The wider world

18
Sep
2024

Wildcat geoengineering

Sun setting behind clouds. The sky is deep orange.
Photo: NASA. Public domain.

Back in 2010, before I started working professionally in a climate-adjacent field, I went to a talk about geoengineering. I came away with a lot to think about. I wrote in my journal at the time, referring to the idea of using sulphur dioxide in the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight,

“Beyond the obvious risks of unintended consequences with trying something like this on a global scale – and such risks are large – there’s a question in my mind of what nation, or group of nations, could possibly claim to have the moral or legal authority to actually do it.”

Since then there has been a lot of serious discussion of geoengineering of various sorts, including this, and I’m not here to pronounce on whether or not it’s a good idea – those far more expert than me have well publicised views. But… at the time I wrote the above, I had assumed that it would be a nation, or a group of nations… now it appears to be a bunch of techbros doing it on their own initiative.

That’s hugely problematic, for a lot of reasons, most of which are explained in the linked article. But there’s something they haven’t picked up on in the article, which relates to the way it’s funded. The company who is doing this is saying “Each gram of SO2 we release will counteract the effect of n kg of CO2 this year.” And on the back of this, they are selling carbon credits for those n kg of CO2. That’s their “business model” for what some would say is simply pollution.

But carbon offsets are normally a one-off payment. I release a kg of CO2, and I buy an offset for it. The SO2 release is something that will need to happen every year!* So something doesn’t line up…

For those who haven’t seen it, this problem of treating the symptom (heat), and not the cause (greenhouse gas), was wonderfully satirised by Futurama back in 2002:

*(maybe not every year. That’s aribtrary. But the dwell time of SO2 in the atmopshere is less than that of CO2, so it’ll need renewing)

Posted by simon
02
Jun
2024

“Profits” cartoon

This “comic” (the word hardly fits) from Rosemary Mosco hit me hard. I don’t have anything to say about it that isn’t said better by the strip itself. Except, perhaps, that if you want more context, this recent US congressional report might be a good place to start.

Original at https://rosemarymosco.com/comics/climate/strong-performance. The rest of her “climate” series is well worth reading too. Most of them are funnier than this.

Posted by simon in The wider world
17
Jun
2023

Overview effect

“Overview effect” is the name given to something experienced by some, but not all, astronauts, when they see the Earth from space. The view of the whole planet, and hence the whole human race, from a distance can bring about a marked shift in perspective, in attitudes, in thinking, that favours peace and cooperation and values the environment 1. It’s probably more common in those who have seen Earth from a great distance – most famously the Apollo astronauts – than those who have only been to low earth orbit, although it certainly happens there too.

View of the Earth rising over the lunar surface, taken by William Anders on board Apollo 8.
Image: Earthrise, William Anders / NASA, 1968. Public domain. Taken on board Apollo 8.

The famous “Earthrise” photo of 1968 probably helped some people feel the same, although looking at a picture is hardly the same as being there and knowing that the rest of humanity is beneath you.

Carl Sagan’s “Pale blue dot” photo and the powerful accompanying speech were (among other things) presumably an attempt to bring some overview effect to the masses. More recently, some wealthy space tourists have spoken about seeking out the effect.

I mention this now because I’ve recently started reading Becky Chambers’s novel, “Record of a spaceborn few“. In it much of humanity lives, and has lived for generations, on a fleet of huge spaceships. This speech is something like liturgy:

“We destroyed our world, and left it for the skies.
Our numbers were few. Our species had scattered.
We were the last to leave.
We left the ground behind. We left the oceans. We left the air
We watched these things grow small. We watched them shrink into a point of light.
As we watched, we understood. We understood what we were. We understood what we had lost. We understood what we would need to do to survive. We abandoned more than our ancestors’ world. We abandoned our short sight. We abandoned our bloody ways. We made ourselves anew.”

This version of humanity experienced the overview effect en masse, as a species, far too late. Let’s not do the same as them.

[1] As I’m currently between jobs, I don’t have journal access. So these two links have been included on the basis of their abstracts.

Posted by simon in Reflective, The wider world
25
Oct
2022

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

I try to keep this blog focused on the professional, or at least the energy-related, and so I doubt that I’ve ever mentioned my love of speculative fiction (a broader term for what might, in the past, have been named “science fiction and fantasy”). But in the last few days, after many recommendations, I’ve been reading Becky Chambers‘s “A Psalm for the Wild-Built“, and that deserves mention here. So here’s this blog’s first book review. Sort of.

The book is short, and enjoyable, an easy read, and excellent in many ways that I won’t get into here. I’m not going to discuss most of its themes, nor even its plot; what has made me post is the world in which it’s set. It’s “bright green”, but beyond bright green. It’s what some would now call “solarpunk”. It’s a society that has de-industrialised and become sustainable, and has completely changed in order to do so, but rather than doing that by reverting to a pre-industrial way of life it has done something new: it has retained technology, but without consumer culture or (we assume) mass production.

“It was a good computer, given to them on their sixteenth birthday, a customary coming-of-age gift. It had a cream-coloured frame and a pleasingly crisp screen, and Dex had only needed to repair it five times in the years that it had travelled in their clothes. A reliable device built to last a lifetime, as all computers were.”

This is, I assume, the kind of world that many environmentalists yearn for – especially those who want to decentralise, for villages to live locally and within their means, and so forth. This is sometimes expressed, at least by those in the first world, as a yearning for the past, for pre-industrial society, which is something that I can’t get behind for fairly obvious reasons. But some also see it as a brave new future, as something that hasn’t been tried before. The huge missing piece is usually a plan to get from here to there…

Anyway. The book is lovely, and provided me with a calm and enjoyable few hours. You should read it, not just for the setting but also for the many other things it explores.

“Farmers and doctors and artists and plumbers and whatever. Monks of other gods. Old people, young people. Everybody needed a cup of tea sometimes. Just an hour or two to sit and do something nice, and then they could get back to whatever it was.”

A glass cup of herbal tea, presented on a hemp mat.
Photo: rawpixel.com, CC0 public domain
Posted by simon in Reflective, The wider world
16
Oct
2022

The name of natural gas

I’ve seen some recent tweets, and partisan websites, claiming that calling geologically-stored methane “natural gas” was a major greenwashing achievement by the fossil fuel industry – that it’s meant to imply a benign fuel.

I can see why people think that. It’s the sort of steering of language that the modern fossil fuel industry might try to do. But in this case, I don’t think that happened: the term “natural gas” is older than “greenwashing”, older than most of the people using it, and arguably older than the environmental movement as a whole.

When natural gas was introduced, it was called that to distinguish it from “town gas” or “coal gas” – a nasty, noxious and somewhat toxic substance made from coal in each town’s gasworks, which used to cook our food and perhaps heat some homes. When the UK switched to natural gas in the 1970s there was a huge, co-ordinated campaign of technicians visiting every gas-connected home to adjust or replace appliances ready for the switchover… and that shift is why the old, often Victorian, gasworks in most cities – eye-catching for their “gasometer” storage systems – are no more. Calling it natural gas, rather than just gas, is also helpful when in the company of Americans, lest they think that we fry our eggs on petrol 😉.

None of this means, of course, that the fossil industry doesn’t benefit from the terminology. This paper (paywall), reported in Vox, suggests that people feel more positive about “natural gas” than “fossil gas” or “methane”. But in this case, so far as I know, it wasn’t a cynical ploy by the industry to call it that. They just lucked out with what it was already called.

Atmospheric view of gas being flared into an evening sky.
Image: Blake Thornberry, CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted by simon in The wider world