Humans are becoming “planetary maintenance engineers,” argues author Gwynne Dyer.
It was technology that got us into this global climate crisis, and it will be technology that gets us out of it.
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 start-ups are going deep and doing a different kind of fracking.
At 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.
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 human beings 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 re-wild most of that land. (The cattle won’t mind a bit.)
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 already, 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 just by one or two per cent, in order to keep the heating below 2 C while we work to reduce our emissions. It’s not a solution, but it may be a necessary stopgap measure to avoid political and economic chaos.
SRM is all about reflecting sunlight back 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.”
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. This column is the second in a two-part series.
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