As you’re reading this, noxious fumes are being pumped out of power plants, the tailpipes of cars, and commercial airplanes. The carbon dioxide they are emitting can remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years. If we do manage to mostly eliminate the use of fossil fuels in the future, we’ll still need to roll back the effects of some of these emissions in order to meet our climate goals. Scientists are currently working on technology that could help the cause, but the Trump administration’s anti-climate agenda is throwing a wrench into their progress.
There are multiple types of climate interventions, sometimes referred to as geoengineering, that the world may need to rely on to deal with the impacts of our carbon output. There’s the most controversial of the lot, called solar-radiation modification (SRM), which involves releasing aerosols into the stratosphere to essentially slightly dim the sun. There are also less contentious interventions, such as carbon-dioxide removal (CDR), which can take multiple forms and involves actually removing carbon from the atmosphere.
People hear of SRM and think of science fiction stories of blocking out the sun — but that’s not quite right. The aerosols would reflect back a percent or two of sunlight that would otherwise reach the Earth. That said, there’s still quite a bit we don’t know about the long-term consequences of releasing aerosols into the stratosphere, so there are legitimate concerns about this idea.
Because CDR is just about removing CO2 from the atmosphere, it’s seen as a more straightforward, logical approach for dealing with our built up emissions. Scientists need to fine tune this technology, and there’s still plenty that needs to be learned.
While SRM is controversial, many scientists feel it should be studied further in case it is needed to avoid some of the harsher effects of climate change in the future. CDR, on the other hand, is built into many climate models, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports for how we’ll reach our climate goals.
The Trump administration’s science funding cuts, firings at agencies like the NOAA, the elimination of important science programs at federal agencies, and other measures born out of its disregard for the climate crisis have negatively impacted the study of climate intervention methods like SRM and CDR.
“I had a grant that was awarded from NOAA, but they told me that they had no money to give me, and so that I couldn’t do it,” Daniele Visioni, an assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University, tells Rolling Stone. “This was explicitly research for the program aimed at understanding and reducing uncertainties when it comes to model projections of geoengineering in the longer term.”
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SRM, in particular, is going to require a lot more research before it could potentially be put into practice, from how to actually release aerosols to projecting their environmental impact. Some of the work here can be done with models, rather than on-the-ground research.
“Solar geoengineering, which refers to reflecting a fraction of incoming sunlight … would require a small fleet of airplanes or other mechanisms for lofting particles into the stratosphere that would circulate around the whole globe,” says Holly Buck, an associate professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Buffalo. “The thing about that is we really haven’t done enough research to understand what the implications would be.”
Buck also notes that CDR is going to be necessary to meet our climate goals. Some of the problems with it at the moment revolve around figuring out how to do it at the scale necessary and at an affordable price point.
“CDR is a kind of technology that if anybody could make it work at scale, which is completely unclear, it would be a good thing,” says Raymond Pierrehumbert, a professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford. “It would be helpful.”
David Ho, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii, says that firings and the cutting of funding have had significant impacts on further developing CDR techniques, which include machines that suck CO2 out of the air, referred to as direct air capture, and the concept of reducing the acidity of the ocean so it will naturally absorb more CO2 than it already does.
Roughly 22 million tons of carbon dioxide already find their way into the ocean every day, and reducing the ocean’s acidity helps naturally increase those numbers. This can be done by grinding up silicate rocks and introducing them to the ocean.
“When they fired a whole bunch of people — the indiscriminate firing of people — these carbon-dioxide removal efforts were fairly nascent, and so a lot of the people were in their probationary periods,” says Ho. “They’re all gone.”
Direct air capture hubs that were in development have been threatened by Department of Energy funding cuts, and many other carbon removal projects are also facing uncertain futures. As Ho says, “Nobody is sure what’s really happening,” and it’s making research and development quite difficult.
Not only is the Trump administration killing funding to renewable energy and trying to boost the fossil fuel industry, it is hurting the effort to research and deploy these climate interventions that may be necessary to win the fight against climate change in the long term. It’s unclear what will be required as this threat grows going forward, so research is key to being prepared for any eventualities. The Trump administration hobbling science in America is making the world less prepared to deal with whatever scenarios the future may bring.
From Rolling Stone US
