Saving the World (with Science-Fiction!)

Look, I know, you're busy.  So am I.  I won't take up too much of your time.  But we need to talk seriously about saving the world.

Saving the world isn’t easy.  I know.  I’ve tried.

My first plan (to locate radioactive waste and become a mutant superhero) didn’t work out.  My fallback plan is to raise my kids to save the world for me.  But that takes time, and these days, it’s hard to tell if we have enough time. 

I was feeling pretty good at this time last year (for the first time in a long time, actually) with the passing of the Paris Accord to finally address climate change and keep global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius.  The idea of being carbon neutral by 2050 was downright exciting!

After all, climate change is a global existential threat to all humans and our ways of life.  Naturally, our government should join with other governments in the interest of mutual security!

But then a year of harsh reality came crashing down and it’s abundantly clear that no one in the government gives a duck’s butt about the Paris Accord, climate change, or guaranteeing a future for our children and grandchildren.

And now our current Commander-in-Cheeto (and no, I will never NOT call him that) is demanding that scientists shut up about climate change, run new research by him first, and freely offers “alternative facts” when regular actual facts aren’t convenient enough.

Well.  Shit.

Okay, no need to panic.  After all, government is inefficient at best, and it would have taken them forever to actually do anything.  No, this whole climate change thing should be left to the free market.  After all, given the right incentives, the free market always makes the right decisions.  And thanks to the simple carbon tax that Congress passed, the free market has all the incentive it needs to innovate ourselves to a rosy, totally non-disastrous future!

What?  Congress didn’t pass a carbon tax?  But why not?  It’s simple, effective, focuses the energies of corporations on making simple changes to reduce carbon emissions, and provides a system by which corporations that invest in carbon-capture technology can make a ton of money!  And most of all, it's a free-market capitalism-based idea.  These guys are supposed to LOVE market-based solutions!  It’s a no-brainer!  And without some incentive, no private company will bother investing in clean technology (except a tiny bit, just to pull in easily-suckered environmentally-conscious customers).

Really?  Not at all?  Not even a cap-and-trade system?

Well.  Shit.

Ok, guys.  Looks like we’re gonna have to do this our damn selves.  As usual.

Now, look, I know you’re doing all you can.  You’re recycling, composting, driving fuel-efficient cars, maybe you have solar panels on your house, or maybe you’re still looking into that.  You’ve reduced your carbon footprint as much as possible.  You’re not part of the problem, you’re part of the solution!

Sorry to say this, but it’s not enough.

We can’t nickel and dime our way to climate sustainability.  At the Paris climate summit, the world’s top climate scientists agreed that to mitigate the worst-case scenario of climate change we needed to find a way to become carbon neutral.  Neutral.  Meaning no carbon emissions added to atmospheric levels.  Seven billion human beings contributing no more carbon to the atmosphere than the planet is able to deal with.  It’s impossible.

The very notion is like something out of a science-fiction novel.

Which gives me an idea.

Now, I don’t read a ton of science-fiction, partially because a big chunk of it is absolute rubbish.  But I’ve found a handful of authors who are well-worth the time and effort to make it through their books.  Authors like Neal Stephenson, Phillip K. Dick, and (most relevant to this conversation) Kim Stanley Robinson.

Robinson wrote, in addition to a series of books looking at catastrophic climate change and surreal but wonderful book about a time-traveling Galileo, a series of books on colonizing Mars, taking a hard look at what would be involved at terraforming the Red Planet to make it habitable to Earthlings, and whether or not such a thing should even be attempted.  Really great stuff.

Either Mars...or the Earth four years from now.  Hard to tell.

Terraforming has long been a common device in any science-fiction dealing with human traveling to other planets.  How do you make a planet totally unlike Earth into a new Earth?  If it’s cold, like Mars, you maybe could find ways to increase atmospheric concentrations of CO2, or if it’s hot, like Venus, find ways of scrubbing CO2 out of the atmosphere.  Typically, big machines are used to cover up the fact that its basically ecological magic, waving a wand and making a planet habitable.  Take a dead, unlivable planet, turn on the re-Earth-anator, and presto!

All of this is, of course, total fiction.  But I also thought 1984 was fiction, until Captain Tiny Hands got elected and we started having to actually hear the words “alternative facts” without any intended irony.

(Yes, I know, I’m supposed to lay off divisive rhetoric and infantile name-calling.  But screw it, I will when he does.  I’m not the one who’s supposed to be acting like the leader of the Free World.)

So, if Newspeak can exist now, so can terraforming, which means this whole climate change thing is about to get awesome!  We can terraform the Earth itself!

Because the reality is we can’t just rely on our own incremental reductions in our individual carbon footprints.  We need to actually terraform the Earth, to make it more habitable than it is or soon will be.  And here’s the craziest part: I firmly believe that we have all the technology we need to do this, and most of it is available to anyone.

We have the technology to capture carbon out of the atmosphere.  (Some of them are called trees.)  We have the technology to reflect more of the sun’s energy out into space, rather than letting it get absorbed and turned into heat.  (White paint.)

No, really.

Do you remember when Obama’s first Secretary of Energy suggested everyone paint their roofs white?  No?  I didn’t think so.  But he said it, and it’s actually a great idea.  Minimal cost, maximum reward.

How?  Because turning a black surface to white causes a huge increase in that surface's albedo, which is a measure of how much of the sun's energy to reflected back into space without causing warming that can be trapped by greenhouse gases.   Now, your roof might not be very big, but multiply that by all the homes in just the United States, and that’s a small thing that could make a big difference.

So, should the government demand that everyone paint their roofs white?  Why not?  This administration seems to love making this country more white.  (Too soon?)

But sadly, the only way you'll get this government to act on this simple, effective measure to deflect more sunlight away from the Earth is if you can convince them that the sunlight is immigrating from a Muslim country.  

So, how about a bunch of people just start going around and painting everyone’s roofs for them?  Why can't we just do it ourselves?

And it's more than just painting things white.  We also need more carbon sinks, places where carbon is transformed into a solid form that can be stored for long periods.  Like forests.  Peat bogs.  Algae.  Let’s all start planting random forests.  How does one start a peat bog?  I have no idea, but someone out there does!  We can do this!

Now, reflective space mirrors might be a little outside the realm of the manageable, unless Elon Musk reads this blog (in which case, Hey, how’s it goin’?), but seeding the upper atmosphere with intentional pollution could have the exact same effect: that of reflecting more sunlight before it even reaches the surface. 

Sure, pollution sounds terrible, but if pollution in the upper atmosphere can create a kind of global dimming it might buy us enough time to pull more carbon out of the air.  It’s an extreme idea, I admit, but it’s one that has to be seriously considered.  Is it beyond the capability of a small but dedicated group of ragtag rebels to pollute the upper atmosphere using…I don’t really know.  Balloons?  Really tall mountains?  A very, very long hose?

Or maybe grass can be genetically altered to be a much lighter color, thus increasing the albedo of our lawns.  I know from homebrewing that brewer’s yeast consume sugar and turns it into alcohol and carbon dioxide.  Could yeast be engineered that did the same thing in reverse?  Get the yeast drunk on alcohol so it consumes CO2?

Maybe alcohol really is the solution to all of our problems.

These are just small ideas.  I’m not certain any of them would work.  But they’re only the beginning.  Yes, they cost money, but not so much as to be prohibitive.  Even without a government or a corporation behind us, we could begin, step-by-step, to terraform our own planet.  That was the major insight of Robinson’s Mars books: small innovations, like tiny wind-powered heaters or genetically engineered lichen, or holes dug deep enough to harness geothermal heat.  We could do something similar here, only in reverse.  Nothing would change our climate overnight, but little by little, our efforts could counteract our own carbon emissions and start to reverse some of the damage our species has done.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking.  I’m talking about a handful of people choosing to deliberately change our climate in ways that can’t be totally and accurately predicted.  What right do these individuals have to change a climate that will affect billions of people?

It’s a fair question, and totally meaningless since that is the status quo we’re all living with and seem to be implicitly endorsing in our everyday lives.  We drive cars, we use electricity from coal and natural gas fired power plants, we use gas to heat our homes.  Yes, when the industrial revolution started and created our current way of life, we didn’t know about climate change.  But that excuse went out the window decades ago.  We now know that we are changing our planet; we’re doing it willingly and deliberately.

All I suggest is that some people should do the same thing, just in the opposite direction.

I guess what I’m suggesting is that we need some non-governmental organization, some charity, some foundation, willing to look at new and potentially controversial ways of changing our environment.  

Maybe we need the polar opposite of a Greenpeace; an organization militantly dedicated to actively changing our planet’s climate, reducing carbon emissions through any means necessary, and finding ways to mitigate the greenhouse effect using technology as a front-line effort, not an after-market solution like more LED lightbulbs.

And I’m convinced that a bunch of smart people, in a room, with no agenda other than stopping climate change, and given an adequate amount of pizza and beer, can do this!

Ah!  Solutions!

So, what do you say?  I’ll bring the beer.