I argued on my Climate Cliff page that it could already be too late to stop climate change running away from us despite massive carbon cuts.
If we instituted a truly massive ‘war-time economy’ against burning coal and oil and gas, there might still be a chance to avoid the climate cliff and the sheer cost of geo-engineering. (See footnote). But I don’t see it happening. We’re still pumping out ever more CO2. So what can we do if we go over the Climate Cliff?
What is the ‘crash position’?
Massive seaweed farms: could stimulate the ocean ecology and feed 10 billion people, give medical and concrete building materials, dump masses of seaweed into oceanic trenches where their carbon is trapped for thousands of years, fertilise land agriculture and return CO2 to safe levels this century.
Solar shield: pour dust into the upper atmosphere to shield us from the sun. This may be one of the cheapest ’emergency cures’ but could have nasty side effects if we try to cancel all the warming. Even advocates warn we should only cancel half the warming this way.
Olivine dust: Spreading this dust across grasslands will suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and soak up our annual emissions for ‘only’ $200 Billion a year. But see my note on cost below!
But all this sheer investment should go into nukes in the first place!
The tragedy is that next generation reactors could come off the assembly line at about $2 billion each. That’s 100 Gigawatt reactors a year, which is nothing to a global GDP of $75 TRILLION annually. The tragedy is that $200 billion a year is most of the money we need to fix climate change! The obvious conclusion:-
1. If we act fast enough right now we could save a stack of money, save a stack of ecosystems, and save a stack of lives by preventing the worst of climate change. Then we wouldn’t have to spend money on these geo-engineering ‘cures’. As the Stern and Garnaut Reports both concluded, prevention is far, far cheaper than a cure. 20 times cheaper!
2. If we leave it too late, we will be stuck with the bill for both the clean energy we have to build anyway and these geo-engineering schemes! We will still have to spend the money to build those nukes. We’ll still be paying the substantial health bills of coal and oil and gas, and just delaying the inevitable.
Eclipse Now 
Dave – Your figure for “current” CO2 emissions is based on the 2007 AR4, itself based on even older measurements. AR4 SPM says: “Annual fossil carbon dioxide emissions increased from an average of 6.4 [6.0 to 6.8] GtC (23.5 [22.0 to 25.0] GtCO2) per year in the 1990s to 7.2 [6.9 to 7.5] GtC (26.4 [25.3 to 27.5] GtCO2) per year in 2000–2005 (2004 and 2005 data are interim estimates).” So we’re not at 26.4Gt per year, but are currently at something like 35Gt CO2 p.a. (depending on which set of figures you choose).
“100 GW of new plants per year, which would cut emissions by about 790 million tons/yr each year”
No, they might displace that amount of emissions *growth* if they were being built instead of new coal, but they would not cut emissions unless coal plants were being shut down for each new nuclear plant. Thus, you’d need considerably more than your figures in order to account for further growth in energy demand.
Plus, this estimate assumes that nuclear can be built for €2b per 1GW plant. Perhaps that might be the case at some point in the future, but we’re nowhere near that now.
Good point Byron! I guess the focus of EP’s point was that $200 billion is a lot of money to waste on spreading dust in the skies (White Skies) or on the ground (Olivine Co2 sequestration) to solve global warming when it should instead go on nuclear power plants which might help prevent it in the first place.
Electricity use is supposed to DOUBLE from 2000 to 2030.
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull461/power_to_the_people.html
A war-time emergency economy really is required. We need to pump $400 billion into nukes each year to build new power and replace the old. That’s a lot of money, but when broken down into a global economy of about $70 trillion dollars annual GDP, it’s not so much. But will it happen? No. I tend to speak in absolute terms of what is possible in an ideal world where everyone rationally looked at the technical possibilities and just decided to get on with it! This of course never happens in the real world. Politics gets involved, especially with nuclear power.
I’m just saying that if I ran the world, we’d probably put $600 billion a year into solving global warming once and for all: $400 into nukes (with subsidies for poorer post-colonial nations to develop their economies) and $200 into Olivine to stabilise the warming over this period. After 30 years the emergency build out of nukes would have broken the back of the problem and the human population would be stabilising. Transport systems would also move to electricity as oil became more expensive, and New Urban movements would also have increased many efficiencies.
Beyond that point, both Olivine and Biochar would help bring us back to 350ppm over time.
You might want to include Ocean Iron Fertilization in the geoengineering section. It is proposed both to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere & ocean & also to increase fishery production.
Googling that term turns up a few items on the idea like the wikipedia article.
Here is the website of an enthusiast for the idea
http://russgeorge.net/
I would like to see some more experiments with it, including careful checking for every downside to the idea anyone can think of.
Hi Jim,
yeah, I’d like to see more work done on it as I just read this yesterday.
“The iron fertilization of the ocean had generated optimism until an experiment earlier this year dampened hopes. When the theory was tested in a 115-square-mile area of the Southern Ocean, tiny crustacean zooplankton ate up all the phytoplankton.”
http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/hacking_the_sky/
But isn’t that the point? The small fish eat the zooplankton, the big fish eat the smaller fish, the ocean food web is stimulated into action and hopefully some of that carbon ends up on our dinner plate and some of it at the bottom of the ocean? Indeed, if krill are super-stimulated into even larger schools, whales will have more to feed on and whale droppings are an enormous source of both more ocean fertilisation and more phytoplankton, and hopefully some of that phytoplankton will end up at the bottom of the ocean.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/06/16/2927491.htm
Indeed, some more recent tests appear quite positive:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/11/scaling-and-testing-geoengineering.html
If we then look at ways to sequester our sewerage onto land, removing heavy metals but saving the NPK and carbon as compost for farmlands, I wonder if that would not only help create a more industrial-strength permaculture recycling of NPK but also dump carbon from seafood onto our farmlands?