The first round of advice came from an expert panel convened by the United Nations saying it’s time to get serious about studying methods of reflecting sunlight that might temporarily cool the Earth. The second opinion came from an ad hoc group of over 90 climate scientists, including James Hansen, who issued an appeal for accelerated research into “solar radiation modification” (SRM).
The basic idea is pretty straightforward — we know that volcanoes cool the Earth, blanketing the planet in aerosol particles like sulphur, which reflect sunlight. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to replicate that effect artificially with fleets of planes or balloons spreading aerosols in the sky.
Both groups of scientists were emphatic that we should not be deploying SRM at scale because we know far too little about its unintended consequences or even its direct impacts.
Both groups were similarly clear that efforts to cut climate pollution are much too slow, and we’d better get ahead of the inevitable pressure to unleash artificial volcanoes.
It sounds crazy but there is currently no one in charge of evaluating and authorizing geoengineering schemes and that’s a key problem the experts urged governments to address, possibly through a mechanism like the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.
The risk of rogue actors is obvious. Billionaires are already circling and vulnerable nations may take direct action. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, India starts pumping aerosols into the sky in defiance of a global ban — although the Indian government in Robinson’s novel could hardly be called a “rogue” actor since the operation was a reasoned response to a cataclysmic heat wave that killed tens of millions.
Ministry for the Future is, reportedly, being widely read by U.S. intelligence and other national security officials who war-gamed climate engineering conflicts in an operation last year.
“It could be weaponized by a country to either try to improve the climate and reduce the temperatures in their own location or against an adversary. It could be threatened in a way that could cause fear or panic among populations,” Sherri Goodman told the Washington Post in its exposé of the U.S. role-playing exercise.
We’re already beyond theoretical risk. In January, Mexico announced it would ban SRM experiments after a company called “Make Sunsets” launched two balloons with sulfur dioxide from Baja California. The company hadn’t given any notice or solicited any permission from the Mexican government.
Last September, researchers in the U.K. tested a high-altitude balloon that dispersed a small amount of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. The project was named — you couldn’t make this up — SATAN, short for Stratospheric Aerosol Transport and Nucleation.
“You don’t call something SATAN if you’re playing it straight,” David Keith told the MIT Technology Review. You might know Keith as one host of the insightful Energy vs Climate podcast out of Alberta. He’s a controversial but clear thinker — basically run out of the University of Calgary by the oil industry (landed at Harvard, poor soul), founder of the B.C.-based company Carbon Engineering, and author of A Case for Climate Engineering which is an important primer on the brutal choices ahead.
SATAN’s project lead said, “I can only confirm that our craft ascended to the heavens, as intended. I only hope that this test plays a small part in offering mankind salvation from the hellish inferno of climate change.”
Real-world geoengineering experiments aren’t restricted to blocking the sun. As long ago as 2012, a company dumped iron sulphate into the ocean off Haida Gwaii, testing whether a phytoplankton bloom could soak up carbon from the atmosphere and earn carbon credits while boosting salmon populations.
Moral hazard
SRM is very controversial among climate scientists and advocates. One big fear is the moral hazard that it could undermine momentum towards cutting emissions. You can certainly imagine fossil fuel boosters latching on to a “get out of jail free card.” If not free, at least cheap — according to one estimate, it would only cost $20 billion a year to cool the Earth one degree.
But SRM wouldn’t address the root cause of global heating and would do nothing to address the other impacts of excess carbon. Ocean acidification would keep getting worse, disrupting the chemistry of the seas and eating away coral and shellfish.
The logic of shading the sun isn’t that it’s some kind of solution to climate change but a way to artificially cool things off while cutting emissions down to zero (and, presumably, sucking carbon from the sky and back to manageable levels).
There are different angles into the question of moral hazard. The hazard is typically discussed in terms of blunting pressure to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but it’s worth flipping the question and pondering the ethics of not pursuing an intervention that might blunt heat and extreme weather, reducing death and suffering, particularly across the Global South that has done so little to cause global heating. How much of the drought in East Africa or the flooding of Pakistan would have to be alleviated for solar radiation modification to appear the lesser of evils?
There’s a disturbing analogue here to the question of adaptation versus mitigation. For many years, prominent voices warned against emphasizing adaptation precisely because of the moral hazard — the risk of taking focus off cutting greenhouse gas emissions. I’ve been sympathetic to that view myself. But while adaptation is ultimately futile without mitigation, the either-or dichotomy looks awfully naive today.
Termination Shock
SRM would also set the stage for Termination Shock, the title of another relevant novel, this one by Neal Stephenson. Once a sun shade program begins, any stoppage would mean abrupt heating, as the masking effect disappears in a matter of weeks. Stephenson’s novel explores the scrambling of regional and geopolitics in a near future of climate impacts and renegade geoengineering — more fodder for scenario planning in the bowels of Washington’s national security buildings.
We are already staring down the barrel of a slower-moving termination effect. The specialists at our grim consultation point out that we have been masking the effects of global warming with aerosols in traditional pollution. Cleaning up things like smokestacks and shipping will remove a global cooling effect that we’ve been generating at industrial scale, unintentionally hiding the true levels of heating.
“Reductions in aerosol emissions in the coming few decades will rapidly ‘unmask’ a significant but very uncertain amount of climate warming,” wrote the authors of the open letter.
In that sense, injecting reflective particles into the atmosphere can be understood simply as a deliberate counterbalance to our inadvertent geoengineering.
As the open letter says, the scale of the unmasking effect is “very uncertain.” James Hansen has estimated eliminating sulfate aerosols could double the rate of warming over the next 25 years. Estimates range widely but even at the bottom end, they are huge: somewhere between half a degree and just over 1 degree Celsius.
After so many years of debate about global warming, you might think that we’d at least have a better scientific handle on the underlying dynamics. But one thing the SRM controversy has revealed is that we still have major gaps in our understanding.
In a recent Volts podcast about SRM, Kelly Wanser described how the United States is the biggest source of global climate research, but spending hasn’t remotely kept up with public attention. It’s been more or less flat for decades, and measly in contrast with other spending:
It is still not widely understood that we are in for several decades of accelerating climate impacts, even under a best-case scenario of dramatic annual cuts in greenhouse gases. And we are a long way from that best-case scenario.
“To bring global temperatures down quickly, the only button we can push — that we know about — is solar climate intervention,” says David Fahey, co-chair of the Scientific Assessment Panel of the Montreal Protocol and director of the Chemical Sciences Laboratory at NOAA.
There is likely to be intense and understandable pressure to push that button. But it’s still an open question whether we’ll have established any oversight or answered the scientific unknowns.
The Roundup
Not very ethical oil
Downstream communities were kept in the dark for nine months about a release of toxic oilsands tailings in Alberta.
Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation calls it a nine-month coverup and accused Imperial Oil and the Alberta government regulator of environmental racism.
The government of the Northwest Territories (also downstream) says, “This lack of transparency and information sharing from our Alberta partners is not an isolated incident, which increases our frustration in this matter."
There appear to have been two separate toxic releases. Imperial Oil learned about toxic seepage from its tailings last May. In addition, last month, 5.3 million litres spilled from a catchment, one of the largest spills in Alberta history.
"How many more tailings leaks are taking place right now?" Adam asked. "It's going to be hard for me to believe anything that comes out of the representatives of Imperial or from the (regulator).”
Banking on fossils
“Environmental advocacy groups and allied investors are pushing some of Canada’s largest banks toward better climate action using a series of shareholder resolutions,” reports John Woodside. The shareholder resolutions will get voted on next month during the banks’ annual meetings.
Big banks are still giving more support to fossil fuels than low-carbon energy. RBC ranks among the worst — giving fossil fuels more than twice as much support.
Climate activists occupied universities this week, demanding RBC be thrown off campus.
Ad ban
The U.K. advertising watchdog has banned Lufthansa ads claiming the company is “protecting the future.”
“Many of these initiatives [are] targeted to deliver results only years or decades into the future,” the advertising watchdog told The Guardian. “We also understood that there were currently no environmental initiatives or commercially viable technologies in the aviation industry which would substantiate the absolute green claim ‘protecting its future’, as we considered consumers would interpret it.”
Vancouver not suing Big Oil
Vancouver’s city council voted to raise property taxes 10.7 per cent, and the new mayor acknowledged the hefty hike was driven in part by the need to upgrade sewers and storm drains to keep up with the storms of climate change. But the new council did not follow through on the previous council’s vote to set aside $1 per resident to sue Big Oil for damages.
“Yesterday’s vote guarantees that Vancouver residents will pay hundreds of millions as the costs of climate change rise … while the corporate polluters most responsible pay nothing,” said Andrew Gage, staff lawyer for West Coast Environmental Law.
A surprise performance
Thousands of people rallied at the B.C. legislature last weekend, calling on Premier David Eby to protect the remaining old-growth forests. Organizers are likely to get even bigger crowds next time: music legend Neil Young made a surprise appearance and offered to play a couple of songs, including Heart of Gold.
International Court of Justice
Vanuatu has rallied 105 countries to support its resolution before the United Nations calling for the International Court of Justice to render an opinion on climate obligations of member countries.
One-in-seven
Talk about exponential growth: five years ago, one-in-70 cars sold was an EV. Today, it’s one-in-seven.
The IEA also decried the ongoing global rise in SUV sales — if SUVs were a country, they’d be the sixth-biggest climate polluter in the world.
Carbon Capture Conundrum
I’ll leave you with a conversation about carbon capture. Max Fawcett invited Environmental Defence’s Julia Levin onto his podcast Maxed Out. Should taxpayer dollars be funding carbon capture by oil companies? Any buried carbon would have to be secured for thousands of years — who’s responsible for that?
That’s all for this week. Thank you for reading Zero Carbon. Please forward it along and always feel free to write to me with feedback or suggestions for future newsletters at [email protected].
Support for this issue of Zero Carbon came from The McConnell and Trottier foundations and I-SEA.