In his quirky but groundbreaking book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Buckminster Fuller pointed out that if you are aboard a sinking ship, even a floating piano top can look extremely promising.  But Fuller also notes that this doesn’t mean a piano top is the ideal design for a flotation device.

To continue the metaphor, in the absence of anything like a global plan to combat the planetary climate crisis, we seem to be searching the horizon for piano tops, forcing ourselves into a series of more and more uncomfortable decisions regarding energy, resources and the ecology that supports us.  In almost every sphere of the environmental movement, you see strategies once considered beyond the pale under serious consideration–only because the options grow worse and worse each day.  Should we allow hydro-fracturing for shale gas if it keeps us from using the even more damaging Canadian tar sands?  If we could eliminate mountaintop removal to extract coal by ramping up our nuclear power output shouldn’t we consider doing that?  Even if tomorrow there were some miraculous global compact to transition to 100% renewable energy, these questions would need to be resolved to determine how we bridge to that desired outcome.

A recent addition to this growing list of uncomfortable strategies under consideration is geoengineering: the science of intentionally altering the earth’s atmosphere to curb the rise in average global temperature.  As we continue to burn fossil fuels at a breakneck pace and as negative feedback loops in the global system (like the growing seasonal reductions in the polar ice cap or the release of methane from melting permafrost grow worse much more quickly than expected, a growing chorus advocates for a dramatic response: injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere that will reflect significant amounts of the sun’s heat, thereby slowing the rise in global temperature.  What might once have sounded liked science fiction is being studied and discussed by reasonable, intelligent people with no particular ax to grind.

A few weeks back Michael Specter at the New Yorker did a wonderful job of summing up the recent scientific activity in the field, and there have been other discussions of the subject at Scientific American and Wired.  Yale 360 surveyed the pros and cons here.

The basic idea is to mimic a major volcanic eruption, without the big bang and the earthquakes.  When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, huge quantities of sulfur dioxide were released into the atmosphere and a period of global cooling followed.  Scientists surmise that a continued infusion of sulfates would result in long-term cooling of global average temperature.  Tinkering with the earth’s atmosphere is not for the faint of heart.  Somehow filling the atmosphere with sulfates would need to happen every year, in perpetuity, or the cooling effects would cease.  Perhaps more importantly, many are concerned that even discussing the concept of geoengineering will give those that are already complacent about climate change an excuse to ignore the subject entirely under the assumption that a simple technical fix will be found.  Others have pointed out that simply reflecting the sun’s heat while continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere will do nothing to curb acidification of our oceans, one of the most dreadful and largely ignored impacts of the current climate crisis.

Ultimately, what should give us pause about geoengineering are the things we don’t know.  The atmosphere is too complex a system to think that we can start mucking with it and have anything like a comprehensive sense of the repercussions.  For instance, many fear that geoengineering has the potential to seriously disrupt the Indian monsoon.  The list of things we don’t know about how the atmosphere interacts with our planetary ecology is almost unfathomably long.  I was reminded of this when someone recently described to me the relatively recent discovery of ballooning spiders, which cast their gossamer into the air like a sail and are carried off by the wind to new domains.  These spiders have been found upwards of 16,000 feet above sea level and travel many hundreds of miles. Will geoengineering impact this species?  I doubt anyone really knows.  And how many others are there like them?  Or consider the emerging understanding about how microbes in our stratosphere impact rainfall, disease and climate?  How will geoengineering affect this almost unknown ecology?

Humans have a tendency to assume that what we know is all there is to know, or close to it. Ultimately, the thing that should make us wary of geoengineering is the same thing that should lead us to slow our emission of greenhouse gases, because we don’t really know how it will impact our otherwise stable global climate.

One of the great benefits of climate change is the opening of the Arctic, making available vast new supplies of fossil fuel, most recently highlighted by a substantial mutual exploitation agreement between Russia and Exxon.

Seriously, of course this is awful.  It won’t even lower the cost of fossil fuels significantly because it will be such a small slice of global oil production, and even that slice will take years to serve.   More importantly, when (not if) some pipe cracks open under the ice in the middle of the four-month night, they (whether Exxon, Rosneft, Shell, BP, or whoever) will be totally helpless. Well, I mean the crews on the rig will be helpless. The lads and lassies back at corporate HQ will be doing the usual bang-up job of manufacturing reasons why no one could possibly have seen this coming.

The U.S. should at least try to stop this.  Unfortunately, we don’t have much influence over either Russia or Exxon, and one major reason is that we have no serious national program for reducing fossil fuel use ourselves. We really can’t castigate Putin for their arctic adventures when we recently approved Shell poking a few 4,000-foot holes into the seabed off Alaska’s north slope), and all signs point to our imminent (and tragic) approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to bring very heavy oil from Canadian tar sands to Houston refineries.

If you haven’t noticed (which would be reasonable, considering the scant attention it’s paid in the mainstream media), the Keystone XL pipeline is the reason our foremost climate scientist James Hansen, agitator Bill McKibben, and activist celebrities like Darryl Hannah have been getting arrested in front of the White House. The White House?  Aren’t the good guys in charge? Why aren’t these demonstrators over at the House of Representatives, protesting climate change deniers?  Well, because we seem to have moved from an administration that denied climate change and let oil companies do whatever they wanted to an administration that supports climate science and lets oil companies do whatever they want.

There are two likely explanations for the administration’s lack of resistance to these potentially catastrophic developments.  First, the price of gasoline is heading toward $4/gallon, and anyone opposed to drilling and pipelines is attacked on that basis (no matter that neither arctic drilling nor the tar sands will have any real impact on gas prices.)

Second, in the middle of a deep recession and with staggeringly high unemployment across the country, politicians may have finally realized that voters want them to do something about jobs. Unfortunately, Keystone XL has a well-oiled publicity machine bragging about the 20,000 jobs they say they will “create.”

This analysis is wrong. Simple arithmetic shows that energy efficiency programs aimed at reducing our need for fossil fuels will create more jobs than any pipeline, since the money that will go to Canada to pay for the oil would instead stay within the country and go to workers in weatherization programs, wind turbine factories, or electric car development efforts. This arithmetic was developed by Democratic Party policy wonks over decades, but their understanding seems to no longer be operative.

If this foolishness continues, arctic seals will soon find it much easier to see the oil-soaked polar bears trying to sneak up on them.  On all other fronts, these projects are bad news in both the short and long term.  Oil spills will darken the Arctic, or even Montana, and the ongoing increases in greenhouse gas emissions will ensure that the ice and the food chains we all (seals, polar bears and humans) rely on for our survival will soon be irrevocably altered or gone.

Photo credits: [Keystone Pipeline] U.S. Dept. of State |  [Tar Sands Protesters] Ben Powless / tarsandsaction.org

Maybe it was too good to be true. When substances like PCBs and DDT were largely banned in the 1970′s we witnessed a steep decline in their occurrence in our environment. A very real and very simple success story. But the story isn’t over. The major concern with this class of pollutants is that they simply don’t break down in the environment. In turns out that back when we were pumping volumes of this rubbish into our environment plenty of it was captured in glaciers. And as glaciers around the world retreat in the face of global warming these persistent nasties are being re-released into our environment.

More details here.