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Nothing anyone is doing has accomplished anything meaningful to prevent climate change.
Sorry to be so blunt about it, but it's true. Greenhouse gas emissions keep rising, hitting record levels despite the CFL bulb, the Prius, EcoMagination, solar and wind power, the EU's carbon-trading scheme, etc. Nice tries don't matter to the atmosphere.
The only thing that's curbed carbon dioxide pollution on a scale that's meaningful is the global recession.
This is why -- unless and until scientists discover a breakthrough in clean energy or political leaders impose a global fossil-fuel tax or carbon emissions cap -- we need to think seriously about geoengineering.
A good place to start is with a recent report from the GAO, Congress's research arm, called Climate Engineering: Technical Status, Future Directors and Potential Responses. It offers solid information and glimmers of optimism for those of us looking for a way out of the climate crisis.
Regular readers of this blog know that I'm fascinated with geoengineering, a term used to describe a variety of large-scale interventions in the earth's climate. In particularly, I'm intrigued by efforts to directly capture carbon dioxide from the air. [One such device is pictured above.] I've written about several startup companies that are working on carbon dioxide removal technology, aka CDR. [See Kilimanjaro Energy: towering ambitions, A global thermostat?, Is geoengineering ready for prime time?]
The 121-page GAO report says no geoengineering technology is even close to being ready to deploy:
Climate engineering technologies are not now an option for addressing global climate change, given our assessment of their maturity, potential effectiveness, cost factors, and potential consequences.
No surprise there. Except for some small-scale studies in Europe, there's been almost no government research into climate engineering.
The GAO report, which was requested by Congress, rated a half-dozen or so technologies on a scale of 1 to 9, measuring Technological Readiness Levels, and rated none higher than 3. A technology with a TRL score lower than 6 is considered immature.
But, the report says, the technology that's furthest along is one of the least known: direct air capture, which would chemically scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere:
The highest-scoring CDR technology (at TRL 3) was direct air capture of CO2, which has had laboratory demonstrations using a prototype and field demonstrations of underground sequestration of CO2.
The technology itself works, according to the GAO:
Its fundamental chemistry and processes are well understood and laboratory-scale direct air-capture demonstrations are supported at two universities.
Every photosynthetic organism
Every photosynthetic organism you see around you is a carbon capture device, that operates on low levels of solar energy.
Want to capture carbon? Work on biomass. These ideas about scrubbing diffuse CO2 from the atmosphere are maddeningly wrong-headed, on every level. We already have plants capturing the CO2 for us, without any intervention on our part. Why do we need to cover land with machinery to do the same job, with a lot more energy inputs?
Ridiculous concept, and this article should have included the energy inputs for producing the machinery and for operating the machinery. The dollar figure per ton of CO2 removed is not a very useful metric, and the energy inputs would have revealed that it is a pointless exercise in futility to try to power this machinery using fossil fuels. You'll never pull more out of the air than you produced to make the energy to run the machinery to pull the CO2.