Category: Energy/Environment

The Ingenuity of Scientists and Entrepreneurs Can Find New Uses for the Previously Useless or Underutilitized

(p. D2) It may be unpleasant to contemplate the ultimate fate of all the material from your own body that you flush down the pipes. But it’s time we talk about biosolids — the disinfected leftovers from the water treatment process.

This sandy material contains nutrient-rich organic content that’s good for agriculture. But it also makes nice bricks, according to Abbas Mohajerani, a civil engineer at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Australia. He’s talking about the kind we use for building.

“Biosolids bricks look the same, smell the same and have similar physical and mechanical properties as normal fired clay bricks,” he said.

For the full story see:

JoAnna Klein. “Ultimate Recycling: When You Flushed The Toilet, They Made A Few Bricks.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 5, 2019 [sic]): D2.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 31, 2019 [sic], and has the title “You Flushed the Toilet. They Made Some Bricks.” Where the versions differ, the passages quoted above are from the more detailed online version.)

Mohajerani’s co-authored academic article proposing that human manure can usefully be turned into bricks for buildings is:

Mohajerani, Abbas, Aruna Ukwatta, Tristan Jeffrey-Bailey, Michael Swaney, Mohtashim Ahmed, Glen Rodwell, Simon Bartolo, Nicky Eshtiaghi, and Sujeeva Setunge. “A Proposal for Recycling the World’s Unused Stockpiles of Treated Wastewater Sludge (Biosolids) in Fired-Clay Bricks.” Buildings 9, no. 1 (2019): article #14.

Europeans Tire of Costly and Ineffective Climate Transition Policies

(p. A15) The 2015 Paris Agreement aspired to “reduce the risks and impacts of climate change” by eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions in the latter half of this century. The centerpiece of the strategy was a global transition to low-emission energy systems.

. . .

U.S. and European governments are trying to induce an energy transition by building or expanding organizations and programs favoring particular “clean” technologies, including wind and solar generation, carbon capture, hydrogen production and vehicle electrification. Promoting technological innovation is a worthy endeavor, but such efforts face serious challenges as costs and disruptions grow without tangible progress in reducing local, let alone global, emissions. Retreats from aggressive goals are already under way in Europe, with clear signs of mandate fatigue. The climbdown will be slower in the U.S., where subsidies create constituencies that make it more difficult to reverse course.

. . . It means that today’s ineffective, inefficient, and ill-considered climate-mitigation strategies will be abandoned, making room for a more thoughtful and informed approach to responsibly providing for the world’s energy needs.

For the full commentary see:

Steven E. Koonin. “The ‘Climate Crisis’ Fades Out.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, June 11, 2024): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 10, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

Koonin’s commentary, quoted above, is related to his book:

Koonin, Steven E. Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2021.

The Dynamic Renewal of artdiamondblog.com

In my Openness to Creative Destruction book I claim that we flourish through dynamism. But sometimes I do not practice what I preach. I fear that may be true with artdiamondblog.com. So I have spent some time pondering changes in my blog that I hope will on balance make it more useful to readers, and also free some of my time for my current main project, a book on Less Costs, More Cures: Unbinding Medical Entrepreneurs.

The Benefits and Opportunity Cost of My Current Blog:

Sone entries preserve some important examples that otherwise might be hard to find or to document.

Some entries help inform readers (and publishers) about my articles and books.

But time spent editing entries could be spent on my next book, or on writing op-eds, or on researching academic papers.

Conclusion:

I believe that the time I spend on my blog has produced value. But I also believe that the time could produce greater value if I re-directed some of it to my main project, the book Less Costs, More Cures. I also believe that it will have more value if a higher percent of the blog entries are related to the new book. (As Aaron and any other regular readers of the blog know, over the past year or two I have already moved in the direction of a higher percent of blog entries being relevant to Less Costs, More Cures.)

I have spent time preserving and sorting articles that I will now toss. Painful, but I long taught that sunk costs really are sunk, and I should practice what I preached.

In addition to content renewal, I also plan to implement some process renewal. Some of this will be trial and error. The content and process ideas below are not an exhaustive list.

Blog Renewal:

For some entries, instead of the past substantial quotations, I will just provide a citation and a couple of sentence summary. This will take less of my time, and so will have less opportunity cost. For some of the entries this change may also make it clearer to the reader why I think the cited article is important.

For articles related to Less Costs, More Cures, I will sometimes continue the past “readers digest” format for entries, where I explicitly quote particularly apt or important portions of the article. But I will less frequently do so for articles that support contentious points that I made in Openness.

I plan to occasionally add entries that provide meaningful and/or entertaining anecdotes or vignettes from my life as an academic. I hope these will not take much time, and that some may be useful to future historians of thought.

For articles to blog, I will try harder to seek out those that will stand the test of time–not depreciate quickly. These would tend to be meaningful stories, not statistics, or short-term accounts about particular firms or executives.

I will stop blogging so much on issues that are important, but where a strong and growing minority are presenting similar information. Three such issues would be environmental optimism, anti-D.E.I., and anti-Chinese-Communist violation of rights. For example, on the environment, we may be approaching a tipping point. Even The New York Times, sometimes in front page articles, has been explaining the potential of geoengineering (though still with the obligatory politically correct nod to the anti-growth/anti-technology environmentalists). [See: Gelles, David. “Can We Engineer Our Way Out of a Climate Crisis?” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, March 31, 2024): 1 & 12-13; Gelles, David. “Scientist Wants to Block Sunlight to Cool Earth.” The New York Times (Sunday, Aug. 4, 2024): 1 & 18-19; Plumer, Brad, and Raymond Zhong. “Bold Plan Would Turn the World’s Oceans into Carbon Busters.” The New York Times (Monday, Sept. 23, 2024): A1 & A12-A13; and Gelles, David. “Renegades of Silicon Valley Pollute the Sky to Save the Planet.” The New York Times (Monday, Sept. 30, 2024): B1-B2.]

Welcome Your Comments:

Although I hope that my blog has been useful, and I have ideas about how it might have been useful, I rarely have empirical evidence. So I will be grateful if you let me know if any of it has been useful to you. I also will be grateful if you let me know what you think about my plans for renewal, and what suggestions you have for improvement (especially suggestions that do not cost me much time or effort ;).

You can respond within my blog as a comment to this entry or you can email me at amdiamond@cox.net. (Or if you have one of my other email addresses, use what you already have.)

Green Energy Subsidies Do Not Reduce Fossil Fuel Consumption

(p. A13) Regular readers may feel vindicated by a new study this week in the prestigious journal Science. It examines 1,500 “climate” policies adopted around the world and finds only 63—or 4%—produced any emissions reductions. Even so, press accounts strained to muddy the study’s simple lesson so let’s spell it out: Taxing carbon reduces emissions. Subsidizing “green energy” doesn’t.

In fact, this should be old hat. One of the most cited papers in climate economics is 2012’s “Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels?” by the University of Oregon’s Richard York. His answer: not “when net effects are considered.”

Mr. York and a colleague returned with a 2019 empirical paper showing that while “renewable energy sources compose a larger share of overall energy production, they are not replacing fossil fuels but are rather expanding the overall amount of energy that is produced.”

. . .

The 2023 data have arrived. Fossil-fuel use, emissions and green energy all have grown right alongside each other, as economics predicted. Global emissions finally broke the 40 gigaton threshold, having doubled since 1984.

For the full commentary see:

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. “Business World; Follow the Science: Biden Climate Policy Is a Fraud.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Aug. 24, 2024): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date August 23, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

The recent Science paper mentioned above is:

Stechemesser, Annika, Nicolas Koch, Ebba Mark, Elina Dilger, Patrick Klösel, Laura Menicacci, Daniel Nachtigall, Felix Pretis, Nolan Ritter, Moritz Schwarz, Helena Vossen, and Anna Wenzel. “Climate Policies That Achieved Major Emission Reductions: Global Evidence from Two Decades.” Science 385, no. 6711 (Aug. 22, 2024): 884-92.

York’s 2012 paper mentioned above is:

York, Richard. “Do Alternative Energy Sources Displace Fossil Fuels?” Nature Climate Change 2, no. 6 (June 2012): 441-43.

York’s 2019 paper mentioned above is:

York, Richard, and Shannon Elizabeth Bell. “Energy Transitions or Additions?: Why a Transition from Fossil Fuels Requires More Than the Growth of Renewable Energy.” Energy Research & Social Science 51 (May 2019): 40-43.

Hygiene Hypothesis Says Parasites Help the Immune System to Develop

(p. D6) The kakapo, a large flightless parrot that can live 95 years and perhaps longer, is dangerously close to extinction. Once found throughout New Zealand, the population has dwindled to fewer than 150.

Conservation biologists are doing everything they can to keep the kakapo from vanishing. And so, when they discovered a few years ago that a pair of captive kakapos were infected with tapeworms, they did the obvious thing: They dewormed the birds.

Hamish G. Spencer, a geneticist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, thinks that was unwise. If endangered species are going to escape extinction, he argues, they may need parasites to survive.

“Some of these parasites may turn out to be quite good for their hosts,” Dr. Spencer said.

. . .

Evidence accumulated over the decades for what came to be known as the hygiene hypothesis. Supporters argued that over the past two centuries, modern civilization has radically changed our relationship with our inner residents.

For millions of years, our evolving bodies had to strike a tricky balance. We depended on a powerful immune system to fend off deadly infections. But if the immune system were to attack indiscriminately, it could destroy the body’s beneficial bacteria, for example, or damage its tissues with relentless inflammation.

According to the hygiene hypothesis, our ancestors came to tolerate low levels of infection. They even came to depend on parasites to help the immune system develop properly.

. . .

It’s possible, Dr. Spencer said, that the lack of parasites may help explain why some species restoration projects have been disappointing. “There are a number of cases where reintroduced populations haven’t done very well,” he said. “It might be that their immune systems are not very good.”

. . .

A first step, Dr. Spencer said, would be to stop medicating captive animals so freely. “We are arguing against the idea that you just dose the hell out of everything before you put animals back in the wild,” he said.

For the full story see:

Carl Zimmer. “Parasites as Welcome Guests.” The New York Times (Tuesday, April 5, 2016 [sic]): D6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 31, 2016 [sic], and has the title “Tapeworms and Other Parasites Can Make Good Guests.” The paragraph that starts “For millions of years,” appears in the online version, but not in the print version.)

For more on the hygiene hypothesis see the following academic article:

Versini, Mathilde, Pierre-Yves Jeandel, Tomer Bashi, Giorgia Bizzaro, Miri Blank, and Yehuda Shoenfeld. “Unraveling the Hygiene Hypothesis of Helminthes and Autoimmunity: Origins, Pathophysiology, and Clinical Applications.” BMC Medicine 13, no. 1 (2015). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-015-0306-7.

Musk Will Downsize Government and “Remove Absurd Regulations”

(p. B4) If Elon Musk becomes chief red-tape cutter in a second Trump administration, he is already giving a taste of what’s to come.

. . .

. . ., he often talks about how regulations can be like little strings that collectively tie down a giant like Gulliver, and strip us of our freedoms.

. . .

A Trump victory could give the country, according to Musk, a rare opportunity to clean house unseen since the Reagan administration’s massive deregulation effort.

“It’s been a long time since there was a serious effort to reduce the size of government and to remove absurd regulations,” Musk said during an appearance this month at the “All-In Podcast” conference.

While he skirted what exactly he would do, Musk made it clear that the EPA was the kind of agency on his mind. He pointed to a proposed fine of about $148,000 by the EPA announced this month over claims of SpaceX improperly discharging deluge water and spilling liquid oxygen at its South Texas launchpad.

Musk called it an example of “irrational regulation” and compared the company’s actions to dumping drinking water on the ground. “There was no actual harm done,” he said. “It was just water to cool the launchpad during lift off.”

. . .

Neuralink announced a regulatory win this past week. Musk’s brain-implant company said the Food and Drug Administration had awarded its experimental Blindsight microchip, which aims to restore sight, a special designation intended for medical devices aimed at treating life-threatening or irreversible debilitating conditions.

If successful, it sounds like the stuff out of TV’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

“Provided the visual cortex is intact, it will even enable those who have been blind from birth to see for the first time,” Musk said this past week.

It is those kinds of advancements that excite his fans and why it can be so hard to rein him in amid public support.

For the full commentary see:

Tim Higgins. “As Musk Picks Fights, Stakes Are Rising.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Sept. 23, 2024): B4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date September 21, 2024, and has the title “The Fight Elon Musk Is Ready to Pick in a Trump Administration.”)

Volcanoes Release Enough Carbon Dioxide to Raise the Temperature by 60 Degrees

So an Oxford geologist finds that “volcanoes release vast amounts of carbon dioxide” and that release is mostly a good thing since without it the Earth “would chill by nearly 60 degrees.” Environmentalists are stressing that the temperature of the Earth may go up by a few degrees. Imagine how the environmentalists would stress if the volcanoes stopped releasing carbon dioxide and the temperature started going down by 60 degrees. That would indeed be something to stress about.

(p. 8) Tamsin Mather, a geologist at the University of Oxford, has no such difficulty. She has spent her career visiting volcanoes to understand how they work, and she has come to see Earth not as a peaceful world encased in a stable crust, but a globe of barely contained geological storms.

“Adventures in Volcanoland” is organized around trips Mather has taken throughout her career, starting with Vesuvius, which she first visited as a child on a family vacation. Next comes the Nicaraguan volcano Masaya, which she studied as a graduate student, and then volcanoes on other continents.

. . .

In her own research, Mather has specialized in measuring the gases that volcanoes emit. Even when they’re not erupting, volcanoes release vast amounts of carbon dioxide. Without that heat-trapping gas, an icehouse effect would replace the greenhouse effect, and the planet’s temperature would chill by nearly 60 degrees.

For the most part, Earth is able to keep its climate stable. While volcanoes warm the planet, chemical reactions draw off carbon dioxide from the air, ultimately delivering it deep underground.

This planetary thermostat is not enough to keep volcanoes from periodically unleashing hell, though. Vast eruptions may be responsible for most of the mass extinctions in life’s history.

For the full review see:

Carl Zimmer. “Lava Lamp.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, August 11, 2024): 8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 19, 2024, and has the title “The Eternal Pull of the Fascinating, Deadly Volcano.”)

The book under review is:

Mather, Tamsin. Adventures in Mather, Tamsin. Adventures in Volcanoland: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves. New York: Hanover Square Press, 2024.

Before Co-founding “Colossal” Private For-Profit Firm, George Church “Was Planning on Slogging Along at a Slow Pace” in Academia

Harvard Professor George Church chooses to pursue his bold dream of bringing wooly mammoths back to life through a private firm rather than through a nonprofit organization or an educational institution. Is that because nimble innovation is less constrained in a private for-profit firm?

(p. D3) A team of scientists and entrepreneurs announced on Monday that they have started a new company to genetically resurrect the woolly mammoth.

The company, named Colossal, aims to place thousands of these magnificent beasts back on the Siberian tundra, thousands of years after they went extinct.

“This is a major milestone for us,” said George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, who for eight years has been leading a small team of moonlighting researchers developing the tools for reviving mammoths. “It’s going to make all the difference in the world.”

. . .

The idea behind Colossal first emerged into public view in 2013, when Dr. Church sketched it out in a talk at the National Geographic Society.

. . .

Russian ecologists have imported bison and other living species to a preserve in Siberia they’ve dubbed Pleistocene Park, in the hopes of turning the tundra back to grassland. Dr. Church argued that resurrected woolly mammoths would be able to do this more efficiently. The restored grassland would keep the soil from melting and eroding, he argued, and might even lock away heat-trapping carbon dioxide.

Dr. Church’s proposal attracted a lot of attention from the press but little funding beyond $100,000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

. . .

“Frankly, I was planning on slogging along at a slow pace,” Dr. Church said. But in 2019, he was contacted by Ben Lamm, the founder of the Texas-based artificial intelligence company Hypergiant, who was intrigued by press reports of the de-extinction idea.

Mr. Lamm visited Dr. Church’s lab, and the two hit it off. “After about a day of being in the lab and spending a lot of time with George, we were pretty passionate on pursuing this,” Mr. Lamm said.

Mr. Lamm began setting up Colossal to support Dr. Church’s work, all the way from tinkering with DNA to eventually placing “a functional mammoth,” as Dr. Hysolli calls it, in the wild.

The company’s initial funding comes from investors ranging from Climate Capital Collective, an investment group that backs efforts to lower carbon emissions, to the Winklevoss twins, known for their battles over Facebook and investments in Bitcoin.

. . .

Heather Browning, a philosopher at the London School of Economics, said that whatever benefits mammoths might have to the tundra will need to be weighed against the possible suffering that they might experience in being brought into existence by scientists.

“You don’t have a mother for a species that — if they are anything like elephants — has extraordinarily strong mother-infant bonds that last for a very long time,” she said. “Once there is a little mammoth or two on the ground, who is making sure that they’re being looked after?”

And Colossal’s investors may have questions of their own: How will these mammoths make any money? Mr. Lamm predicted that the company would be able to spin off new forms of genetic engineering and reproductive technology.

“We are hopeful and confident that there will be technologies that come out of it that we can build individual business units out of,” Mr. Lamm said.

For the full story see:

Carl Zimmer. “MATTER; A Company Aims to Restock the Woolly Mammoth.” The New York Times (Tuesday, September 14, 2021 [sic]): D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Sept. 30 [sic], 2021 [sic], and has the title “MATTER; A New Company With a Wild Mission: Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth.”)

Cloud Brightening Could Counter Global Warming

If the costs of global warming become large enough, we can brighten clouds to reverse global warming.

(p. A1) A little before 9 a.m. on Tuesday [April 2, 2024], an engineer named Matthew Gallelli crouched on the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier in San Francisco Bay, pulled on a pair of ear protectors, and flipped a switch.

A few seconds later, a device resembling a snow maker began to rumble, then produced a great and deafening hiss. A fine mist of tiny aerosol particles shot from its mouth, traveling hundreds of feet through the air.

It was the first outdoor test in the United States of technology designed to brighten clouds and bounce some of the sun’s rays back into space, a way of temporarily cooling a planet that is now dangerously overheating. The scientists wanted to see whether the machine that took years to create could consistently spray the right size salt aerosols through the open air, outside of a lab.

If it works, the next stage would be to aim at the heavens and try to change the composition of clouds above the Earth’s oceans.

. . .

(p. A14) Brightening clouds is one of several ideas to push solar energy back into space — sometimes called solar radiation modification, solar geoengineering, or climate intervention. Compared with other options, such as injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, marine cloud brightening would be localized and use relatively benign sea salt aerosols as opposed to other chemicals.

. . .

“I hope, and I think all my colleagues hope, that we never use these things, that we never have to,” said Sarah Doherty, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington and the manager of its marine cloud brightening program.

. . .

But it’s vital to find out whether and how such technologies could work, Dr. Doherty said, in case society needs them. And no one can say when the world might reach that point.

In 1990, a British physicist named John Latham published a letter in the journal Nature, under the heading “Control of Global Warming?,” in which he introduced the idea that injecting tiny particles into clouds could offset rising temperatures.

Dr. Latham later attributed his idea to a hike with his son in Wales, where they paused to look at clouds over the Irish Sea.

“He asked why clouds were shiny at the top but dark at the bottom,” Dr. Latham told the BBC in 2007. “I explained how they were mirrors for incoming sunlight.”

Dr. Latham had a proposal that may have seemed bizarre: create a fleet of 1,000 unmanned, sail-powered vessels to traverse the world’s oceans and continuously spray tiny droplets of seawater into the air to deflect solar heat away from Earth.

The idea is built on a scientific concept (p. A15) called the Twomey effect: Large numbers of small droplets reflect more sunlight than small numbers of large droplets. Injecting vast quantities of minuscule aerosols, in turn forming many small droplets, could change the composition of clouds.

“If we can increase the reflectivity by about 3 percent, the cooling will balance the global warming caused by increased C02 in the atmosphere,” Dr. Latham, who died in 2021, told the BBC. “Our scheme offers the possibility that we could buy time.”

A version of marine cloud brightening already happens every day, according to Dr. Doherty.

As ships travel the seas, particles from their exhaust can brighten clouds, creating “ship tracks,” behind them. In fact, until recently, the cloud brightening associated with ship tracks offset about 5 percent of climate warming from greenhouse gases, Dr. Doherty said.

Ironically, as better technology and environmental regulations have reduced the pollution emitted by ships, that inadvertent cloud brightening is fading, as well as the cooling that goes along with it.

A deliberate program of marine cloud brightening could be done with sea salts, rather than pollution, Dr. Doherty said.

For the full story see:

Christopher Flavelle. “Salting the Clouds to Cool an Overheating Earth.” The New York Times (Thursday, April 4, 2024): A1 & A14-A15.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 2, 2024, and has the title “Warming Is Getting Worse. So They Just Tested a Way to Deflect the Sun.”)

The article by the physicist John Latham, published in the one of the top two journals in science, and mentioned above, is:

Latham, John. “Control of Global Warming?” Nature 347, no. 6291 (Sept. 27, 1990): 339-40.

The Benefits of the “Energy Transition” Are Distant and Uncertain, While the Costs Are Immediate and Large

(p. A15) The 2015 Paris Agreement aspired to “reduce the risks and impacts of climate change” by eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions in the latter half of this century. The centerpiece of the strategy was a global transition to low-emission energy systems.

. . .

The energy transition’s purported climate benefits are distant, vague and uncertain while the costs and disruption of rapid decarbonization are immediate and substantial. The world has many more urgent needs, including the provision of reliable and affordable energy to all.  . . .

U.S. and European governments are trying to induce an energy transition by building or expanding organizations and programs favoring particular “clean” technologies, including wind and solar generation, carbon capture, hydrogen production and vehicle electrification. Promoting technological innovation is a worthy endeavor, but such efforts face serious challenges as costs and disruptions grow without tangible progress in reducing local, let alone global, emissions. Retreats from aggressive goals are already under way in Europe, with clear signs of mandate fatigue. The climbdown will be slower in the U.S., where subsidies create constituencies that make it more difficult to reverse course.

. . . today’s ineffective, inefficient, and ill-considered climate-mitigation strategies will be abandoned, making room for a more thoughtful and informed approach to responsibly providing for the world’s energy needs.

For the full commentary see:

Steven E. Koonin. “The ‘Climate Crisis’ Fades Out.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, June 11, 2024): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 10, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

Koonin’s commentary, quoted above, is related to his book:

Koonin, Steven E. Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2021.

The New York Times Is Open to the Possibility and Desirability of Geoengineering

In the past, The New York Times either ignored, or was dismissive of, geoengineering to reverse or mitigate the alleged future effects of global warming. A few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised to see the paper publish a page one article, quoted below, that was open to the policy of geoengineering. This is progress because the left’s standard response to the alleged effects of global warming is to advocate reduced economic growth. Geoengineering would allow economic growth, and the human flourishing it allows, to continue, even if global warming becomes as severe as the pessimists fear.

(p. 1) On a windswept Icelandic plateau, an international team of engineers and executives is powering up an innovative machine designed to alter the very composition of Earth’s atmosphere.

If all goes as planned, the enormous vacuum will soon be sucking up vast quantities of air, stripping out carbon dioxide and then locking away those greenhouse gases deep underground in ancient stone — greenhouse gases that would otherwise continue heating up the globe.

Just a few years ago, technologies like these, that attempt to re-engineer the natural environment, were on the scientific fringe. They were too expensive, too impractical, too sci-fi. But with the dangers from climate change worsening, and the world failing to meet its goals of slashing greenhouse gas emissions, they are quickly moving to the mainstream among both scientists and investors, despite questions about their effectiveness and safety.

. . .  Once science fiction, today these ideas are becoming reality.

Researchers are studying ways to block some of the sun’s radiation. They are testing whether adding iron to the ocean could carry carbon dioxide to the sea floor. They are hatching plans to build giant parasols in space. And with massive facilities like the one in Iceland, they are seeking to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air.

. . .

(p. 12) A plant similar to the one in Iceland, but far larger, is being built in Texas by Occidental Petroleum, the giant oil company.

. . .

The Occidental plant, being built near Odessa, Texas, and known as Stratos, will be more than 10 times more powerful than Mammoth, powered by solar energy, and have the potential to capture and sequester 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.

It uses a different process to extract carbon dioxide from the air, though the goal is the same: Most of it will be locked away deep underground. But at least some of the carbon dioxide, Occidental says, will also be used to extract more oil.

In that process, carbon dioxide is pumped into the ground to force out oil that might otherwise be too difficult to reach. Techniques like this have made Occidental a company worth more than $50 billion and helped send American crude production to a new high in recent years.

Of course, it is the world’s reliance on the burning of oil and other fossil fuels that has so dangerously sent carbon dioxide levels soaring. In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide acts as a blanket, trapping the sun’s heat and warming the world.

Today, Occidental says it is trying to become a “carbon management” company as well as an oil producer. Last year, it paid $1.1 billion for a start-up called Carbon Engineering that had developed a way to soak up carbon dioxide from the air, and began building the Stratos project. Today, what was a barren plot of dirt less than 12 months ago is a bustling construction site.

“It’s like the Apollo missions at NASA,” said Richard Jackson, who oversees carbon management and domestic oil operations at Occidental. “We’re trying to move as quickly as we can.”

For the full story see:

David Gelles. “Can We Engineer Our Way Out of a Climate Crisis?” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, March 31, 2024): 1 & 12-13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated April 4, 2024, and has the title “Can We Engineer Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis?” The sentence above that starts “Once science fiction” appeared in the print, but not the online, version.)