy out of carbon. In fact, that's why we depend upon it so much. So to tell an entire huge part of the world, hey guys, I know you're not where we are right now, and you would really like to be able to I don't know, eating stuff, but stop using this thing that has all this power in it and uh and and deal with that. That's that's

a denical reality, right. Yeah. So so a lot of people they think, well, maybe we can turn to some sort of like uh, crazy solutions to reverse engineer the problem, right, So, for example, carbon capture, I've heard of that. Yeah, So carbon capture and sequestration. What what is that? Is that where where you you get like a net and you uh andfferent net. Sorry, I thought we were doing a beach blanket bingo thing here for a second. No, it's not where you get a net and you capture carbon

and you drag it off kicking and screaming. Uh. It really is talking about putting in systems in uh, in places where a lot of carbon dox i gets released in the atmosphere normally, so things like power plants, you know, anything that's like a coal firing power plant would be an example. Two capture the CEO two being given off in that in that system, which could be a different

approach depending upon the actual system you're talking about. In some cases you might get almost pure CEO two being admitted, depending upon again what what it's coming from, in which case capture would be a little easier. If the CEO two is actually in a mixture, then you have to figure out how are you going to deal with all of this. But the idea is that you capture that, you then put it someplace where it's not going to get into the atmosphere. And the two big choices of

just capturing it and then putting it somewhere else. Are either to pump it into the uh the ocean, deep into the ocean, like deep undersea or underground. And by underground, I mean you know hundreds of meters underground. You're you're trying to pump c O two into a porous rock formation that hopefully has a non porous formation above it, which will block the c O two from filtering back up, and the c O two will become trapped underground. Uh, there's actually room for giga tons of c O two

underground in this way. And in fact, this is a technology that oil companies already use when they're exploring for oil. They'll pump c O two down in order to try and find oil deposits. So the technology, the basic technology to do this is already there. It's not being used in this application, but the actual tech exists. Uh. But but wouldn't putting a whole crap ton that's the scientific term of c O two down into a place that

didn't already have it change? Well, if you're talking about strata under the earth that's hundreds of meters below, it's gonna change things in a way that doesn't really affect us in any way, the same sort of thing as if you were to find a natural gas deposit or something. So if we're talking about the ocean, we're actually there are some concerns here obviously. For one thing, in our last podcast, we discussed the fact that c O two and seawater can combine in a way that ends up

lowering the pH of sea water. So pumping a lot of c O two into the ocean could end up affecting the pH levels of at least the region around wherever it is you're pumping the the c O two into that has a potential for affecting an entire ecosystem under the water. So obviously that is something that would have to be studied in depth before we were to roll that out on any kind of wide scale basis, because you don't want to end up removing c O two from the atmosphere, pump it into the ocean, and

just create a brand new set of problems. So that's one possibility. I think that the one about essentially shoving an underground is something that could at least in theory, takes some of the burden of CO two emissions uh out of the picture. Although obviously we don't have a way of doing that for things like personal vehicles. You know, we we're talking about these massive plants and manufacturing facilities. That would be a big benefit, but it's only part

of the equation. Can I ask you a question? Sure, go ahead? This process sounds energy intensive, especially if we're already what we're trying to do is offset the carbon we're putting into the atmosphere creating energy. Well, at least the pumping creating the pumping carts certainly would require its own energy. I mean, capturing is you could you could potentially create a mostly passive system to capture c O two, but it wouldn't you know, I would imagine a power

system would be more efficient. But when you're talking about pumping CEO two under the ground, that's gonna require energy. So you have to figure that out exactly. You know, you can't. Are you just gonna have a massive petroleum burning generator that's that's just releasing more c O two into the atmosphere while you're pumping. Now, grant, you know

you're talking about different scales here too. The amount of c O two omitted by a like a power company coal burning plant is way higher than than yeah, a pump exactly. So, um, you know you're looking at a scale. You're talking about reducing c O two emissions. You're certainly not talking about eliminating them. But that's that's one suggestion

of using technology to try and fight this off. But there are a couple of other ideas, you know, like like, what's this geo engineering thing I see on our outline, Joe geo engineering. Um, there's there's a lot of exciting stuff in this one. Oh boy, some route words. Okay. So if y'all like the plots the bad guys come up with in James Bond movies, oh do I you'll like geo engineering. You don't look like blow Feld for you know, just out of look you look like Donald Pleasant.

Thank you. But between between aggravating James Bond being chased by Michael Myers, my book is full. Go ahead. Uh so you've got one about about reforestry, I believe, Well, see that's a tough one. Okay. So there are all these ideas about how we could make major changes to the planet Earth that would help offset the either the heating effects of of global warming or the atmospheric carbon situation that causes or in a few that I'm going

to talk about the radiation itself that's reaching near Yeah. Um, so to one way or another change the planet to help offset the bad effects of this or to keep it from happening in the first place. Um And and they say, well, okay, so we know there's gonna be a lot of carbon out there, so just what are we going to do about it? One idea has to do with plants. Okay, so forests and plants they create

energy by photosynthesis. So they take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and nutrients from the soil, and energy from the sunlight and they use all that to turn that carbon into plant matter. Um. And they create cellulose and release oxygen and stuff. Yeah and so so wait this sounds great. So it's taking all the carbon out and it's releasing where's the problem. Some people have said, hey, I know, we'll use this kind of principle, this plant

based principle in the ocean. And this is this idea of ocean fertilization. If you heard of this, pray tell what is this ocean fertilization that I would like to talk about. Ocean fertilization by way of anecdote parable all right, go ahead, okay. So there is a Guardian article from two twelve that tells the story of an American businessman from California named Russ George. Um, and he had an idea. He said, okay, well, plankton like iron. Um a lot of iron in the water that they use this as

a new trient. They gobble it up in the population is bloom. Well, so they are photosynthetic, and that means plankton absorbed carbon dioxide like trees do. The idea of ocean fertilization is you put the iron in the water, um, the plankton gobble it up, and they gobble up C O two. They die, and then they take the c O two to the bottom of the ocean with them when they sink. So that's sort of like a natural way of like sequestering the carbon dioxia, getting rid of it,

putting it somewhere else. They put it in their bodies, they sink to the bottom, then they've got it down there out of our hair. Right. Well, it turns out it's not that simple. So Mr Russ George he went off the west coast of Canada and dumped about a hundred tons of iron sulfate in the water. According to this article, that sounds like a lot. Yeah. Um, and it spawned a plankton bloom as large as ten thousand

square kilometers. Um. Now you may have heard before of blooms in the water being related to actually not so wonderful effects. Well, anytime that you're changing an ecosystem like that, if you've got too much of something at the bottom of the food chain, what's that going to do to the rest of it? Yeah, there are all kinds of questions about whether this uh well, number one, whether it's safe, and number two, whether it even works in the first place.

So scientists are still not sure whether this iron fertilization process will actually keep the carbon locked and sequestered at the bottom of the ocean, or if it's only a temporary thing. And then also they raised all these uh, you know, concerns about how it affects ecosystems in the water, about how it can produce um chemicals in the water that are toxic and you know, so in other words,

you're doing more harm than good. Yeah, And in fact, I think some people think that this can actually worsen global warming in fact, Nature, the journal of Science Nature published a paper about how ocean fertilization should be completely abandoned. They published that back in two thousand nine, and uh, in fact, I can I can quote a little bit from it is it is already commonly accepted that ocean iron fertilization should not be rushed into as a mitigation strategy.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change regards it as supported by neither appropriate assessment of environmental side effects nor a clear institutional framework for implementation. Similarly, last year to United Nations Conventions path resolutions restricting large scale ocean iron fertilization activities, citing concerns about the environmental risks and lack of a scientific basis on which to justify such activities, concerns that

have been recognized for some time. A Royal Society report released this month emphasized that the technique has a relatively small capacity to absorb carbon and comes with quote probably deleterious ecological consequences end quote. Yeah. So, uh, here's our first major geoengineering scheme thumbs down down. I think I think, uh, I think I gotta go with nature on this one. Well, I've got a I've got a question, Um, so if the Earth is getting hotter, maybe we can't do anything

about the carbon. Maybe it's just gonna be there and it's gonna trap this, you know. So radiation comes down, it comes back up, but it doesn't escape the atmosphere. What if we could reduce the amount of radiation coming in in the first place? Right There are a bunch of ways that scientists, mad or not are trying to

solve that problem. There's there's a the concept of cloud reflectivity or cloud brightening, which says that and and no one's really sure exactly what affect clouds have on climate right now in terms of I mean, because they they're going to reflect sunlight from the sun, but they also do absorb some of the radiation coming back up from the earth. So is it a net loss? Is it? Is it just do you break even? And we're not

questioned about that, and we're not sure. But there's a concept that if we can create more low reflective clouds, that that could be awesome. Um. One idea for this is that we could get these boats out onto the ocean that are shooting seawater and therefore a salt high into the air, creating large bright clouds with the help of the salt, because adding particles to the air creates more smaller water droplets, which creates clouds with a greater

surface area for reflecting sunlight. Um. I mean you know, we could We could even put wind powered boats out there that would drag propellers through the water to generate the electricity to create the spray. So other than creating the boats, this could be a pretty green adventure. I just imagine all these fish flying up into the atmosphere like that poor frog photo in a great some kind more sushi for me. It's just called the killing floor.

There's really a sluice there. Um. However, this could potentially lead to drought in areas down wind if if you, because these clouds would be more rain resistant than normal clouds, and so therefore it might be bad for already drought potential areas. Gotcha. So again, another another potential solution that could end up having unintended negative consequences. Absolutely, and since we're not sure about clouds, roll and everything in the

first place, it's a pretty big question mark right now. Um. No I had mentioned salt in the air helping create these reflective clouds. That's technically an aerosol, which are which is just solid particles of matter in the air. And now different air sels can reflect or absorb some light. We talked about this in the previous podcast I believe, you know, for example, carbon tends to absorb radiation and keep it in Earth's atmosphere, whereas things like sulfates and

nitrates will reflect. So there's an idea to inject sulfates into the stratosphere to provide more of that reflection. Um, there's there's a lot of potential here. According to NASA models estimate that air sels have had a cooling effect that has counteracted about half of the warming caused by the build up of greenhouse gases since the eighteen eighties, which is significant. However, you know, there's you know, a okay, a model from the University Washington said that this will

never fully offset climate change. And furthermore, the idea of just toss and stuff up into the air could have serious I mean, obviously could have serious impacts on your ecology. You have if you have chemicals combining in ways that you had not anticipated, then you could end up with things like acid rain or certainly different rain rain that perhaps environment is not used to Um. There's another one, and this is my favorite, and that is space mirrors.

Mirrors in space like a compact for the Earth or or I'm really picturing this is the most James BONDI of all of these, I think, um and okay, so as Mr Burns, Yes, I think Mr Burns is really a failed Bond villain if only he could cross cross platforms there um. Now. Scientists have estimated that you'd only have to deflect about one percent of incoming solar radiation

to completely offset climate change. That sounds cool, um right, except for the part where that would require maybe six hundred thousand square miles of mirror or many mirrors put together, which which is a bunch and probably expensive. There there are two different leading ideas for space mirrors right now. One is to launch um launch one out in between the Earth and the Sun at a gravitationally stable point about four times away from Earth is the Earth is

to the Moon. If that just made SENSEI um. And the other is to create a network of stable mirrors in orbit around the equator, so it would be like a swarm of mirrors. It would be like a like a ring like we would have our own ring around

the planet. Yeah, a, this is this is a huge expensive project, and be especially that that ring of mirrors could create some really weird weather effects, uneven global temperature changes, causing droughts in some places like for example, the America's and northern Eurasia, which happens to be where a lot of things get grown. So yeah, so well, hey, hey, hey, I got I got a solution for you guys. Nanotechnology. Put a period in it. We are done. I love

how nanotechnology is the illusion of everything. It's a magic wand isn't it. You know, in the future, they'll they'll cue, they'll cue, they'll cure chronic elbow pain with the nanotechnology. Hey hey, nano robots in my blood are going to do that, so they might. So nanotechnology is it's a legitimate field. So even though we're joking right now, it is very much legitimate field and there's some amazing science

coming out of it. But again, I think some people point to nanotechnology like it's a cure all automatically, somehow knowing how to make very very tiny things will solve all of our scientific problems. It's like it's like people use the idea of quantum in like science fiction or healing, or or just using the word science. But you say, so is this for real? Nanotech? Nanotech for real can give us very helpful ways of of of dealing with

this situation. But so now, technology as a platform, it's not, it's are It's not just a platform. It's not just like nano technology is. You know, you wouldn't go into a scientific laboratory and just see a big vat that says nanotechnology and like I need some of that. Uh No, we're actually talking about making improvements to existing technologies through the discoveries we make in nanotechnology. For example, solar cells. So one of the issues we have with solar cells.

You know, these are of course the cells that we use in solar panels to collect solar energy and converted into electricity. One of the problems you have is efficiency. How much of that energy are you actually harnessing and being able to convert into electricity usually tends to be somewhere in the neighborhood. You know, you have laboratory conditions that can get up higher than that, but in general they're they're pretty lows. That means you're you're losing of

that energy. Uh, and that's one of the arguments against using solar energy in various applications, saying that it would be more expensive than alternatives, there's a higher startup cost, it's not as efficient. Then you have all these other

issues you have to worry about. Well, nanotechnology is one of those things that has taught us a lot about nanostructures and the way that light behaves in nanostructures, and but designing specific nanostructures, we can actually direct more light down to hit the solar cell, so you lose less of it in reflection and and that way you can make the solar panels more efficient. So by making that more efficient, you make get a more viable alternative to

fossil fuels. So that would take some of the demand from fossil fuels off and put it into a renewable energy source. Now I feel like you're talking in a more feasible right. Well, when you say something like material science, that's a little bit more. You know, on similar terms, if you so, if you have better roads than all cars, whether they're electric or not, are going to be more energy efficient. But the you know, creating the infrastructure to

create better roads requires a lot of cement. Cement is really energy inefficient to create. So if we could build a better cement exactly, or you could use is nanotechnology again to design lighter but strong materials and build vehicles out of that. That means you need less fuel to

move those vehicles around. So again, this is one of those things where nanotechnology can help in sort of an indirect way, but they can make you know that that discipline can help make other technologies more efficient and uh and less let me put less of a burden on

us and when it comes to energy. So this brings it full circle for me because I think, uh, it sounds like, well, maybe we could do something with carbon sequestration, carbon capture and sequestration that may help maybe, Um, most of these other plans sound kind of mad scientist, not very feasible, maybe making things worse. What's the real way to deal with this? Bottom line, it's you've got to go back to the stuff we've already heard about. I mean,

that's what seems like it's going to work. Reducing and and and relying on reducing your your consumption and general and relying on alternatives to fossil fuels in general as well. So those would be the two main things, right as reduce your consumption and and shift as much of your consumption to renewable forms of energy as you possibly can't, Like just your average electronics are consuming power even when

you're not using them. Unplugging your television can have a huge effect on your power bill and also on your just energy consumption. Yeah, because stuff you've heard a million times before. Turn your lights off when you leave the house, just you know, walk places when you can, or ride it, buy some and we've done we've done full podcasts on a few of these topics. So well we'll try and

we'll try to link them up when this publishes. But you know, I mean or or we talked a few weeks ago about food, um, you know, vegetarian eating and the effect that you know, meat has a huge carbon footprint print. Well, you know what, there's one thing we didn't talk about, which are the idea of carbon credits

and carbon credit economies. This is gonna work, well we should explain so, so essentially, what what's happening here is that here, here's the problem from an economic standpoint, at least, this is what some people would argue. They would argue that it costs less money to depend upon fossil fuels than it would to shift to an alternative, at least initially. You might be able to argue in the long term that you would have a benefit, but that's a tough

sell for any company. Well, the alternatives are new technology now, so they're more expensive. They're more expensive, and some would argue unproven, some would say they're not efficient, so that would cause other changes in production. It would mean possibly passing the costs down to you, so that essentially, ultimately the consumer ends up footing the bill for whatever the changes are. There a lot of arguments against it. Yeah,

it's a hard sell. Well, carbon credits, the idea is to make it less of uh, give give less incentive to using carbon when you are a giant company, like a manufacturing company. So basically the idea is you put a cap on how much carbon you are allowed to release into the environment in a given year. You have a certain amount and beyond that you are not allowed

to go. So you have to figure out how to work within that cap if you absolutely have to do business beyond like if your business requires that, you're going to have to emit more carbon than what you are allowed. You can then purchase the right to emit carbon, or you can trade, depending upon the way the the economy is set up. But the idea is that at auction you could purchase carbon emission allocations. You could you could be allowed to admit a certain amount of carbon for

a certain amount of money. The government, in turn would take the revenue generated from these these auctions and pour that into research and development for clean energy alternatives, uh and trying to do some sort of public good with

that money. In theory, anyway, that's what would happen. So the idea is that economically you would have the incentive to move away from carbon because if you stayed with it, you'd have to start paying for it, and one way or another, you would either have to ramp down production so that you worked within the parameters that were given to you, or you have to pay money so that you work within the ones you were accustomed to. Either way, it's an incentive for you to move off of that

and find some alternative. UM. The whether it works or not, that's a good question, because in the United States it's been struck down every time it's come up. It's one of those things where, UH, it requires, It requires legislation with teeth in it. You have to have the authority to say, like, if you're doing business within this country, these are the rules you have to follow. And if you don't do that, if you just make it a suggestion, then obviously very few companies it will adopt that if

it means that would affect the bottom line. So, uh, you know, would it work. There's some question about whether or not it would be a huge benefit, but it would at least given incentive to companies to try and explore alternatives, while theoretically also pouring more money from the

government into UH sustainable clean energy alternatives. UH. A lot of the arguments I've read are that the private industry just it's just not enough to to allow for these clean energy alternatives to really get a strong foothold, in part because the United States government, along with other governments, subsidizes fossil fuels. So with fossil fuels getting a subsidy, then they already have an advantage. And so you know, you're playing against a stack deck. So that's that's the

general idea. Now. I think personally that a carbon credit economy set up fairly, you know, the way it was intended to be, and UH, with the added incentive to move into more clean energy, would at least be a good way to transition UM, particularly for a developed nation. UH. And we discussed earlier. It's it's complicated issue because you can't just demand the entire world shifts to this when there are large parts of the world that are struggling for basic UH supplies that all the rest of us

just tend to take for granted. UH. It's it's a very complicated issue. But I think that this sort of thing would really help. I just unfortunately, I don't think that carbon credit is something we're going to see, at least in the United States anytime really soon. I just think that it's too hard to sell politically to have

it happen UM. So that that's kind of where we get a lot of people saying, you know, we're hoping that technology can help get us out of this, because I don't see another way that's going to happen anytime soon. So fun times, you guys want to add anything happy and and silly before I go any any mole reptilians that we need to talk about. I could help, okay, RoboCop, so I think nano RoboCop could help Nano RoboCop, So

we have to go to Nano Detroit. Yeah, all right, So we'll go to Nano Detroit and go to the Nano Wonderbread factory that's been turned into a Nano casino

and uh, we'll we'll get help there. No, no, I think I think that all of this is I mean, we've talked about some things that that are not going to work probably ever, but the fact that people are thinking about it and putting research into it is absolutely val valuable, even even if only to prove that, yes, you should turn the lights off in your room when

you leave it. All right, So, guys, if you have any comments you would like to share, or you just want to join the conversation, go to f W Thinking dot com. That's the website where we've got all the blog posts, podcasts, videos, articles. You can join the conversation there, or you can let us know what you think on social media and you can find us at Twitter and Facebook and Google Plus. Just search for f W Thinking.

They'll find us there if we want to hear from you, and we will talk to you again really soon for more on this topic. In the future of technology visit forward thinking dot Com brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,