After Geoengineering - Holly Jean Buck

• HJB’s Twitter thread on a framework to evaluate stopgap measures, and why such social and thinking technologies are just as important as the computing ones

Introduction. Desperation Point

• Solar geoengineering = an effort to change the solar constant: watts per sq m reaching the planet (on average, 180 W/sq m over land)
  • Already naturally variable by cloud cover, time of day, surface reflectivity, etc.
  • Already unnaturally variable due to GHG emissions (warming) abs particulate pollutants (cooling)
• Most discussed method = stratospheric aerosol injection → alters not only amount, but type of light (color, intensity)
• Contemporary corporate capitalism is not naturally technologically progressive: so many promising ideas in alt energy, carbon removal that have been thwarted
• Rigid binaries of climate engineering: currently an abyss between A) those who see the potential of tech but have little historical awareness of the exploitative way it is often developed, and B) those who have a deep understanding of colonial/imperial context of capitalism but dismiss tech as a useful tool → little room to discuss how technology can be used to further climate justice
  • Can we imagine democratically controlled industrial tech that doesn’t exist to conquer nature?
  • Concept of de-growth actually commits us to climate disaster as much as austerity
  • However! Geoenginering requires systemic change, bc responsible solar geoengineering requires carbon removal which requires renewables which requires systemic change!
  • Other binaries (ex. geoengineering vs agroecology) obscure spectrum of possibile interventions, give control over climate engineering to the elite
• Climate intervention is a practice (a process, verb, form of governance) rather than a thing
  • Carbon removal is more akin to waste removal than transformative innovations like robotics, biotech: a ameliorative, not generative
  • Not as much a technology as an industry, so risky and low-profit that it’s like a global public project
  • Classification as a technology overlooks all the social implications
  • Consider climate engineering through the lenses of development or humanitarian interventions, as infrastructure → more nuanced and complete understanding, perceive it as more tangible, identify potential pitfalls
• Goals of this book:
  • Consider what comes “after geoengineering” → what are its end goals? To forever be dependent on geoengineering, or to use it temporarily?
    • Must be see as a temporally extended process, not a one-off event (Pak-Hang Wong)
  • Evolve conceptual language re: what it means to intentionally change the climate
  • Consider better-case geoengineering scenarios

Part I. Cultivation

1. Cultivating Energy

• Chemurgy: using farm products for stuff besides food (ex. biofuels)
  • Shifting from dependence on sub-surface fixed resources (coal, oil) to surface flow resources (algae, ethanol?), to harness fossilized sunshine
  • Movement emerged in 1930s, but fell out of favor by 50s, for a variety of reasons that are important to consider as the idea returns in today’s “bioengineering” industry
• Bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS) → grow biomass, burn in power plant, separate out carbon and bury underground
  • How do large-scale land grabs for biofuels impact the people and surrounding ecosystem?
  • Thus far, biofuels have not met expectations— often involve labor intensive, exploitative plantations, require more water/fertilizer, overall not competitive with fossil fuels
    • Land scarcity
    • Very difficult to design for net carbon negative process when commodity chains prioritize low cost > low carbon
    • Can remnants of these first-gen biofuel failures be rescued by more effective new options?
  • Next-gen biofuels
    • Cyanobacteria, algae → options with fewer negative impacts
    • Engineer feedstock themselves to be more efficient by improving photosynthesis, carbon fixation, oil content
    • Engineer microbes to directly produce biofuels without feedstock
  • All this new development is still being done with constraints of profitability— what would biofuels look like without capitalism? Could harness these five levers:
    • Measure and limit impact of land use change
    • Use carbon neutral power & organic fertilizer
    • Minimize biomass transport, prioritize sea > road transport
    • Maximize use of carbon negative fuels
    • Exploit alt biomass processing options

2. Cultivating the Seas

• Cultivating seaweed → many possible uses: biofuel (processed into methane), human food, cattle food, hydrocolloid as additive
  • Current major producers = China and Indonesia, but research underway in the US
  • Same story— past attempts didn’t pan out, but can new tech change the outcome?
    • 1972: Ocean Food and Energy Farm project, funded by lots of govt orgs to grow kelp as biofuel… but challenges of scale, actual farm design, drop in cost of oil/gas → didn’t go anywhere
    • New startup Marine BioEnergy uses robotics, kelp “elevators”
• Ocean afforestation → use kelp as part of BECCS by separating methane & CO2 & storing the latter
  • 9% afforestation can sequester decent amount of carbon, promote fish production…
  • Seems a little out there, but only because we don’t already have institutions geared towards such multistep, holistic solutions— not harder than putting a man on the moon
• Integrated multi-trophies aquaculture (IMTA) → polyculture approaches utilizing whole water column, driven by social justice and sustainability
  • In western cultures without existing seaweed industry, either need big companies (more monoculture approaches) or collective efforts by small groups to bring cultivation to scale (to catch up with China)
  • Regulations to ensure seaweed health, incentivize innovation can promote sustainable worker, community-oriented models to avoid repeating past mistakes

3. Regenerating

• Nature-based solutions = conservation, restoration, land management actions to increase carbon storage or avoid environmental GHG emissions
  • Usually local/regional in scale, more focused on mitigation… not generally considered geoengineering, but it gets tricky with some more extreme interventions
  • Are these strategies being ignored in global climate politics? What would it take for them to be a part of our solution?
• Regenerative agriculture = holistic land management for carbon seq, crop resilience, soil health, nutrient density
  • Goes beyond sustainability to actively increase flourishing (the positive psych of agriculture?)
  • Carbon farming by 1) switching to low or no-till practices, 2) using and leaving cover crops, 3) using species with greater root mass
  • Double-cropping, agroforestry, silvopasture, regenerative grazing
  • Scale of impact of all these is somewhat controversial (bc eventually soil is saturated, practices must be continued, etc.), but they have so many benefits regardless → first step is just starting
• Biochar = carbonized organic material benefiting soil fertility, water capacity: biomass is combusted at low temps anaerobically (pyrolysis) → charcoal, enduring form of organic carbon
  • Practiced in Amazon 2000 years ago, and dark, fertile terra preta soils can still be found
  • Alternative to BECCS; biochar could potentially be used to enhance concrete, asphalt, in infrastructure… but little to no research on this
• Afforestation = more than just planting trees— to achieve sequestration at scale with just reforestation would require societal shifts similar to that of geoengineering: shift to almost entirely cultured meats would require public health, education, etc. changes
  • Impact depends on kind of forest (tropical vs arboreal), and factors to consider like loss of albedo effect, release of volatile organics, potential of natural disasters
  • Can easily turn into “carbon colonialism” and be thought of as very distant from our lives, but in reality will affect us all
• Blue carbon = carbon stored in peatlands, mangroves, marshes, seagrass
  • Hot spots for storing carbon → first step is to protect training ones
  • Enhancement of their sequestration by wetlands restoration, coastal adaptation, etc. has lots of potential and few drawbacks, but hasn’t been addressed at scale of geoengineering till recently
  • Lots of complexities in seagrass idea (type of sediment, species,

• Ultimately, nature-based sequestration are “charismatic” in a way, but limited in potential; important to remember:

  1) Difference between continual and one-off sequestration

  2) Most of these are temporary, require maintenance, and can be vulnerable to climate change itself (ex. wildfires in forests, soil erosion from flooding)

  3) We currently emit >40 Gt carbon per year— afforestation or soil sequestration at maximum (which would require extreme measures, and take time to reach) draw down 10 Gt/year, and only until they reach capacity, perhaps a few decades) → we still need to cut emissions!

• Too much faith in these methods → not enough investment in other tech, reducing emissions
• All of these things should still be implemented— but climate change is the least of the reasons

Part II. Burial

• While less appealing/intuitive than “green” solutions, geologic methods of sequestration are safer, more inert, permanent

4. Capturing

• Carbon capture & storage (CCS)
  • Four parts: 1) capture at site of production, usually using amines 2) transport of cooled liquid 3) storage in empty wells, underground 4) monitoring to make sure it stays there
  • Requires infrastructure at same scale as oil does
  • Very controversial, because currently mainly used for enhanced oil recovery by fossil file industry → not a part of many climate plans, but this overlooks potential it has if used towards a different end
  • Major challenge is where to store the carbon— risky, can conflict with other land uses
  • Better opportunities when decoupled from coal → “renewable CSS,” which 1) sources carbon from biomass as in BECCS or direct air capture, 2) aims for long term storage of carbon rather than use for fuel
• Direct air capture
  • “Mining” carbon directly from the air
  • Technology exists, but currently expensive (around $500 per ton?), would require massive infrastructure investment to bring to scale → primary limitation is a financial one
  • Climeworks, Carbon Engineering
• How to implement carbon capture to enact climate repair?
  • DAC can be used at two scales:

  1) Million-ton scale, carbon capture and utilization (CCU) → make shoes/fabric/even concrete from captured CO2, helps develop tech, sort of a stepping stone

  2) Billion-ton scale, can actually affect pollution levels, but will require massive political action (and deciding who should pay) and geological storage (new industry of carbon storage?)

5. Weathering

• Natural carbon cycle: excess atmospheric CO2 reacts with water → carbonic acid, falling in (slightly) acidic rain → dissolved rock to form inorganic carbonates → wash into oceans and incorporated into calcium carbonate by shell-building creatures, plankton → build up layers that turn to limestone
  • Sequesters about 1 Gt CO2 per year, not negligible
• Enhanced/accelerated weathering aims to speed this up to capture carbon as a solid (more convenient than liquid as in CCS)
  • In situ methods of injecting CO2 gas and water into basalt
  • Ex situ methods of grinding up rocks to increase weathering surface area
    • Rocks to crops → spread on croplands, where soil microbes somehow speed up the process
  • All pretty new areas of tech, questions of scale (including what groups would be its “champions”) and unintended consequences, but lots of potential

Part III: The After-Zero Society

• What might the world look like if/when we’ve dedicated ourselves to carbon removal?
• Easy to be confined by same binary of degrowth/withdrawal vs eco-modernism/industrial tech (rural vs tech), but what about a hybrid position?
• Democratically-controlled industrial tech that doesn’t exist to conquer nature

6. Working

• Could involve rural reinvigoration or continued oppression of rural laborers
  • Easy to think of “incentivization,” but this overlooks the other factors besides money that motivate people to do things: ex. caring for the land
• Can hold multiple perspectives at once— carbon removal as a burden, an opportunity for work, a form of care— and consider dimensions of responsibility and agency
• On a more tech-forward note, how could blockchain be used to facilitate a carbon removal market? Complicated bc involves a real world action that must be verified
• Role of AI, automation, machine labor: can help (information tech like AI for Earth), can hurt (take away jobs), or change the nature of our work…
• Nature’s labor: what is the right way to treat our nonhuman worker partners?
• Three final notes: 1) people doing the work of carbon removal should be defining what the field looks like, 2) need open-source tech to bring efforts to scale, 3) when creating new jobs, must pay attn to race, gender, inclusion

7. Learning

• How do we learn the mindset to realize a carbon removal society? In some ways, the new forms of infrastructure would look very similar to today’s, but it would be a shift from aiming for mitigation to regeneration
  • Also changing whole societal structure build around oil, fossil fuel industry
• Hard to hypothesize what this could look like, but would have to start with education, and addressing several challenges: disciplinary siloing, colonization of many levels of formal education, rote learning in primary school education that inhibits creativity, higher education saddling students with debt, undervaluing teachers, need for lifelong learning system as automation shifts job market

• Capacities to build during early formal education to make carbon removal society possible (doing well on some, but not on others…):

  1) Critical design skills, including visualization of the invisible

  2) Empathy — cross-cultural and multispecies

  3) Decolonial practice — requires knowledge of history & geography, recognizing & acting on understandings of hegemony

  4) Experiential knowledge of the natural world

  5) Numeracy and scale

  6) Critical algorithmic literacy

  7) Interdisciplinary systems thinking

  8) Dialogue — working together toward common goal, rather than argument and critique between idealogical factions

  9) Imagination — to conceptualize a world different than the one we live in now

  10) Emotional self-knowledge

8. Co-opting

• Key question: How does one get countries and companies to walk away from their (oil extraction) assets?
  • Fossil fuel companies have the infrastructure necessary to implement large-scale carbon storage, but the agenda needs to be defined democratically or else it will be carried out for their benefit only (ex. CCS with coal, instead of permanent)
• Need to have political engagement to enact carbon removal in a just way, beyond reactive measures vs fossil fuel industry

Part IV: Buying Time

9. Programming

• Could solar geoengineering be used to “flatten the curve” in a transition to a carbon removal society, to prevent collapse of sensitive ecosystems like coral reefs and Redwood forests?
• Climate systems = incredibly complex, so very difficult to model — as is solar geoengineering
  • Can act on different parts of atmosphere, different times, many feedback loops with temperature and reflectivity
  • Will need an algorithm of sorts to constantly monitor and adjust implementation
  • For most equitable, transparent design, need international cooperation and collaboration
• “Termination shock” is actually pretty hu likely— solar geoengineering so easy to deploy that it would take a huge catastrophe to destroy that ability
• Important point: would not affect ocean acidification, or reverse tipping points already crossed that are causing parts of Greenland, Antarctica to melt
• Don’t want to wait till it has to be suddenly deployed in emergency— start at least with the research now!

10. Reckoning

• Embracing reckoning and accountability is not just morally right, but pragmatically necessary for carbon drawdown
• Kyle Whyte, on the irony of a lot of current geoengineering discourse: “Members of dominant populations are trying to avoid their dystopia by preserving our dystopia.”