Category: Entrepreneurship

For Nov. 5 Vote Diamond Ponders Deregulation of Entrepreneurs, Survival of Israel, Defense of Freedom of Speech

Art Diamond on 9/26/24 with red Nebraska sign.

I requested a red Nebraska sign that was delivered yesterday. Our Omaha district is sometimes called “the blue dot” because it sometimes votes against the rest of red Nebraska. To decide what to do on Nov. 5, I mostly ask three questions. Who will most reduce regulations so that entrepreneurs can create the goods and services that allow us to flourish? Who will stand firm for the survival of the freedom sanctuary that is Israel? And especially, who will stand firm for the nonpoliticized rule of law and for freedom of speech?

Is Longevity Constrained by Nature or by Government Regulations?

I am a longevity optimist. If regulatory constraints are loosened, I believe entrepreneurs will bring us quicker progress.

(p. A12) S. Jay Olshansky, who studies the upper bounds of human longevity at the University of Illinois Chicago, believes people shouldn’t expect to live to 100.

. . .

Kaare Christensen, co-author of a paper predicting most newborns born in the 2000s would live to 100 if medical progress continued, said it is too soon to know who is right. Future advances could make up for stalled life expectancy gains.

“The setback could be temporary,” he said.

Christensen, who runs studies on very old people at the Danish Aging Research Center in Denmark, said people in their 90s have better cognitive function and healthier teeth over their lifetimes than counterparts of the same age born just 10 years earlier.

“I would say prepare for your 90s instead,” Christensen said.

Old-age debate

Olshansky’s foray into the limits of lifespan began in 1990 when he published a paper in Science stating that life expectancy wouldn’t rise dramatically even if diseases including cancer and heart disease are eliminated. He has been fighting about it ever since.

James Vaupel, a demographer, pushed back. In a 2021 paper, Vaupel pointed to statistics showing that since around 1840 life expectancy at birth has increased almost 2.5 years per decade in some countries.

Vaupel and Olshansky published dueling papers over the decades until Vaupel’s death at age 76 in 2022.

Steven Austad, a professor of biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, was asked at a 2001 scientific meeting when he thought the first person to live to 150 would be born. “I think that person is already alive,” Austad replied. Austad said he based his answer on optimism that scientists will figure out how to change the biology of aging.

When Olshansky heard about the exchange, he bet Austad that wasn’t true. In 150 years, he argued, there still wouldn’t be a person alive at 150. The men wagered $150 each, which they put in a fund to pay out in 150 years, with the winner’s heirs to reap the profit. A decade ago, they each added another $150 to the account.

Austad said he agreed with Olshansky that most newborns born now won’t live to 100. But he thinks his optimism that someone will live to 150 is justified. He pointed to a study showing the compound rapamycin extended the lifespan of mice, even if they start getting it later in life. Some longevity enthusiasts are taking rapamycin themselves. Studies on other potentially antiaging compounds are under way.

“If any turn out to work,” Austad said, “they will win my bet for me.”

For the full story see:

Amy Dockser Marcus. “Live Until 100? Our Chances Are Slim.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, July 17, 2024): A12.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 11, 2024, and has the title “Think You Will Live to 100? These Scientists Think You’re Wrong.”)

The paper co-authored by Christensen and mentioned above, is:

Christensen, Kaare, Gabriele Doblhammer, Roland Rau, and James W. Vaupel. “Ageing Populations: The Challenges Ahead.” Lancet 374, no. 9696 (Oct. 3, 2009): 1196-208.

The 2021 paper co-authored by Vaupel and mentioned above, is:

Vaupel, James W., Francisco Villavicencio, and Marie-Pier Bergeron-Boucher. “Demographic Perspectives on the Rise of Longevity.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 9 (2021): e2019536118.

United Nations “Innovation Matters” Podcast Posts Second Part of Episode on Diamond’s Openness to Creative Destruction

Innovation history and policies continue to be the themes of this second part of my conversation with Lars Anders Joensson on the United Nations’s Innovation Matters podcast. The discussion of “Innovation Matters: Innovative Dynamism” is mostly related to the process of innovative dynamism as discussed in my book Openness to Creative Destruction. Anders was especially energized in this second part of the conversation. (Recorded Weds., Aug. 3, 2022; posted Thurs., Sept. 19, 2024.) [Links to first part of podcast conversation.]

Part 2 is available on: SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music.

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.”)

Successes of Thiel’s Entrepreneurial Anti-College Fellowships Undermine Veneration of Higher Ed

Gary Becker won the Nobel Prize in part for his work as a founder of the study of the economics of human capital. One common finding of the field is that investment in higher education has a high rate of return. So Becker was puzzled when his own grandson pondered skipping college in order to directly become a technology entrepreneur.

I speculate that information technology will make it increasingly easy for autodidacts to learn on their own what they need to know, whenever they need to know it. I further speculate that formal education, especially formal higher education, will wither into irrelevance, just as the Post Office has withered in the face of email and Amazon.

(p. B4) Peter Thiel is trying harder than ever to get young people to skip college.

Since 2010, Thiel, an early Facebook investor and a founder of PayPal Holdings, has offered to pay students $100,000 to drop out of school to start companies or nonprofits.

. . .

Some big successes include Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, the blockchain network; Laura Deming, a key figure in venture investing in aging and longevity; Austin Russell, who runs self-driving technologies company Luminar Technologies; and Paul Gu, co-founder of consumer lending company Upstart.

When he began his fellowship, Thiel, a vocal libertarian who was an active supporter of Donald Trump in 2016, was disenchanted with leading colleges and convinced they weren’t best suited for many young people.

His aim, at least in part, was to undermine the popular view that college was necessary for all students, and that top universities should be accorded prestige and veneration.

Since then, public opinion has shifted toward his perspective. More Americans are rethinking the value of a college education. At the same time, America’s elite universities have come under fire for their handling of a surge in antisemitism and for maintaining what critics call a double standard regarding free speech.

For the full story see:

Gregory Zuckerman. “Thiel’s Offer to Skip College Draws Many.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Feb. 26, 2024): B4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date February 24, 2024, and has the title “Peter Thiel’s $100,000 Offer to Skip College Is More Popular Than Ever.”)

Becker is best known for:

Becker, Gary S. Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis; with Special Reference to Education. 3rd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Federal Government Creates Perverse Incentives for Medical Insurers to Harvest Diagnoses for Untreated Maladies in the So-Called Medical “Advantage” Program

Notice that the federal government has set up the incentives of the Medicare Advantage program so that insurers will receive benefits, but no costs, for diagnosing patients with certain conditions, that the patients have not asked them to treat. The nurse home visits aimed at harvesting diagnoses do not benefit patients, but instead waste patients’ time and taxpayers’ money. Is UnitedHealth Group the most despicable organization for shamelessly exploiting the perverse incentives, or is the federal government the most despicable organization for creating the perverse incentives?

(p. A3) Millions of times each year, insurers send nurses into the homes of Medicare recipients to look them over, run tests and ask dozens of questions.

The nurses aren’t there to treat anyone. They are gathering new diagnoses that entitle private Medicare Advantage insurers to collect extra money from the federal government.

A Wall Street Journal investigation of insurer home visits found the companies pushed nurses to run screening tests and add unusual diagnoses, turning the roughly hourlong stops in patients’ homes into an extra $1,818 per visit, on average, from 2019 to 2021. Those payments added up to about $15 billion during that period, according (p. A9) to a Journal analysis of Medicare data.

Nurse practitioner Shelley Manke, who used to work for the HouseCalls unit of UnitedHealth Group, was part of that small army making home visits. She made a half-dozen or so visits a day, she said in a recent interview.

Part of her routine, she said, was to warm up the big toes of her patients and use a portable testing device to measure how well blood was flowing to their extremities. The insurers were checking for cases of peripheral artery disease, a narrowing of blood vessels. Each new case entitled them to collect an extra $2,500 or so a year at that time.

But Manke didn’t trust the device. She had tried it on herself and had gotten an array of results. When she and other nurses raised concerns with managers, she said, they were told the company believed that data supported the tests and that they needed to keep using the device.

“It made me cringe,” said Manke, who stopped working for HouseCalls in 2022. “I didn’t think the diagnosis should come from us, period, because I didn’t feel we had an adequate test.”

. . .

Last month, the Journal reported that insurers received nearly $50 billion in payments from 2019 to 2021 due to diagnoses they added themselves for conditions that no doctor or hospital treated. Many of the insurer-driven diagnoses were outright wrong or highly questionable, the Journal found.

. . .

In the Medicare Advantage system—conceived as a lower-cost alternative to traditional Medicare—private insurers get paid a lump sum to provide health benefits to about half of the 67 million seniors and disabled people in the federal program. The payments go up when people have certain diseases, giving insurers an incentive to diagnose those conditions.

To find out how insurers use home visits to add diagnoses, the Journal interviewed nurses, patients, home-visit managers and industry executives and reviewed hundreds of pages of internal documents from home-visit companies. They described a system that used nurses, software and audits to generate diagnoses.

“They do the job with a purpose, and it pays off for the Medicare Advantage plans,” said Francois de Brantes, a former executive at Signify Health, a company that does home visits for insurers. “Identifying the diagnoses, that’s the job.”

. . .

Secondary hyperaldosteronism, a condition in which levels of the hormone aldosterone rise, is rarely diagnosed in traditional Medicare patients. HouseCalls documents show that its software would suggest the diagnosis if a patient had a history of heart failure or cirrhosis, and either took certain drugs, such as diuretics, or had swelling due to fluid retention. Nurses weren’t required to confirm the diagnosis with a lab test.

“In a million years, I wouldn’t have come up with a diagnosis of secondary hyperaldosteronism,” said Bell, the former HouseCalls nurse.

UnitedHealth diagnosed it 246,000 times after home visits, leading to $450 million in payments over the three years of the Journal’s analysis. All other Medicare insurers combined collected $42 million from making that diagnosis after home visits.

For the full story see:

Anna Wilde Mathews, Christopher Weaver, Tom McGinty and Mark Maremont. “Nurse Visits Made Insurers $15 Billion.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2024): A1 & A9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date August 4, 2024, and has the title “The One-Hour Nurse Visits That Let Insurers Collect $15 Billion From Medicare.”)

Start-Ups Succeed When They Give Up Work-Life Balance in Order to “Work Like Hell”

(p. B4) Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO and executive chairman at Google, walked back remarks in which he said his former company was losing the artificial intelligence race because of its remote-work policies.

. . .

“Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning,” Schmidt said at Stanford. “The reason startups work is because the people work like hell.”

For the full story see:

Joseph De Avila. “Ex-CEO Criticizes Google, Retracts It.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Aug. 15, 2024): B4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Aug. 14, 2024, and has the title “Eric Schmidt Walks Back Claim Google Is Behind on AI Because of Remote Work.”)

“Medicine Is Riddled With Flawed, Incomplete Evidence”

William Osler’s hospital residency system may have been an advance when he invented it. But it is far from perfect. We need lighter regulations so that medical entrepreneurs can create institutional innovations.

(p. D3) Medicine is full of young recruits writing veterans’ books, war stories full of hopes and fears for the next in line.

. . .

None in recent memory has wielded a set of intellectual and writerly tools to such dazzling and instructive effect as Dr. Nussbaum’s “The Finest Traditions of My Calling: One Physician’s Search for the Renewal of Medicine.”

. . .

. . .  Dr. Nussbaum steers his narrative directly to the hard questions about 21st-century medicine, a profession just about as variously troubled as his patients.

. . .  None of the usual medical heroes apply. Even the enduring William Osler, who started the hospital residency system at the turn of the 20th century and is routinely worshiped as a medical saint, comes up short. Osler was all about the physical evidence of illness, and Dr. Nussbaum faults him for seeing the body primarily as a collection of diseased parts, “a decidedly incomplete view.”

Few of Osler’s heirs strike Dr. Nussbaum as free of their own shortcomings.

He notes that partisans of today’s much promoted evidence-based medicine must determinedly finesse the fact that medicine is riddled with flawed, incomplete evidence. The leaders of genomic revolution trumpet a future that keeps being postponed. Quality-control gurus abound, but their work often fails to yield actual quality.

And those who would update and streamline medical routines offer up paradigms Dr. Nussbaum finds simply bizarre. He points to Atul Gawande, the Harvard surgeon and health policy writer who in a New Yorker article lauded the ability of large chain restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory to serve a uniform, reproducible product thousands of times over. Dr. Gawande charged medicine to do likewise, but that image of the physician as a line cook feeding faceless strangers does not inspire Dr. Nussbaum.

Still, if a doctor is to be neither parts mechanic nor line cook, then what? Dr. Nussbaum considers some alternatives.

. . .

Dr. Nussbaum considers the alternatives in a flowing, complex stream of anecdotes and reflections, all the stronger for its frequent uncertainty. He writes beautifully, in a lucid prose as notable for its process as its conclusions: The reader can actually watch him think.

For the full review see:

Abigail Zuger, M.D. “Unsparing Examination by a Young Doctor.” The New York Times (Tuesday, April 5, 2016 [sic]): D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 4, 2016 [sic], and has the title “Book Review: ‘The Finest Traditions of My Calling’.”)

The book under review is:

Nussbaum, Abraham M. The Finest Traditions of My Calling: One Physician’s Search for the Renewal of Medicine. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.

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.

Low Government-Negotiated Drug Prices Will Slash Pharma Revenue Needed to Finance Government-Mandated Costly Phase 3 Trials

Mandated Phase 3 randomized double-blind clinical trials cost many millions of dollars each, and most of the trials fail. To fund all the trials that fail and the few that succeed, the few new drugs that succeed need to have high price tags. The only other way for new drug development to be economically sustainable, is to stop mandating Phase 3 clinical trials. If we stopped mandating Phase 3 clinical trials, we would, in other words, allow physicians and patients to try drugs after safety has been shown through Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials, but without the expensive proof of efficacy from Phase 3 trials. We would thereby allow physicians and patients greater freedom.

(p. B6) While many companies, from Pfizer to Bristol-Myers Squibb to Bayer and Novartis, have announced big layoffs, news from a key outsourcer on Wednesday [Aug. 7, 2024] showed that the industry’s cost-cutting ways are intensifying.

Charles River Laboratories International, which provides drug-development services, plunged 12.6% on Wednesday [Aug. 7, 2024], the most in four years, after sounding the alarm over pharma research spending plans. The Massachusetts-based company said it now expects to post a decline in sales for the full year, primarily owing to lower demand from pharma clients. The company previously expected to grow this year. “There are profound cuts at pharmaceutical companies,” James Foster, Charles River’s chief executive officer, told analysts. Foster called the reduction in pharma research spending “unusual” and “sudden.”

Foster said his clients are blaming the cuts on the Inflation Reduction Act, which allows Medicare to negotiate some drug prices directly with manufacturers, and a looming patent cliff, which will see more than $200 billion in annual drug sales come under threat from copycat generics.

For the past few years, pharma companies have been warning that they might need to cut back on innovation as the U.S. government forces some companies to negotiate prices of their top-selling drugs.

. . .

A reduction in preclinical testing, the kind of services that Charles River provides, is the sort of thing that will only be felt in the long term. By that time, current management teams, desperate to lift their stocks now, might be long gone.  . . .

Big pharma wants to clean house. Expensive studies of drugs that won’t make it to market for many years to come are an easy target.

For the full commentary see:

David Wainer. “Big Pharma Scales Back R&D, Sending Shudders Through Industry.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Aug. 9, 2024): B6.

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

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date August 8, 2024, and has the title “Big Pharma Cuts R&D, Sending Shudders Through Industry.” The quoted paragraph starting with “Foster said” appears in the online, but not the print, version of the commentary.)

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.)