Geoengineering fun

Eli Dourado writes of four intriguing geoengineering schemes: (HT Marginal Revolution's incomparable links.)

1. Bring back the Wooly Mammoth

The short version: Siberia used to be grassland, maintained by wooly mammoths. Grassland is colder than forests. Our ancestors killed off the wooly mammoths, and the trees took over. The permafrost is melting, which will be a huge climate amplifier. What to do?

Nikita Zimov ... is director of Pleistocene Park, a 144 km² grassy Siberian reserve founded by his father, gonzo scientist Sergey Zimov. The Zimovs have spent the past two decades ripping up trees and reintroducing grazing herds, including bison, moose, wild horses, yaks, and reindeer.

The plan is working. Nikita Zimov says the permafrost, which is at around –3º outside the park, is 17º colder (!) inside the park. 

Better yet bring back the wooly mammoth! Or rather play with elephant and wooly mammoth DNA until we get a half way new animal that can go restore the Siberian grasslands, and let it evolve a bit.

Mammoths provided the Pleistocene with the valuable services of grazing, trampling snow and moving it around to get to the grass below, and uprooting trees. Nothing will make a mammoth happier, it is thought, than ripping a tree out of the icy ground, just as modern elephants enjoy doing the same in the warmer ground of Africa. Based on everything we know, mammoths were a critical part of the Siberian Steppe ecosystem, and their extinction at human hands is what caused the forests to take hold.

I love the image of genetically engineered half wooly mammoths playfully ripping trees out of Siberia, eating grasses, and trampling ground to save the permafrost.

2. Project Vesta.

 mine large volumes of a (usually) green mineral called olivine, crush it up, and spread the resulting green sand on beaches all over the world, especially in the tropics where the water is warmest. 

It soaks up carbon dioxide and ends up on the sea floor, and eventually subjected into the mantle. That's where carbon dioxide ends up now, just much faster. And green beaches are kinda cool.

...One ton of olivine applied in Vesta’s process removes around 1.25 tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere. Olivine is superabundant, making up about half of Earth’s upper mantle...[ calculation follows ] that works out to around $9.04 per ton of CO₂ removed from the atmosphere and ocean.

$10 per ton is a great price. Many other hot ideas are $100 per ton or more.

what if we wanted to offset cumulative anthropogenic emissions since 1751? As of 2017, that was close to 1.6 trillion tons of CO₂. 1.6T × $9.04 = $14.46T through 2017. Adding $360B for each of 2018 and 2019, we arrive at a one-time cost of $15.18T for offsetting all human emissions since the dawn of the industrial revolution, which if done over 10 years, would cost 1.7% of global GDP.

3. Prometheus fuels

Short version: a chemical process that allows you to create ethanol and then other fuels from any electricity source, including nuclear, solar, etc. Fuels can be stored and transported, so the intermittent nature of much "clean" fuel doesn't matter.

4. The billion oyster project

Bring huge oysters back to New York Harbor. Ok, not much climate action but pretty cool

*******

Cool, but like other sensible adaptation and geoengineering projects, you can tell this is going nowhere in today's environmental politics, right? Genetically engineer a new frankenspecies of mammoth and set it loose to breed? Spread green rocks on all the worlds beaches? How unsightly! You've got to be kidding right? Well, no, if the climate really is a planetary emergency.

Two little sentences from Eli are worth quoting here:

Some environmentalists don’t like geoengineering because it seems too easy: 

Indeed. Suppose we found a technical solution that did not require an uprooting of all society, "climate justice," a federal takeover of this that and the other. (Nuclear power, GMO foods, green beaches, and wooly mammoths.) How would the Green New Dealers react? Thanks, problem solved, we'll go back to other things? I doubt it.

Most deeply

 it ignores the sins of humanity, for which we must atone. 

That is indeed much of the mood on the climate left -- and the reason all sorts of technocratic solutions are going nowhere politically.

Eli makes a brave ethical argument for his GMO wooly mammoths:

..our climate impact started much earlier, during the Paleolithic era, when we hunted megafauna to extinction and therefore altered critical ecosystems. .. But in fact, using genetic engineering to revive megafauna that we wiped out to restore ecoystems that benefit the climate also atones, if that is the right way of looking it at. Hunting these magnificent creatures to extinction was our original climate sin.

Good luck with that. Maybe we should instead charge the mammoth head on: just get past the atoning for sins business and get on with solving the carbon problem in the most effective way.

from The Grumpy Economist https://ift.tt/2H85ZPJ