Negative carbon technology solves just transition. Avoiding energy poverty and cleaning up the impact of the military industrial complex requires geoengineering.

(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).