Search the archive.

Facing such a future, nations are unlikely to stand idly by. They could decide to take matters into their own hands. What is to stop the government in Dhaka, for example, faced with the prospect of losing much of Bangladesh’s low-lying territory to the Indian Ocean, from purchasing jumbo-jets and spraying reflective aerosols into the stratosphere in hopes of reducing the absorption of sunlight? Nor will individuals remain on the sidelines. In 2012, an American scientist 100 tons of iron sulfate off the coast of British Columbia. The result was a massive phytoplankton bloom that absorbed atmospheric carbon and led to record salmon runs. How long before a progressive-minded billionaire seeks to do something similar on a far grander scale? Geoengineering is quickly moving from the radical fringe to the center of global public policy. In its October 2018 , the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found no feasible pathway to keep average global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius—a target endorsed in 2015 at the Paris climate conference—without large-scale carbon dioxide removal. At last month’s U.N. Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Switzerland submitted a , co-sponsored by a dozen other countries, asking the U.N. Environment Program to “prepare an assessment of the status of geoengineering technologies.” Its purpose would be to establish criteria to define geoengineering; assess the scientific state of play; identify leading actors; summarize the potential risks, benefits, and uncertainties; and propose “global governance frameworks” for all of these things. The resolution failed within the consensus-based assembly. Such resistance is likely to crumble as the climate crisis worsens, however, and as more actors begin to freelance. Already, hundreds of scientists are conducting small-scale geoengineering experiments outside of public view and official supervision. Geoengineering could become a free-for-all, as uncoordinated governments and individuals take decisions with momentous implications for global security, prosperity and equity. Carbon dioxide removal, for instance, could place enormous demands on land, energy, water and oceans at the expense of biodiversity, food production, groundwater availability, soil quality and nutrient balance. Likewise, sweeping efforts to increase reflectivity of the atmosphere, clouds, land and oceans could alter regional and global weather patterns, temperatures, hydrological cycles, crop yields and development prospects. Solar radiation modification poses an additional dilemma: Because it does not actually reduce greenhouse gases, it must be continued in perpetuity—or at least until carbon removal has lowered CO2 levels. Given these risks, the world urgently needs a multilateral governance framework for geoengineering. Such an institution, or set of institutions, would permit sovereign nations to negotiate common standards and shared rules for forays into this uncharted territory. An immediate priority should be to improve transparency—a precondition for good governance. To this end, researchers from the Carnegie Endowment and Atlantic Council creating a central clearinghouse to collect and share data on geoengineering research and experiments, as well as to encourage protocols for public disclosure. Over the longer term, the U.N. system should move from simply sharing information about climate change to making rules, and enforcing them. A logical setting in which to launch negotiations is the U.N. Framework Convention for Climate Change. Member states can use its annual conference of parties to designate geoengineering a third pillar of climate risk management, alongside mitigation and adaptation. In parallel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should expand its expertise on geoengineering. Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation in the 21st century, “humanity is stuck with a planet stewardship role.” But as it fails in that mission, humanity may be drawn, ineluctably, to become Earth’s engineers.

(David Schwartzman, Emeritus@Howard and Peter Schwartzman, Enviro@Knox, The Earth is not for Sale: A Path Out of Fossil Capitalism to the Other World that is Still Possible p. 103-107)

More attention should be focused on the message of the climate justice movement. For example, today’s key players in the present climate justice movement present misleading prescriptions for change like the slogan, ‘Keep the oil in the ground’ (even worse, taken literally, ‘Keep the oil in the soil’). This prescription ignores energy poverty, and presents an unrealistic framework for change. Instead the movement should argue first for a rapid phaseout of the highest carbon footprint fossil fuels (coal, natural gas and tar sands oil), the actual agenda of 350.org, using the minimum necessary amount of conventional liquid oil reserves to replace all fossil fuel consumption with a sufficient global wind/solar power infrastructure. Very welcome is the initiative to create Annex 0, coupled with COP21, to protect indigenous people from the extraction of hydrocarbons, but it too glosses over this issue (Oilwatch, 2015). What will be sufficient wind/solar power to address humanity’s and nature’s needs? Short answer: a supply that is capable of terminating the energy poverty that now affects the majority of the World’s people, while simultaneously facilitating climate adaptation, the sequestering of carbon from the atmosphere into the soil/crust, and bringing (and keeping) the atmospheric carbon dioxide level below 350 parts per million (ppm). Within the near future context, for an energy transition confronting the ever-mounting threat of catastrophic climate change, the following challenges point to the need for a significantly higher global energy supply than now, even after taking into account higher efficiencies possible in a wind/solar energy transition. With the present global consumption, a baseline (18 trillion watts of primary energy consumption), and growing global population, incremental energy will be required for the following new challenges facing our planetary civilization: Carbon sequestration from the atmosphere adaption are already near US$50 billion per year and are expected to rise exponentially with ongoing climate change, especially in developing countries (Dougherty-Choux, 2015). The clean-up of the biosphere, notably toxic metals and other chemical and radioactive waste from the nuclear weapons, energy, and chemical industries — a heritage of its long-term assault from the MIC, and other industrial wastes such as plastic particles in the ocean, threatening its ecosystems (Harrabin, 2017a). (3) The repair and expansion of physical infrastructure, such as electrified rails, and the creation of green cities globally. (4) Adaptation to ongoing climate change, especially by the global South with its disproportionate impacts, even if warming could be kept to below 1.5°C. All four imperatives will require very significant energy supplies from future wind/solar power, incremental to the present consumption level. The actual level of this increment needs study but some preliminary estimates are now available. For example, if 100 billion metric tons of carbon, equivalent to 47 ppm of atmospheric C02, were industrially sequestered from the atmosphere it would require 5.9 to 18 years of the present global energy delivery (18 TW), assuming an energy requirement of 400 to 1200 KJ/mole C02 utilizing a solar-powered high efficiency source of energy (Zeman, 2007; House el al., 2011). This requirement would of course be reduced by the use of agriculturally-driven carbon sequestration into the soil (see P. Schwartzman and D. Schwartzman, 2011; D. Schwartzman and P. Schwartzman, 2013).4'3 Carbon sequestration from the atmosphere will require a very ambitious program involving a combination of technologies, including the transformation of agriculture to agroecologies, as well as reacting carbon dioxide and water with mafic rocks and crust to produce carbonates; this is not ‘clean coal’, i.e., carbon capture and storage (CCS) from coal- derived emissions. The following conclusion of a recent paper is very relevant: ‘We conclude that CDR [Carbon Dioxide Removal from the atmosphere] can be a game changer for climate policy in the sense that it significantly improves feasibility and cost considerations for achieving stringent climate stabilization. It is, however, a complement, not a substitute to the traditional approach of mitigating emissions at their source’ (Krieglcr el al., 2013, p. 55). This sequestration program will be imperative for the rest of this century and beyond because approximately half of the anthropogenic (caused by humans) carbon dioxide emissions go into the ocean and biota, which continuously re-equilibrate with the atmosphere (Cao and Caldeira, 2010; Gasser el al., 2015). CDR is a technology that urgently needs more research and development to have any chance of limiting warming to 2°C, or the better l.5°C (Van Vuuren el al., 2017). Natural climate solutions, i.e., soil conservation, restoration, and/or improved land management actions can potentially contribute to significant climate mitigation by increasing storage of soil carbon (Griscoma el al., 2017) but more aggressive measures will be needed to limit warming to no more than 1.5°C. Efforts to boost sustainable agriculture, specifically with agroecologies and permaculture, are imperative to replacing industrial/GMO agriculture, both to confront the challenge of climate change and to eliminate big negatives of the present system of unsustainable agriculture. These alternatives will be very useful in sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, burying it in the soil. Hence, we applaud the launching at COP21 of the Soils for Food Security and Climate (LPAA, 2015). But some have even claimed that a transition to sustainable agriculture alone can reverse global warming without the elimination of GHG emissions from fossil fuel sources (e.g., according to Biodiversity for a Livable Climate (2015), ‘We can return to pre-industrial atmospheric carbon levels in a few decades or less, and cool the biosphere even faster than that’). Kastner (2016) makes similar arguments. The critical issue is the potential global sequestration flux assuming a complete transition to sustainable agriculture. The maximum flux is far too small to achieve what is claimed, even if fossil fuel emissions cease immediately (Schwartzman, 2015c).4·4 Further, as pointed out in Schwartzman (2015c), ongoing warming will plausibly reduce the potential of this mode of carbon sequestration owing to the enhanced respiration of soil carbon back into atmosphere as temperatures increase as a result of the decomposition rate of this carbon pool. Indeed, Crowther et al. (2016) found strong evidence for this impact of climatic warming, likewise Melillo et al. (2017), see commentary by Metcalfe (2017). In addition, based on a recent study of radiocarbon age, the soil carbon sequestration potential may have been significantly overestimated (He et al., 2016). In conclusion, to achieve the goal of limiting warming to below 1.5°C by 2100, carbon-sequestra- tion from the atmosphere technologies, in particular with atmospheric carbon going into the crust, will be imperative, instead of simply relying on carbon-sequestration into the soil. One very promising approach is injecting atmospheric carbon dioxide into basalt rock (Oelkers et al., 2016); see Schwartzman (2016b) for more on this subject. Carbon sequestration from the atmosphere into the soil and crust is the only imperative climate geoengineering approach. The dangers of other climate geoengineering technofixes have been highlighted in many publications (e.g., Wetter and Zundel, 2017). In particular, the threat to biodiversity from sudden implementation and termination has been recently modeled (Trisos et ai. 2018). With respect to the need for climatic adaptation, note that a recent study finds ‘abrupt changes in sea ice, oceanic flows, land ice, and terrestrial ecosystem response, although with little consistency among the models. A particularly large number is projected for warming levels below 2°[C|' (Drijfhout et al., 2015, p. E5777). The costs of climate adaption are already near US$50 billion per year and are expected to rise exponentially with ongoing climate change, especially in developing countries (Dougherty-Choux, 2015). Λ greater energy capacity than present will likely be required to realize these objectives. Even with a complete transition to a global wind/solar power infrastructure by 2050, including its roughly 30% gain in efficiency, at least 22 trillion Watts will be required to guarantee the minimum energy per person necessary for a state-of-the-science quality of life (3.5 kW/ person x 0.7 x 9 billion people; note that the latest United Nations (2015) projection for 2050 is 9.7 billion people). Additional capacity will be necessary especially for ongoing carbon-sequestration from the atmosphere and climatic adaptation, with the total required likely approaching the order of 25 trillion Watts. This approach is imperative because these applications will require extra capacity being created as early as possible, given the physics of greenhouse gas forcing (Matthews and Caldeira, 2008).

(Holly Jean, postdoc@UCLA, https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/geoengineering/best-case-scenario-carbon-underground/)

If we buy into thinking of carbon removal technologies as substitutes for reducing carbon output, then industrial interests have already won: they have set the narrative and the framing, where carbon capture exists so that they can continue to emit. But we should demand more from these technologies. Industrial carbon capture technologies could instead be used as an extension of decarbonization—mitigation to get us to zero, and carbon removal going a step further to take emissions negative and address some of the climate impacts already being felt. It won’t be easy. But climate science suggests it’s a challenge the Left must take up. Climate change has already warmed the planet over 1°C relative to pre-industrial levels. Paradoxically, cleaning up the air pollution that’s currently masking some of the global warming in the pipeline would raise temperatures another 0.5 – 1.1 degrees.1 This means that if we waved a magic wand and suddenly (1) stopped using fossil fuels, and (2) cleaned up air pollution, we would already be breaching 1.5°C, the amount of warming that most climate advocates have argued for. The carbon budget is not an exact science, but it seems we are hovering at the point where 1.5°C of warming is locked in by what has already been emitted. Put differently, the most recent scientific evidence suggests we have zero to five years before every additional ton of carbon dioxide emitted would need to be compensated by a ton of negative emissions to stay below 1.5°C.2 In fact, the scenarios used in the fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report rely on massive amounts of negative emissions to curb warming to 1.5°C, primarily via a method known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). This led a team of modelers to try and see what it would take to achieve 1.5° without BECCS. Even a scenario where renewables, electrification, and energy efficiency were aggressively pursued—as well as replacing 80 percent of meat and eggs with cultivated meat, flying less, and eliminating tumble dryers—could not eliminate the need for carbon removal. This scenario still required about 400 billion tons (Gt) of carbon dioxide removed via reforestation.3 Reforestation sounds great and green, but it also has the potential to result in dispossession, conflict over land access, and smallholder livelihoods. What about achieving a slightly less ambitious goal of 2°C? Two and 1.5 degrees might not sound all that different, but they are. The difference is one that threatens entire unique coral ecosystems, the homes of five million people4 (including entire countries), and high increases in the frequencies of extreme events. Rapid mitigation could still curb warming to 2°C without the use of negative emissions technologies. But that window is closing fast. If near-term emissions reductions follow the trajectory laid out in the commitments nations made under the Paris agreement, by 2030, 2°C scenarios will also depend upon negative emissions.5 That is, in the next decade, we would have to vastly exceed the Paris promises to not depend upon negative emissions. We aren’t even making much progress towards these Paris targets, which if achieved would still produce 3°C of warming—an amount widely agreed to lead to massive disruptions. This is why negative emissions have become such a useful device for the models. By the end of the century, scenarios for 1.5°C or 2°C envision pulling out ten billion tons (10Gt) per year. For comparison, current levels of emissions are around forty billion tons of CO2 per year. So 1.5°C means not just zeroing out those forty billion tons, but then working to extract another 10 billion on top of that to be net-negative. This would require scaling up current carbon capture and sequestration efforts a thousand-fold.6 Negative emissions help maintain the narrative that although time is running short, we can still stop catastrophic global warming if we act now.7 Once we understand that this inventive arithmetic has been employed to “solve” for 1.5, what do we do? Assuming there will be a complete about-face that puts us on a course towards 100 percent renewables, massive lifestyle changes, and drastic land use change for afforesting millions of hectares in the tropics8 within the next ten years strikes me as not only magical thinking, but thinking that puts many at risk of great suffering. Alternately, accepting that the earth will warm more than 1.5°C means accepting the loss of the world’s coral reefs and the half billion people relying on them, as well as other harms to communities living on the front lines of climate change. So we need to ask: Is there a form of massive carbon removal that could be put towards socially just ends, pulling carbon out of the atmosphere as a form of collective social good? Can it work as an outgrowth of energy democracy? For if such a collection of technologies, practices, and institutions can exist, we should try to build it. Notably, carbon removal at what I’ll call climate-significant scale should not be thought of as a magic wand to wipe carbon away either. For one thing, it will not compensate exactly for emissions. The ocean, for example, currently takes up close to half of the carbon humans emit, and it’s possible that if carbon was removed at large scale from the atmosphere, the oceans would then give off carbon, perhaps replacing half of the carbon that had been removed.9 The prospect of carbon removal is fraught with complexity, and even peril—all of which we have to talk about. The Necessity of Geological Sequestration The best way to remove carbon immediately is through “natural climate solutions,” which employ nature’s processes to store carbon in ecosystems. Sequestering carbon in soil, restoring forests and planting new ones, and protecting wetlands can store carbon. These can forestall some amount of warming, in addition to other benefits for both humans and the environment. Yet while it seems intuitive to simply let nature take up the carbon, carbon was put into the atmosphere unnaturally, and the available scientific evidence suggests ecosystem-based solutions simply don’t scale well enough to contend with the sheer amount of carbon that has been dumped into the atmosphere. Pursued vigorously, reforestation and soil carbon sequestration could each remove a few gigatons per year—for a while. After a few decades, a forest planted to remove carbon reaches a plateau where it becomes saturated and can’t remove any additional carbon, like a bathtub filling up, at which point the already-absorbed carbon must simply be held indefinitely. Similarly, a farm that has transitioned to regenerative practices to store more carbon in the soil can only remove additional carbon for a few decades. Moreover, forests can be ravaged by epidemics or fires, resulting in the sudden release of their stored carbon, which means they are vulnerable to global warming itself. So while these projects can do important work in the near future, we also need to supplement these one-off, land-based carbon removal projects with systems that can continuously remove carbon and store it reliably over centuries — that is to say, with industrial carbon capture with geological sequestration. We need to build systems that capture carbon emissions from sources like power plants factories, or even from ambient air, and transport it to underground reservoirs where it can be stored. There are major technical and social obstacles to this. But these industrial systems for geological storage, used together and sequentially with natural carbon removal, could help ease the path to climate-stable world. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is not a new technology. The first large-scale operations began in the 1970s, and there are around 17 CCS projects operational today. CCS is actually a collection of technologies: those needed to capture carbon emissions at a source; technologies to transport it, usually by pipeline, to a storage site; and technologies to inject it deep underground. It can be used with industrial operations like cement or steel production, with natural gas power plants, with biomass-fueled power plants (BECCS), or in tandem with devices that mine carbon from the air (“direct air capture”). But only in the latter two cases does CCS confer “negative” emissions and actually remove carbon—if it’s installed on a fossil fuel plant, all it’s doing is avoiding some emissions. Its history is tainted by two things: its linkage with the coal industry, and its use for enhanced oil recovery, a technique which injects carbon dioxide into the ground to retrieve more oil from depleted wells. Understandably, this has predisposed people who care about the climate to be very skeptical of the technology and the actors who promote it. Recent experiences with fracking have also made people rightfully wary about injecting large volumes of fluid and gas underground. Once carbon is injected into reservoirs, moreover, it can be difficult to monitor. We need to give CCS another look despite these reservations. Several decades of experience with the technology have improved monitoring technology dramatically and developed best practices for mitigating local risks. The IPCC finds that the local health and safety risks are on a similar scale to those of the current hydrocarbon infrastructure.10 It’s not ideal to replace one hazardous network of infrastructure with another—except in this case, putting the carbon back underground ameliorates the much greater risks of global climate change, which will be felt around the world. In short, it is safer to have the carbon back under the ground than in the atmosphere. The carbon removal technology that’s typically used as a stand-in for negative emissions in integrated assessment models is known as bioenergy with CCS (BECCS). BECCS refers to a system where carbon is captured from a power plant that runs on biomass like switchgrass or poplar trees; the captured carbon is then transported and stored underground. In the real world, BECCS lacks strong proponents. Critics point out that attempts to scale up the use of biofuels have already had major implications for land use, and consequently, for ecosystems as well as for people whose livelihoods depend on the land. One common estimate is that using BECCS to remove 600Gt by 2100 would require dedicated cropland of 430-580 million hectares—equivalent to one-half of the land area of the US.11 Using BECCS at climate-significant scales could have dramatic impacts on biodiversity and freshwater resources. It also can’t be used in every situation: to actually be carbon-negative, BECCS has to meet stringent conditions regarding everything from supply chains to fertilizer. Socially and ecologically just supply chain management requires still more, including fair wages for workers, measures to safeguard biodiversity, and worker or communal ownership of land. These drawbacks and challenges mean that we shouldn’t rely on it as the primary mode of carbon removal, but BECCS could still be useful in specific contexts. A method known as direct air capture, on the other hand, is potentially less land intensive, but it requires massive amounts of carbon-neutral energy. Direct air capture machines absorb carbon from ambient air through a chemical process; then the carbon must be removed and stored underground, as if the carbon had been captured at a power plant. But because direct air capture machines could be located at the site of underground injection, they could have less of an infrastructural footprint. The downside is that it’s currently very expensive, with estimates ranging between $100 and $600 per ton of carbon removed depending on the energy source used.12 So while direct air capture seems to have more potential to remove carbon at climate-significant scales than BECCS, far more work is needed to refine the technology. All of these technologies require both more funding for research and development as well as strong policy incentives to mature, whether that means a robust price on carbon or government pollution controls. On the bright side, perhaps this means they are more likely to be an extension or complement to reducing carbon output rather than a substitute for it. Without heavy state intervention, it is impossible to imagine CCS scaling up over the century to climate-significant levels. The storage capacity of geological reservoirs is sufficient that there aren’t geological limits to carbon sequestration. Eventually, there would be systemic limits for inputs to CCS—land in the case of bioenergy; renewable energy supply in the case of direct air capture—and so the yearly rate of carbon sequestration would be constrained. This means that a full carbon-clean up—that is, if the world wanted to bring greenhouse gas concentrations back to pre-industrial levels, as a restoration or recompensation project—could stretch over centuries. But the near-term practical constraints on CCS are grounded only by political will.

[Jonathan; December 2020; Managing Editor at Harvard Magazine, citing Dan Schrag, Director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment; Harvard Magazine, “Controlling the Global Thermostat,” ]

“Potentially interesting,” he adds, “is the fact that the countries most likely to benefit are lower-income. They don’t have the resources for adaptation, and will weigh the low costs of geoengineering interventions against the high costs of building sea walls and moving populations.” Work by students of Keith, the faculty director of Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program, indicates that this type of intervention would decrease global inequality substantially because the benefits are biggest for the poorest populations. “For me,” he says, “that’s the fundamental argument for anything in public policy.”

The world is losing its battle against climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions rose to last year, as countries lagged in meeting their already inadequate pledges under the Paris Agreement. Based on the current trajectory, the warming Earth will blow well past the 2-degrees Celsius ceiling widely agreed to be the maximum acceptable increase in average global temperatures before catastrophic impacts set in. In the face of this looming threat, climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts are necessary but insufficient. Humanity must also consider a third option it has long resisted: geoengineering, or the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment. Geoengineering takes various forms, but most fall into one of two categories: carbon-dioxide removal and solar radiation modification. The first one, also known as negative emissions, entails the permanent removal of CO2 from the atmosphere and its subsequent storage, either in plants, underground or beneath the ocean floor. Solar radiation modification denotes the deployment of technologies to alter the amount of radiation entering or leaving Earth’s atmosphere. Unlike carbon removal, solar radiation modification does not remove greenhouse gases. Rather, it reduces the heat that they trap. Both types of geoengineering encompass diverse approaches, of varying complexity and maturity. Carbon-dioxide removal strategies, for example, include planting forests at massive scale, capturing carbon from the atmosphere—or from the burning of biomass—and permanently storing it, fertilizing ocean ecosystems to accelerate phytoplankton growth, and dispersing carbon-binding minerals on land or in the oceans. Solar radiation modification technologies, meanwhile, range from injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, to seeding or thinning clouds and brightening Earth’s surfaces in order to alter the amount of incoming and outgoing radiation. Many approaches remain experimental, and none—with the partial exception of afforestation, or planting trees on non-forested land—have been attempted at scale. Environmentalists hesitate to endorse geoengineering techniques for fear of creating a moral hazard. They worry that governments, corporations and citizens will use the likely false promise of a technological quick fix down the road to avoid taking dramatic but costly steps today to reduce emissions. In addition, the idea of interfering with Earth’s climate system raises a host of practical, distributional and ethical conundrums. To begin with, geoengineering risks unintended consequences. Dare we experiment with the only planet we have? Large-scale geoengineering projects also seem bound to create winners and losers around the world. Who gets to determine where the chips fall? Finally, the very notion of manipulating the climate can induce a cosmological queasiness, especially among the faithful. In taking this path, do we make ourselves gods? These are all profound and troubling questions. Nevertheless, geoengineering is a Rubicon that humanity seems destined to cross. By spewing massive quantities of CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere—in fact, an unintentional form of geoengineering—humanity is running the largest uncontrolled scientific experiment in Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history. Unless dramatic action is taken soon, the end of the century will likely bring a wide range of environmental calamities: the rapid melting of polar ice caps, inundation of coastal regions and low-lying islands, more frequent and extreme natural disasters, widespread desertification and deforestation, the creation of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, accelerated extinction of plant and animal species, and the death of entire marine ecosystems, including coral reefs and fisheries, through warming and acidification.

(Moira, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/26/planet-earth-climate-crisis-geoengineering , 8-1)

The realities of climate change are front-page news every day. Temperature records are being smashed. Wildfires are raging. There is no sign of things going back to “normal”. If anything, they will only get worse. Last year, when the planet was convulsing with the arrival of a pandemic, we pinned our hopes on technology – in the form of an mRNA vaccine – getting us out of our crisis. The vaccine was a technological intervention, injected into the arms of billions of people. Could we (should we?) look to technological solutions to our climate crisis, too? This is the question posed by Holly Jean Buck in her 2019 book, After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration. Zooming with me from Buffalo, New York, where she’s a professor of environment at the University of Buffalo, Buck is blunt in her assessment. The pace of climate change, and the insufficiency of humanity’s current response, have effectively already made the choice for us: mankind will have to engage in some kind of “geoengineering” – an umbrella term for various methods of intentional, planetary-scale climate intervention – whether we like it or not. Geoengineering refers to any number of ways that humans can change our climate through interventions. The two main types of geoengineering are carbon engineering, which aims to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, and solar engineering, which aims to reflect solar energy away from Earth. “We’re in a climate crisis,” she tells me. “Mitigation isn’t going fast enough. Adaptation needs far more support than it’s getting. It’s clear that we need to remove some amount of carbon from the atmosphere.” How much? “Hundreds of billions of tons,” Buck says. “We have emitted so much, and now we have so much legacy carbon. The challenge isn’t just cutting emissions.” The second challenge is “removing the carbon that’s up there. It’s this massive cleanup operation that we need to undertake this century.” The idea of deliberately altering the climate can be frightening and distasteful, including to many environmentalists. But Buck argues that climate engineering is coming whether we like it or not. “If people on the environmental left – people who care about climate change – just reject all of these approaches out of hand, then we lose the ability to shape them, which would be a grave mistake,” she says. The simplest form of geoengineering is the kind of carbon removal many of us learned about in school: planting trees. “Land-based solutions are really important, especially in the next decade or so, because they can be implemented quickly – and we know how to plant forests,” Buck says. She points to other kinds of land-based climate interventions that show promise. Changing agricultural practices can be used to store more carbon in the dirt. Other strategies include storing carbon in wetlands, ocean iron fertilization, or different approaches involving rock weathering. But land-based solutions, though a helpful beginning, probably won’t be enough, Buck says. To plant enough trees to soak up enough carbon to sufficiently cool our planet, we would have to fundamentally change the way we use land in ways that would make our economy and many of our lives unrecognizable. And there are other risks to relying too heavily on land-based techniques. “A lot of land-based approaches are vulnerable to climate change itself,” Buck explains. “You don’t want a wildfire to wipe out these removals that you’ve been banking on, right?” Massive reforestation efforts could go up in smoke. But land-based solutions are not the only option. Carbon removal can also be accomplished with industrial technologies. Buck points to a carbon mitigation strategy called geological carbon capture, which is already widely used to reduce the emissions of heavily polluting industries. “You could outfit, well, scrubbers basically, on a factory, and these collect carbon dioxide. Then you inject [the carbon] underground, into a cavern, and keep it there, under the rock, for a very long time. You keep monitoring it, to make sure it stays where you want it to be.” There are risks to injecting large amounts of carbon into rock; Buck laments the under-regulated “wild west atmosphere” of fracking, which caused earthquakes in some parts of the US. But scientists have learned from that experience, and technologies exist to keep underground carbon in place. And new techniques may make geological carbon capture safer. “There’s a lot of new research about how to get carbon dioxide to turn into rock quicker once you inject it” underground, Buck says. This is a carbon mitigation technique that has proved efficient in reducing emissions at an industrial scale, and it has been in use for decades, meaning that the safety and science of the technique are well understood. Buck’s hope is that this technology could advance and be used not just for mitigating carbon emissions, but for removing carbon. “It becomes carbon removal” – as opposed to mitigation – “if you’re removing the carbon just from the ambient air,” Buck says. There are now machines that can “scrub” carbon out of the air; the carbon can then be transported and stored underground. Without these machines, the technique can also be used to create bioenergy, which involves “producing biomass” – say, a very carbon-dense type of plant – “and combusting it at a power plant, and separating out the carbon and storing it underground again”. This strategy – using a spectrum of carbon-engineering techniques to inject carbon deep beneath rock - is the most effective and safest, Buck believes. But unless humanity gets its act together soon, we may forced to entertain much riskier climate mitigation strategies. “If we don’t remove carbon, and decarbonize, and reform how we use land, and rework our transportation systems, and change industrial systems fast enough,” Buck says, “then there’s the possibility that people will pitch the idea of solar geoengineering.”

(Kevin Surprise (@KevinSurprise) is a Visiting Lecturer in Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke College. https://mronline.org/2020/07/30/solar-geoengineering-is-incompatible-with-a-radical-green-new-deal/)

No kind of justice The left’s position on geoengineering is varied. Some advocate for it (and Holly Jean Buck convincingly argues that carbon removal can be part of radical climate transitions), while the predominant position sees solar geoengineering as a “false solution.” This critique, though important, too easily lumps all geoengineering technologies under one umbrella, missing unique political and economic facets of solar geoengineering. Solar geoengineering would not merely maintain the status quo, but increase the power of concentrated capital and leading capitalist states by extending their reach to the stratosphere, only to mask and at best temporarily impede capitalism’s destruction of the planet. Climate capitalism is likely impossible without the time afforded by solar geoengineering, and “moderate” versions could easily be incorporated into a corporate-centrist GND. But this is no kind of climate justice. With the backing of billionaires, the explicitly pro-capitalist agenda of researchers, and the ever-present prospect of militarization, solar geoengineering is antithetical to ecosocialism, climate justice, and a radical GND—movements pushing for massive redistribution, nationalization(s), new relations of production, racial, gender, and frontline justice, and beyond. A revolutionary climate movement must fundamentally reject a world engineered to fit the needs of endless capital accumulation.

(Jeff, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/geoengineering-house-democrats-climate-plan-2020-1023376/ , 7-2)

Geoengineering is also an idea that is radically out of sync with the times. There is nothing Green New Deal-like about geoengineering. In fact, if anything, it is anti-Green New Deal, encouraging a kind of collective passivity in the face of climate change. Don’t worry, Big Daddy will take care of things with his fleet of fancy airplanes. I’ve attended a number of geoengineering conferences over the years — the people who are discussing the development and governance of this technology are not exactly a Black Lives Matter crowd.

(Greg , Geo-Engineering: The Climate Change Solution COP26 Ignores". 11-11-2021. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/11/11/geo-engineering_the_climate_change_solution_cop26_ignores.html)

In August, the physical science working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its most recent report. The IPCC was founded in 1988 and released its first comprehensive report on climate change in 1990. The August report is part of the sixth such assessment. As with prior findings, the news is grim. Our planet is heating up faster than we expected. The window for addressing the most cataclysmic effects of climate change is closing rapidly. We didn’t need another IPCC report to tell us what news reports from every corner of the globe are telling us daily. Just as we didn’t need another United Nations summit—Glasgow is the 26th. Our climate is changing before our very eyes—in dramatic and destructive ways. Not long before the pandemic and the 2020 election pushed them off Page One, fires in Australia and the Amazon were spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, highlighting one of the most insidious aspects of climate change – a vicious cycle whereby weather-driven events like fires end up reinforcing our cycle of warming by adding to emissions. The 2021 hurricane season continued the recent trend of starting earlier, generating more storms, and causing more damage. This was the fourth-costliest hurricane season on record. The other top three have all occurred in the last decade. This summer, extreme weather in Germany created mudslides that wiped away towns that had existed for centuries. In the Middle East, temperatures soared in excess of 125 degrees. And last month, almost 30 inches of rain fell just south of Milan, Italy over a 12-hour span – the highest rainfall amount ever recorded in Europe over that period of time. As difficult as these last couple of years have been, they pale in comparison to where we are headed. Extreme weather events will threaten food supplies leading to mass migrations of people and wars over food and water. Rising sea levels will threaten the homes of some 300 million people by 2050. The damage to property, loss of tax base, and the costs of relocation will measure in the trillions of dollars. Increases in respiratory disease, premature deaths, and infectious disease migration will take a toll on public health. All of this will be accelerated if we cross the point of no-return – the thawing of the permafrost. The permafrost is land mass that remains permanently frozen and stores over 1,400 gigatons of greenhouse gases – the vast majority of which will be released into the atmosphere if the permafrost thaws. It covers roughly 11% of the earth’s landmass, mostly in the Northern Hemisphere – in countries like Greenland, Canada, and Russia. Progressive Opposition to Saving the Earth None of this is inevitable. But avoiding the most damaging effects of climate change will require us to embrace a strategy that goes beyond eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. Geo-engineering, an approach that has been around for decades, must be part of the plan.

(Kevin Surprise (@KevinSurprise) is a Visiting Lecturer in Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke College. https://mronline.org/2020/07/30/solar-geoengineering-is-incompatible-with-a-radical-green-new-deal/)

Solar geoengineering, specifically Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), is a proposed climate technology that could cool the planet—quickly and cheaply—by continually spraying megatons of sulfur dioxide into the lower stratosphere to reflect some incoming solar radiation back to space. In climate policy, solar geoengineering has long been considered fringe, at best a last-ditch “plan B” in the event of a climate emergency. But recent activity around the technology compels a shift in perspective: solar geoengineering is not a futuristic “plan B,” but a rapidly developing pillar of capital’s climate “plan A.” Solar geoengineering is receiving renewed discussion because of brief mention in the House Select Committee’s Climate Action Plan. The plan recommends following guidance from the National Academies of Sciences’ forthcoming report on “reflecting sunlight to cool earth” (two briefings from this committee were released in June). Other recent moves include steps taken by the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program (HSGRP) to advance outdoor SAI field-experiments, Congressional appropriation of $4 million to NOAA to support federal solar geoengineering research, and release of a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists endorsing cautious research. In the midst of rising emissions and climate inaction, many scientists and policymakers are coming to the conclusion that cheap, fast-acting technologies require research and investment. Moreover, a budding consensus is emerging around key norms and best-case scenarios: solar geoengineering research should proceed cautiously, cooperatively, and transparently. Governance should be internationally coordinated and include input from publics and civil society, particularly from the Global South. If deployed, it should be gradual, moderate, and temporary, with the aim of “buying time” for emissions cuts, and providing “humanitarian” relief to those vulnerable to near-term climate risks. This is powerful narrative. Yet, even if such extremely optimistic scenarios were to obtain—a highly dubious prospect—solar geoengineering would remain antithetical to ecosocialism and to a radical GND. There are four key reasons for this: the research is largely funded by billionaires and wealthy philanthropic organizations with ties to finance and technology capital; solar geoengineering is being designed to “buy time” for market-driven decarbonization (to explicitly avoid revolutionary change); the “humanitarian” discourse around the technology represents a form of technocratic, liberal paternalism; and, as states will have ultimate control over deployment, the prospect of militarization cannot be ruled out.

(Dana, an environmental scientist and risk assessor, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jul/30/america-spends-over-20bn-per-year-on-fossil-fuel-subsidies-abolish-them)

Imagine that instead of taxing cigarettes, America subsidized the tobacco industry in order to make each pack of smokes cheaper. A report from Oil Change International (OCI) investigated American energy industry subsidies and found that in 2015–2016, the federal government provided $14.7bn per year to the oil, gas, and coal industries, on top of $5.8bn of state-level incentives (globally, the figure is around $500bn). And the report only accounted for production subsidies, excluding consumption subsidies (support to consumers to lower the cost of fossil fuel use – another $14.5bn annually) as well as the costs of carbon and other fossil fuel pollutants. At a time when we need to transition away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible, the federal and state governments are giving the industry tens of billions of dollars to make the production of their dirty, dangerous products more profitable. We already have to leave tapped fossil fuels in the ground Crucially, the OCI report noted that if we want to meet the Paris target of limiting global warming to less than 2°C (and we do!), not only does the fossil fuel industry have to stop developing new reserves, but “some already-tapped reserves must be retired early.” Developed fossil fuel reserves vs. remaining carbon budget to meet 2°C and 1.5°C Paris climate targets. FacebookTwitterPinterest Developed fossil fuel reserves vs. remaining carbon budget to meet 2°C and 1.5°C Paris climate targets. Illustration: Oil Change International This reality is incompatible with continued US government subsidization of fossil fuel industry production, including $2.5bn per year for the exploration of new fossil fuel resources ­– new resources that simply cannot be developed if we’re to meet the Paris climate target. Sign up to the Green Light email to get the planet's most important stories Read more To achieve that goal, we instead need to replace fossil fuels with clean energy as quickly as possible. And yet, OCI notes that permanent tax breaks to the US fossil fuel industry are more than seven times larger than those for renewable energy. Some of those fossil fuel subsidies have been around for over a century. And they’re making it profitable for the oil industry to extract resources that would otherwise be left in the ground: at current prices, the production of nearly half of all U.S. oil is not economically viable, except with federal and state subsidies. And as David Roberts notes, federal policy is also propping up the coal industry. Were they forced to meet modern pollution standards, 98% of currently operating coal power plants would be unprofitable compared to an equivalent natural gas plant. Coal power plants only stay open through regulations allowing pollution exemptions, and by forcing taxpayers to pick up the climate change bill. Add another trillion dollars in climate subsidies Without a price on carbon pollution, Americans are effectively subsidizing the fossil fuel industry for the costs incurred through its products’ climate change damages. For example, think about the added costs to taxpayers for worse wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and flooding, all amplified by human-caused climate change. In the absence of a price on carbon pollution, the fossil fuel industry doesn’t pay a cent of those costs. Taxpayers pick up the whole tab. These costs can be estimated via the ‘social cost of carbon.’ It’s a difficult number to pin down, but even at the extremely conservative US federal estimate of $37 per ton of carbon dioxide pollution (some recent research pegs the value at more than five times higher), that’s about $200bn per year for America and $1.3tn globally. While direct government subsidies to the fossil fuel industry are expensive, they’re dwarfed by the costs incurred by failing to tax carbon pollution. The fossil fuel industry owns the GOP The OCI report noted that the Obama administration actually proposed to eliminate 60% of federal fossil fuel industry subsidies, but that proposal went nowhere for one obvious reason: In the 2015-2016 election cycle oil, gas, and coal companies spent $354 million in campaign contributions and lobbying and received $29.4 billion in federal subsidies in total over those same years - an 8,200% return on investment. Of those fossil fuel industry contributions to political campaigns, 88% went to Republican politicians. As a result, 97% of House Republicans oppose taxing carbon pollution, and the Trump administration is looking into every possible scheme to further prop up the dying coal industry. The GOP might as well rebrand itself as the Grand Oil Party. Americans needs to rethink what subsidies are for Subsidies are a way for the government to assist an industry, hypothetically for good reason. For example, wind and solar power help meet our energy needs without producing harmful pollution in the process. Because of the associated societal benefits, it’s possible to justify subsidizing clean energy. Alternatively, we could eliminate all energy subsidies and instead tax carbon and other forms of pollution. If rising energy prices are a concern, we could offset those costs by returning the pollution tax revenue to taxpayers. There are numerous different policy options available to achieve the Paris climate target. We can avoid unacceptably risky levels of global warming while also achieving cleaner air, water, and public health without destroying whole landscapes. But continuing to funnel tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry is perverse and counter-productive, as the OCI report noted: Removing these highly inefficient [fossil fuel] subsidies – which waste billions of dollars propping up an industry incompatible with safe climate limits – should be the first priority of fiscally responsible climate, energy, and tax reform policies.

(Joseph E., PublicPolicy@Harvard, , 4-11)

The Impacts of Eliminating Subsidies for US Oil and Gas Production Oil and gas tax expenditures do not have a meaningful impact on US oil and gas production. Oil and gas companies have had access to two of the most prominent subsidies, the intangible drilling cost and percentage depletion provisions, since long before the first oil shock in 1973. Over the 1973–2008 period, US oil production declined each year an average of more than 120,000 barrels per day. Since 2008, US oil production has averaged an annual increase of more than 350,000 barrels per day. These subsidies could not reverse the decline in domestic production before 2008, and high oil prices and technological innovation, not subsidies, explain the rapid production growth in recent years. The remarkable technological innovation that has transformed the US oil and gas sector over the past half dozen years more than offsets any adverse impacts that subsidy elimination would have on domestic production. The National Research Council (NRC) recently modeled the elimination of the percentage depletion provision for natural gas. For this analysis, the NRC used the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) 2011 benchmark energy forecast through 2035. Over the 2010–2035 period, the NRC estimated that eliminating this subsidy would reduce US gas production by about 2 percent relative to this 2011 forecast. This impact appears modest on two dimensions. First, the NRC estimates that US gas production would continue to increase in the years immediately after subsidy elimination and remain above 2010 levels every year through 2035. Thus, the impact is not a fall in the level of production, but slower growth in production. Second, and more profoundly, the DOE's 2013 version of the benchmark forecast shows 15 percent greater gas production through 2035 than the 2011 version used by the NRC. Continuing innovation has led the DOE, year after year, to raise its forecast domestic production and lower its estimated wellhead prices. RFF Visiting Fellow Stephen Brown evaluated the elimination of oil and gas tax expenditures with his colleague Maura Allaire in 2009. He found that US oil production would be about 26,000 barrels per day lower than it would be without the subsidy elimination. Also in 2009, the US Department of the Treasury estimated a similarly modest impact on domestic oil production on the order of about 0.5 percent. The recent, dramatic increase in US oil production—reaching levels unseen since the 1980s—puts this production impact into context. Since January 2009, the average monthly increase in domestic oil production is about 45,000 barrels per day. Thus, it takes about 17 days to make up for a decline of 26,000 barrels per day of production. If the point of these subsidies is to stimulate US production, then the taxpayer is not getting a good deal. If a private company spent nearly $5 billion per year to produce 26,000 barrels per day, it would lose a lot of money. Even applying the Department of the Treasury's 0.5 percent production impact to today's higher level of US oil production translates into the taxpayer spending several hundred dollars per barrel of incremental production. This reflects the fact that the vast majority of these subsidies go to producers that do not change their production in response to the subsidies. Since independents finance projects substantially through cash flow, instead of raising debt, eliminating the tax provisions that subsidize their activities could impact their financing strategy. For example, these companies may need to raise debt and equity for their drilling projects, not unlike how firms in other sectors of the economy finance major projects. In other words, eliminating these subsidies requires them to operate on a level playing field for attracting investment along with supermajors and other companies throughout the economy. Environmental Impact of Eliminating Fossil Fuel Subsidies These subsidies' very small production impacts result in imperceptible effects on US fossil fuel prices and subsequent domestic consumption. As a result, the current subsidies in the US tax code likely have little direct impact on US carbon dioxide emissions. Nonetheless, eliminating these subsidies could lead to significant carbon dioxide emissions reductions globally. Given the US effort in securing the G20 agreement to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies in 2009, the failure to make any domestic progress hamstrings US officials in leveraging progress by other G20 nations. While this issue continues to receive attention from leaders in G20 summits, the progress to date has been slow. Eliminating these domestic subsidies would empower the United States to push other large economies to do likewise. Eliminating fossil fuel subsidies around the world would deliver quite dramatic carbon pollution benefits, as well as important economic and fiscal impacts. The International Energy Agency estimates that eliminating fossil fuel consumption subsidies, currently about a half trillion dollars annually, would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 7 percent by the end of the decade and 10 percent by 2050. Doing so would also free up resources—amounting to at least a quarter of some countries' government budgets—that could be used to address important social needs, such as public health and education.

(Megan, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/were-nuts-isnt-a-great-pitch-for-a-green-new-deal/2019/02/07/f605b220-2b2f-11e9-984d-9b8fba003e81_story.html , 2-7)

I’m in the middle of renovating a house, so it’s probably not surprising that when I started reading Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) FAQ for a Green New Deal, published Thursday by NPR, I was immediately struck by a casual proposal to “upgrade or replace every building in US for state-of-the-art energy efficiency.” Homeowners tend to start renovations hoping to make their houses greener and more energy efficient, if only for reasons of parsimony. They quickly discover that what they lightheartedly imagined to be a few minor upgrades are in fact massive expenses. All they wanted was energy-efficient windows, better insulation, a tankless water heater, a radiant system to replace their (dry, noisy, inefficient) HVAC and . . . dear God, did the contractor misplace a decimal point? We’re updating a modest row house, not building Versailles! Ceilings and walls must be removed, then replaced; fancy new equipment installed; ductwork rerouted; slabs perhaps broken and repoured; ancillary systems brought up to modern housing codes. Much labor is required; much homeowner patience and cash, too. And the older the building, the more expensive and disruptive the process, since decades of obsolete junk have to be ripped out, with all appropriate environmental remediation measures taken along the way. Yet Ocasio-Cortez, or someone in her office, apparently thought those repairs could be made to every building in the United States within a decade. And this is only one of the minor details of the plan; it barely merits more than a mention.

(https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KVvvcBgETGQJ:https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/want-a-green-new-deal-heres-a-better-one/2019/02/24/2d7e491c-36d2-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html&cd=43&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us , 2-24)

IN THE climate debate, the most destructive actors are those who want to do nothing — or even, like the Trump administration, go backward. But it’s also true that good intentions are not sufficient. There are a lot of bad ideas out there. The Green New Deal that some Democrats have embraced is case in point. In its most aggressive form, the plan suggests the country could reach net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, an impossible goal. Christopher Clack, the CEO of analysis group Vibrant Clean Energy, estimates it would cost $27 trillion to get there by 2035 — a yearly price tag of about 9 percent of 2017 gross domestic product. (Total federal spending is currently a bit more than 20 percent of GDP.) Put another way, that would be more spent every three years than the total amount the country spent on World War II. The plan’s proposal to retrofit all existing buildings is also astonishing in its implied scale, and its promise to invest in known fiascos such as high-speed rail reveal deep insensitivity to the lessons of recent government waste. At the same time, the Democratic plan would guarantee every American “high-quality health care” and “a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security.” These expensive aspirations, no matter how laudable, would do nothing to arrest greenhouse-gas emissions. As ostensible parts of a Green New Deal, they divert money and attention from the primary mission: rapidly eliminating emissions between now and midcentury. Even focusing only on that central mission, it is easy to go wrong. California created a cap-and-trade program that prices emissions in the state. But policymakers undercut the system with a variety of additional and unnecessary mandates, such as the state’s low-carbon fuel standard. Because California put an overall ceiling on its total emissions — the “cap” in “cap and trade” — the same level of emissions reduction would happen without the additional fuels standard. The standard just forces particular businesses and consumers to bear a higher burden for the same level of greenhouse-gas abatement. Then there is Germany, a country whose government has imposed extremely high electricity costs on its people in the name of emissions reduction but that still burns tremendous amounts of noxious brown coal. German energy consumers’ investment has not paid off as much as it should have, in large part because the government surrendered to anti-nuclear-power hysteria following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster. Germany’s nuclear power plants produced vast amounts of electricity with no carbon dioxide emissions. But instead of keeping them open as long as possible, giving the country more time to scale up renewables, Germany is shutting them early. The nation’s investments in renewable energy have gone to filling this loss of zero-carbon electricity generation, rather than to retiring coal plants. Spurning a major carbon-free energy source is an irrational indulgence that no nation can afford in the fight against global warming. Good intentions will not solve the global warming crisis. Massive social reform will not protect the climate. Marshaling every dollar to its highest benefit is the strongest plan. Our Green New Deal would do that.

Hsu, 21 --- D'Alemberte Professor, Florida State University College of Law (Summer, 2021, Shi-Ling Hsu, ECONOMIC JUSTICE: Carbon Taxes and Economic Inequality, 15 Harv. L. & Pol'y Rev. 551, Nexis Uni, JMP)

Progressive ambivalence about carbon taxation is both understandable and misplaced. It is understandable because carbon taxation is widely believed to be regressive. 5 It has become standard fare that a carbon tax increases energy costs, which make up a larger portion of a poor household's [*552] budget than a rich household's budget. 6 As it turns out, this perception is inaccurate: carbon taxes actually hurt fossil fuel industries, which are owned by relatively wealthy shareholders, more than they injure consumers. 7 Moreover, carbon tax revenues can be redistributed in such a way that overcompensates most poor households for increased energy costs (resulting from carbon taxation) and undercompensates most rich households, in which case some progress can be made toward economic equality. That said, that redistribution would be fairly modest at the carbon tax levels currently under discussion--on the order of a few hundred or a few thousand dollars per household annually. 8 So at best, carbon taxation can only advance modest gains toward greater equality.

(https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KVvvcBgETGQJ:https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/want-a-green-new-deal-heres-a-better-one/2019/02/24/2d7e491c-36d2-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html&cd=43&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us , 2-24)

Cutting emissions, at home and abroad STOP US IF you’ve heard this before: No matter what the United States does to fight global warming, it won’t matter as long as China, India and the rest of the world do nothing. Those who make this point often argue for doing nothing in the United States, too: sitting back and watching the world cook in a stew of greenhouse gases and mutual distrust. But fatalism is not the only possible reaction to climate change’s international nature. The smarter response is to build policy around it. That starts with making sure that emissions-cutting efforts at home do not have unintended consequences. If the United States puts a price on greenhouse-gas emissions, other countries would lure U.S. manufacturers with the promise of lax environmental rules. Relocated manufacturers could then export their goods to the United States. The net effect would be no benefit for the planet but fewer U.S. manufacturing jobs. One response is a kind of tariff on goods entering the country from places with weaker carbon-dioxide policies. That would both eliminate the incentive to offshore manufacturing and encourage countries to strengthen their own rules. Such a border adjustment system would stoke suspicions that the United States was raising protectionist trade barriers in the guise of environmentalism. It would be far more likely to be considered credible — in foreign capitals and at the World Trade Organization — if the United States remained party to the Paris Agreement, the 2015 climate accord that every nation in the world has agreed to. President Trump announced in 2017 that the United States would exit the agreement by 2020, which would make the United States the only country in the world hostile to the pact. For any rational leader following Mr. Trump in office, reentering the Paris Agreement would have to be a top priority. Participating in the agreement would give the United States a forum — and a basis — to press other nations to reduce emissions. Much like the wildly successful General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which oversaw successive elimination of trade barriers among major economies, the Paris Agreement has established an expectation that the world’s big players will meet regularly and boost their ambition to meet a goal in everyone’s interest, in this case massive greenhouse-gas reduction. To walk away from that process is to reject the lessons of decades of post-World War II international cooperation. Beyond Paris, the government could share the fruits of U.S. clean-energy research with other nations. It could zealously promote international agreements such as the Kigali Accord — a 2016 pact that Mr. Trump has so far not rejected and that serves as more proof of international interest in arresting climate change — which would phase out extremely potent greenhouse-gas agents known as hydrofluorocarbons. Foreign aid to prevent deforestation could be among the most cost-effective climate-preserving measures. Helping other countries to replace archaic cooking stoves that produce noxious fumes would help cut emissions and improve quality of life across the developing world. The best way to ensure that other countries commit to attacking climate change is for the United States to show that it is no slouch — and that it will lead the world as others do their part, too.

(https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KVvvcBgETGQJ:https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/want-a-green-new-deal-heres-a-better-one/2019/02/24/2d7e491c-36d2-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html&cd=43&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us , 2-24)

Another criticism is that carbon pricing hurts the poor, who would suffer most when prices rose. But the revenue from carbon pricing could be recycled back to Americans in a progressive way, and most people would end up whole or better off. A third objection is that carbon pricing is politically impossible, because it reveals the cost of fighting global warming in the prices people pay — rather than hiding the costs in wasteful subsidy programs that people pay for with their tax dollars. This is a leadership challenge, not a policy challenge. More than 40 governments globally, including several states, have found the political will to embrace carbon pricing programs, which is the only option that would plausibly be bipartisan. One objection does have merit: Though carbon pricing would spur huge change in infrastructure and power generation, that alone would not be enough. It would not stimulate all the innovation the nation needs in the climate fight, nor would it change behaviors in circumstances where the desired price signal is muted or nonexistent. Carbon pricing can do a lot — but not everything. Start with carbon pricing. Then fill in the gaps. LAST OCTOBER, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that the world is not on track to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius — and that even 2 degrees may be too much. It would be safer for humanity to keep warming below 1.5 degrees. Sea-level rise would threaten up to 10 million fewer people. Coral reefs might survive. Mosquito-borne illnesses would not spread as widely. Green New Dealers are right that a big problem requires a big solution. Only one serious option — putting a price on carbon — would encourage every sector of the economy to green up in equal measure. Pricing greenhouse-gas emissions with a carbon tax or cap-and-trade program, the economy-wide option, is bigger than the more spectacular-sounding but piecemeal subsidy and mandate programs some environmentalists prefer. But even carbon pricing would not be quite enough. There are places where the price signal would not come through or be effective. In those circumstances, the government would have to do more. For example, economists know that companies that invest in research and development do not get rewarded for the full social value of their work. Others benefit from their innovations without paying. Consequently, firms do not invest in research as much as society should want. On clean energy, that would be true even with a price on carbon emissions. The government should fill this research gap. It would take only a small fraction of the revenue a carbon pricing system would produce to fund a much more ambitious clean-energy research agenda. Basic scientific research and applied research programs such as ARPA-E should be scaled up dramatically. Similarly, a carbon price would encourage homeowners to invest in more efficient appliances or double-paned windows, but renters pay their own electricity bills yet have little say over such decisions. Because of this dynamic, even with a high carbon price, the country would get less investment in energy efficiency than it needs. The government must fill this efficiency gap. Federal standards for appliances and buildings could slash energy waste where price signals failed to do so. Government loan programs could also help low-income people finance money-saving investments. The government must also account for the fact that not all greenhouse-gas emissions come from burning the fuels that a carbon pricing program would reach — coal, oil and gas. How would the government charge farmers for the methane their cows emit or for the greenhouse gases released when they till their soil? How about emissions from cement, ammonia and steel production? The federal government would have to tailor programs to the agricultural and industrial sectors, which might include judicious use of incentives and mandates. Tying eligibility for the nation’s extensive farm subsidy system to environmental stewardship would be a place to start. Finally, there is transportation, a sector that is deeply hooked on oil and dependent on government decision-making on infrastructure investment. Carbon pricing would deter unnecessary driving and spur the purchase of cleaner cars, but only government can ensure adequate mass transit options. Local governments could help with zoning laws to encourage people to live in denser, more walkable communities. The federal government should also press automakers to steadily improve fuel efficiency. In the fight against climate change, the government must enlist the whole economy. Start with carbon pricing. Then fill in the gaps.

(https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KVvvcBgETGQJ:https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/want-a-green-new-deal-heres-a-better-one/2019/02/24/2d7e491c-36d2-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html&cd=43&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us , 2-24)

WE FAVOR a Green New Deal to save the planet. We believe such a plan can be efficient, effective, focused and achievable. The Green New Deal proposed by congressional Democrats does not meet that test. Its proponents, led by Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), are right to call for ambition and bold action. They are right that the entire energy sector must be reshaped. But the goal is so fundamental that policymakers should focus above all else on quickly and efficiently decarbonizing. They should not muddle this aspiration with other social policy, such as creating a federal jobs guarantee, no matter how desirable that policy might be. And the goal is so monumental that the country cannot afford to waste dollars in its pursuit. If the market can redirect spending most efficiently, money should not be misallocated on vast new government spending or mandates. In this series of editorials, we propose our own Green New Deal. It relies both on smart government intervention — and on transforming the relentless power of the market from an obstacle to a centerpiece of the solution. To glimpse what we mean, take a brief trip with us to Dominion Energy’s Cove Point plant on the Chesapeake Bay’s western shore. Giant natural-gas storage tanks offer a warning of how the U.S. government must step up its efforts to combat global warming — but also of how environmentalists and politicians who claim to know how to do that are generally unable to predict how technology and practice will develop. The plant is a reminder that big change is far easier when you get the market to work with you, rather than against you. Huge ships used to bring liquefied natural gas from overseas, weigh anchor a mile offshore and pipe their cargo into the tanks at Cove Point. Then fracking unlocked vast amounts of cheap U.S. gas, turning the country from net importer to net exporter. Now ships wait offshore to receive U.S. liquefied natural gas for export to Asia. As he celebrated the facility’s shipments to Japan in Yokohama last June, Dominion Chief Executive Officer Thomas Farrell boasted that the United States has perhaps 200 years’ worth of obtainable natural gas that “we will be exporting toward our allies across the world for decades and decades.” To some, Cove Point is evidence that unhindered economic growth enables environmental stewardship. U.S. natural gas is far less damaging to the environment than coal. It has become so cheap that it is displacing coal in electricity generation, driving down emissions. To others, Cove Point is an environmental catastrophe. Natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and burning it releases lots of greenhouse-gas emissions, which cause climate change. Both arguments are right. Natural gas’s displacement of carbon-rich, toxic coal as the country’s top electric fuel source would have seemed a preposterous dream just a decade ago. It has come about with no government mandate and while saving consumers money. When the market demands an outcome, things change fast. But even substantial reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions in the long term will not be enough to head off catastrophic climate change. The transition from coal to natural gas has been beneficial. But society must eliminate its carbon dependency. It cannot burn vast amounts of any fossil fuel for “decades and decades,” as Mr. Farrell hopes, unless there is a revolution in emissions capture technology. Even in the short term, U.S. emissions are rising, despite the restraint that stepped-up natural-gas burning has provided. The government must demand more change, more quickly. Putting the planet first requires accepting both insights. The government should insist on cutting emissions but, to the largest extent possible, decline to dictate how, instead setting incentives and standards that unleash public and private effort. Carbon pricing can do a lot — but not everything ASK PRACTICALLY any climate scientist whether humanity must cut greenhouse-gas emissions, and you get an emphatic yes. Ask practically any economist how to do that as cheaply as possible, and the answer is equally emphatic: put a price on carbon dioxide emissions with a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade program. Pollution pricing is not untested theory. It is the policy that ended acid rain, ahead of schedule and more cheaply than projected. Following that success, it was long assumed that pricing carbon dioxide would be the centerpiece of any ambitious plan to slash emissions. Yet Republicans never embraced the market-based idea, even though conservative economists admit its appeal, because they never accepted the need to act at all. Some environmentalists, meanwhile, are increasingly wary of carbon pricing. The Democrats’ Green New Deal, which is noncommittal on the policy, reflects the accelerating drift from the obvious. Yet neither the science nor the economics has changed. It is still imperative to act. And carbon pricing is still the best first-line policy. Theory and practice confirm this unassailable point: If it costs more to pollute, there will be less pollution. Taxing all fuels according to their carbon content would send a price signal to every business and every consumer. Habits that pollute would become more costly. Changes that reduced pollution — generating cleaner electricity, buying more efficient appliances, weatherizing homes, investing in smart thermostats — would become more desirable. A high-enough carbon price would shape millions of choices, small and large, about what to buy, how to invest and how to live that would result in substantial emissions cuts. People would prioritize the easiest changes, minimizing the costs of the energy transition. With a price that steadily rose, market forces would steadily wring carbon dioxide out of the economy — without the government trying to dictate exactly how, wasting money on special-interest boondoggles. Here’s an example. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found last year that an average carbon price between 2030 and the end of the century of $100, $200 or even $300 per ton of carbon dioxide would result in huge greenhouse-gas emissions cuts, could restrain warming to the lowest safety threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius and would almost certainly prevent the world from breaching the traditional warming limit of 2 degrees Celsius. In contrast, U.S. biofuels policy, a sad example of nanny-state inefficiency, costs $556 to $618 in 2010 dollars to abate one ton of carbon dioxide, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2013. With its array of green subsidies and mandates, the government is overpaying for too few emissions cuts in too few sectors of the economy. One objection is that carbon pricing is not powerful enough. The European Union’s carbon pricing program has not worked well. But that is a failure of design and political will. A carbon price equal to the challenge would start high and rise higher, sending a much stronger price signal.

(Tooze, Adam (Prof. History@Columbia University, Prof. International Security@Yale, Fellow in History@Jesus College, Cambridge, PhD Econ History@London School of Economics). “Did Xi Just Save the World?” Foreign Policy Magazine, September 25, 2020. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/25/xi-china-climate-change-saved-the-world%e2%80%a8///SHL)

“China will scale up its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions by adopting more vigorous policies and measures. We aim to have [carbon dioxide] emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.” Xi Jinping’s speech via video link to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 22 was not widely trailed in advance. But with those two short sentences China’s leader may have redefined the future prospects for humanity. That may sound like hyperbole, but in the world of climate politics it is hard to exaggerate China’s centrality. Thanks to the gigantic surge in economic growth since 2000 and its reliance on coal-fired electricity generation, China is now by far the largest emitter of carbon dioxide. At about 28 percent of the global total, the carbon dioxide produced in China (as opposed to that consumed in the form of Chinese exports) is about as much as that produced by the United States, European Union, and India combined. Per capita, its emissions are now greater than those of the EU if we count carbon dioxide emissions on a production rather than a consumption basis. Global warming is produced not by the annual flows of carbon but by the stocks that have accumulated over time in the Earth’s atmosphere. Allowing an equal ration for every person on the planet, it remains the case that the historic responsibility for excessive carbon accumulation lies overwhelmingly with the United States and Europe. Still today China’s emissions per capita are less than half those of the United States. But as far as future emissions are concerned, everything hinges on China. As concerned as Europeans and Americans may be with climate policy, they are essentially bystanders in a future determined by the decisions made by the large, rapidly growing Asian economies, with China far in the lead. China’s rapid rebound from the COVID-19 shock only reinforces that point. With his terse remarks, Xi has mapped out a large part of the future path ahead. As the impact of his remarks sank in, climate modelers crunched the numbers and concluded that, if fully implemented, China’s new commitment will by itself lower the projected temperature increase by 0.2-0.3 degrees Celsius. It is the largest favorable shock that their models have ever produced. There’s an obvious question, of course: Is Xi for real? There are reasons to be skeptical. Xi is not promising an immediate turnaround. The peak will still be expected around 2030. Recent investments in new coal-fired capacity have been alarming. A gigantic 58 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity have been approved or announced just in the first six months of this year. That is equivalent to 25 percent of America’s entire installed capacity and more than China has projected in the previous two years put together. Due to the decentralization of decision-making, Beijing has only partial control over the expansion of coal-burning capacity. If Beijing is actually to implement this policy, there are huge political as well as technological challenges ahead. There have been some encouraging noises about new renewable energy commitments. But the transition costs will be huge, and Beijing has to face its own fossil fuel lobby. As one commentator remarked, Chinese officials laugh when they earnestly seek advice from Europeans on problems of the “just transition” and realize that the entire fossil fuel workforce that has to be taken care of in Germany is smaller than that of a single province in China. It will be an upheaval similar to the traumatic 1990s shakeout of Mao Zedong-era heavy industry. But as ambitious as the objective may be, Xi would not be making such an announcement lightly. Within China, his words have huge weight. The first test of the seriousness of China’s commitment will come when we get the final details of the 14th five-year plan, the road maps that have guided China’s economic development since the beginning of the Communist era. They will begin to emerge by the end of the year. Toward the outside world, the significance is no less momentous. Hitherto the only big bloc fully committed to neutrality was the EU. The hope for this year was an EU-China deal that would set the stage for ambitious new targets to be announced at the COP26 U.N. climate conference planned for Glasgow in November. Rather than a summit in Leipzig, the Sino-EU meeting took place via videoconference. The exchanges were surprisingly substantive. The Europeans wanted China to commit to peak emissions by 2025 and made menacing references to carbon taxes on imports from China if Beijing did not raise its ambition. They have given a cautious welcome to Xi’s U.N. statement. They can hardly have expected more. Xi’s move is all the more striking given the deterioration of China’s relations not just with the United States but with the EU and India. This summer, Indian and Chinese troops skirmished in the Himalayas, and Germany pivoted to an Indo-Pacific strategy aligned with South Korea and Japan. Now the pressure will be on India, long China’s partner in resisting calls from the West for firm commitments to decarbonization, to make a similarly bold climate announcement. Though Europe will cheer Xi’s commitment, in strategic terms it underlines how awkward the EU’s position is. On the one hand, the Europeans increasingly want to stake out a strong position on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, human rights, and any geopolitical aggression in the South China Sea. Europe’s residual attachment to the United States is real. But China has now underscored how firmly it aligns with a common agenda with the EU on climate policy. The contrast to the Trump administration could hardly be starker. Beijing has acted unilaterally. It is playing by the rules of the Paris climate agreement, which revolve around independent national commitments. Beijing has not asked for a quid pro quo from Europe or anyone else. Nor has it waited for the outcome of the U.S. election in November. This ought to give Americans from all sides pause. If the Republican China hawks mean what they say, it surely should be puzzling to them that Beijing, which they accuse of foisting the climate issue on the world to hobble America, is now making a huge and unilateral commitment on decarbonization. But Xi’s move should also be a wake-up call for advocates of proactive climate policy on the Democratic side. Against the backdrop of climate negotiations in the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama eras, their approach tends, in its own way, to be highly transactional. The conceit that one can still hear from veterans of U.S. climate diplomacy is that the world is waiting for America to come back to the table and that no big deal like that at Paris in 2015 is conceivable without the United States. But 2020 is not 2015. The sobering truth is that neither the EU nor China is any longer conditioning its climate policy on the United States. If you are serious about the issue, how could you? If Washington does come around to supporting a Green New Deal of the Joe Biden variety, that will, of course, be welcome. But in light of America’s cavalier dismissal of the Paris agreement, even if a new administration were to make a new and more ambitious round of commitments, what would that amount to? So long as the basics of the American way of life remain nonnegotiable and climate skepticism has a strong grip on public opinion, so long as the rearguard of the fossil fuel industries is allowed the influence that it is, so long as one of the two main governing parties and the media that supports it are rogue, America’s democracy is not in a position to make credible commitments. Whatever the outcome of the election, Donald Trump will surely carry through on his declaration that the United States is exiting the Paris agreement. The day on which that decision comes into effect is Nov. 4. Trump’s inversion of U.S. policy is possible because Obama never put the Paris agreement to Congress. Indeed, after the abortive cap and trade legislation of 2009, the cornerstone of the original Green New Deal, the Obama administration abandoned major legislative initiatives on climate change. Instead, it relied on regulatory interventions and the force of cheap fracked gas to deliver a modest decarbonization agenda, anchored on ending coal. In the future too, the two things that can be counted on to drive the climate agenda in the United States are technology and markets. And the same goes for other recalcitrant fossil fuel addicts around the world. If there are affordable and high-quality technological options, the switch to green will happen. Due to the advances in solar and wind power, we are rapidly approaching that point. Whatever Trump’s bluster, coal is on its way out in the United States, too. The U.S. environmental movement remains a vigorous and inspiring voice. America’s science base and business nous, as well as the enthusiasm of capital markets for ventures like Tesla, can be counted on as drivers of progress. There are no doubt positive synergies to be had between market-driven energy choices in the United States and the industrial policy options that the European and Chinese bids for neutrality will open up. Solar and wind have already given examples of that. But amid the shambles of U.S. policy both on climate and the coronavirus, it is time to recognize a qualitative difference between the United States and Europe and China. Whereas Europe and China can sustain an emphatic public commitment to meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene with international commitments and public investment, the structure of the U.S. political system and the depth and politicization of the culture wars make that impossible. Perversely, the only way to build bipartisan political support for a green transition in the United States may be to pitch it as a national security issue in a cold war competition with China. Of course, one should not despair of a more creative and positive scenario for the United States. The Green New Deal points the way. The push from the left has shifted the terms of debate across the Democratic Party. Of late, there are even voices in the Republican Party calling for an accommodation with the reality of global warming. But who knows how the electorate will decide on Nov. 3 and whether America’s institutions will hold up. For the United States, everything hangs in the balance. For the rest of the world, that is not the case. As Xi made clear on Sept. 22, as far as the most important collective issue facing humanity is concerned, the major players are no longer waiting. If the United States joins the decarbonization train, that will be all well and good. A constructive U.S. contribution to U.N. climate diplomacy will be most welcome. But the era in which the United States was the decisive voice has passed. China and Europe are decoupling.

(Nicolas, Deputy Director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies and Herbert and Joyce Morgan fellow at The Heritage Foundation, , 2-25)

Wishful Thinking. Although one of the priorities of the Green New Deal is to make the U.S. a lead exporter in green technologies, assuming developing countries will forego cheap abundant carbon dioxide–emitting energy for more expensive intermittent sources is pure fantasy. Developing countries will likely expand their use of renewable power sources, but not to the extent it will have any meaningful impact on global temperatures. While some countries are shuttering their coal-fired plants, others in both developed and developing countries are building new plants and expanding the life of existing generators. Affordable, reliable, and widely available energy is essential to lifting people out of poverty and improving the life, health, and comfort of people trying to reach a better standard of living.