$100 Million for Geoengineering Research, Plus Using Giant Viruses to Cool Glaciers
The Plan B Post is your free, weekly update on cutting carbon pollution and cooling the earth with geo-engineering. June 19, 2024 edition.
IT’S NOT EXACTLY an Oprah-style “everybody gets a car” mania, but $100 million is on offer for geoengineering research, a huge increase over previous years, writes James Temple at MIT Technology Review.
“A lot of people are recognizing the obvious. We’re not in a good position with regard to mitigation—and we haven’t spent enough money on research to be able to support good, wise decisions on solar geoengineering.”
— Douglas MacMartin of Cornell
If you’re a geoengineering researcher, here’s where the funding is coming from:
Quadrature Climate Foundation plans to provide $40 million over the next three years. That’s about 5% of its total assets.
Carbon to Sea, a nonprofit formed by Meta’s former chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer, will give $50 million over five years.
The Simmons Foundation will award $10M per year over five years.
AT A HARVARD event, Billy Pizer of Resources for the Future said geoengineering is moving from fringe to mainstream. Geoengineering “may happen whether you want to talk about it or not. If you don’t want to be surprised by it, you need to get ahead of it.”
But quote of the day goes to Harvard’s Keutsch for this disturbing gem:
“I compare solar geoengineering to opiates. They’re really strong painkillers in that they only treat a symptom and not the actual cause. As for the withdrawal symptoms, that’s the termination shock. For me, from the physical science perspective, termination shock is the biggest concern.”
CAN YOU BUILD a berm big enough to hold fast an entire glacier? That’s the glacier geoengineering question of the week.
Because a “handful of ice streams and large glaciers” are expected to produce nearly all the sea-level rise over the next few centuries, a few well placed super structures could make a huge difference and cost much less than protecting all the waterfront cities in the world from sea level rise.
“The idea is to return the system to its state around the early 20th century, when we know that warm water could not access the ice shelf as much as today.”
— John Moore, University of Lapland, Finland
Among the solutions Moore and others have looked at are the famous glacier curtains we talked about last week. You could also build giant artificial braces to hold glaciers in place, cover them in reflective insulation; or remove the water from beneath them so they move more slowly. By contrast, the proposal of building fencing to retain snow that would otherwise blow into the ocean seems disappointingly unimaginative.
WE COVERED IT before, but if you've missed it, Hayley Smith at the Los Angeles Times this week takes an in-depth look at how cleaner shipping has increased global warming. Call it the reverse solar radiation management effect.
CANADA IS AT a crossroads on geoengineering. It can wait-and-see, or use serve as an honest broker on this emerging technological issue.
AND FINALLY THIS week, how about deploying giant 1,500X-scale viruses to eat the dark-colored algae blooms that speed glacial melting? It could be a thing. After all, what could go wrong?