Technology got us into this global climate crisis, and it will be technology that gets us out of it. Specifically, technology that lets us continue living in a high-energy civilization without burning fossil fuels, and that keeps the heat from overwhelming us while we work toward that goal.
Solar, wind and nuclear power are already good alternatives to fossil fuels, and now a promising new contender is emerging. Geothermal power was once limited to countries with hot volcanic rock near the surface (Italy, Iceland, New Zealand), but now startups are going deep and doing a different kind of fracking.
At four kilometres down, there’s hot, dry rock (200 C to 400 C) under half the land surface of the planet. By using high-pressure water to fracture the rock, the water flashes into superheated steam. It spins turbine blades to create electricity, then cools and is pumped back down to go around again.
This 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.
Then we need a global-scale solution for the accelerating loss of biodiversity. That can only be achieved by returning at least half the land that humans have appropriated for agriculture back to its natural state — and almost miraculously, such a solution has appeared.
It’s called precision fermentation: put the right microbe in a bioreactor, give it water, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and sunlight, and it will double its mass every three hours. Drain the resultant soup off, dry it, and you have 65 per cent edible protein, fats or carbohydrates.
Half the world’s farmland is used to feed our domestic animals. We could feed them this instead and return most of that land to its natural state. (The cattle won’t mind.) And if our own food supply shrinks as the temperature rises, we can eat the “food from the sky” too: it can be turned into any kind of food you want. The first factory opens near Helsinki this year.
Unfortunately, the typical new technology takes 15 to 30 years to roll out at scale, and there is little reason to believe that these new technologies are different. Given how fast the warming is proceeding, we are still in great danger. That’s why we will probably need Solar Radiation Management (SRM).
SRM involves reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the planet’s surface by one or two per cent to keep the heating below 2° C while we work to reduce emissions. It’s not a solution, but it may be a necessary stop-gap to avoid political and economic chaos.
SRM is all about reflecting sunlight into space. The leading candidate involves using special aircraft to put sulphur dioxide high into the stratosphere.
Big volcanoes do the same thing from time to time, and it temporarily cools the Earth’s surface without harming living things. (There is no life in the stratosphere.) Some worry that it might expand the ozone hole, but experts tell me that at worst it might slow the healing of the ozone hole.
Forty-five years ago, James Lovelock, the scientist who realized that all the Earth’s natural systems are connected and named the ensemble Gaia (now renamed Earth System Science), saw this all coming. He knew that we would be too slow in cutting our emissions because that’s how human beings are. He foresaw that we would then have to intervene directly in the climate to save ourselves, and predicted that we would become “planetary maintenance engineers.”
I interviewed him one last time for my new book on climate change, just eight months before he died in 2022 at the age of 103.
“Are we there yet, Jim?” I asked him. “Yes,” he said, but he wasn’t in despair. We have the tools to get through this if we use them wisely.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.