Solar, wind and nuclear power are already good alternatives to fossil fuels, and a promising new contender is emerging.
It was technology that got us into this global climate crisis and it will be technology that gets us out of it. Specifically, technology that lets us go on living in a high-energy civilization without burning fossil fuels and technology that keeps the heat from overwhelming us while we work toward that goal.
Four kilometres down, there’s hot, dry rock (200 to 400 C) under half the land surface of the planet. Use high-pressure water to fracture the rock and the water flashes into super-heated steam. It spins turbine blades to create electricity, then cools and is pumped back down to go around again.
This new fracking technology could end up bigger than solar or wind because it’s not intermittent. It produces electricity day and night in any weather. The first megawatt-scale pilot plant opened in Nevada last year.
A global-scale solution is also needed for the accelerating loss of biodiversity. That can only be achieved by returning at least half the land human beings have appropriated for agriculture back to its natural state. Miraculously, such a solution has appeared.
SRM is all about reflecting sunlight back into space, but it comes in several flavours. The leading candidate involves using special aircraft to put sulphur dioxide high in the stratosphere. Big volcanoes do exactly that from time to time, and it temporarily cools the Earth’s surface without harming living things.
There was concern for a while that sulphur dioxide might expand the ozone hole — the region in the stratosphere over Antarctica and nearby parts of South America and Australia where a lack of ozone is letting too much ultraviolet light from the sun reach the ground. However, experts on atmospheric chemistry tell me that SRM would at worst slow the healing of the ozone hole, not expand it.
Lovelock knew we would be too slow in cutting our emissions, because that’s how human beings are. He foresaw we would then have to intervene directly in the climate to save ourselves and predicted we would have to become “planetary maintenance engineers.”
I interviewed him just eight months before he died in 2022 at the age of 103. “Are we there yet, Jim?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, but he wasn’t in despair. We have the tools to get through this, if we use them wisely.