Fast Company: Can We Suck Enough CO2 From The Air To Save The Climate?
“As we try to slow our carbon emissions, we also need to get carbon out of the air. A new industry is springing up to meet the challenge, but can it scale fast enough?”
“As we try to slow our carbon emissions, we also need to get carbon out of the air. A new industry is springing up to meet the challenge, but can it scale fast enough?”
“Climate geoengineering is a divisive topic. What could be good – the promise of ways to either cool the planet through enhancing the reflection of sunlight, or to remove CO2 from the atmosphere thereby reducing global warming – could also be terrible. Particularly if banking on hypothetical solutions from unproven technology reduces the urgency of efforts to stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”
“Last month, two subcommittees of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology held a hearing “to assess the status of geoengineering research in the United States.” Of particular concern is solar geoengineering, also known as solar radiation management, which committee C hairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, characterized as “one of the most intriguing ideas” in the field.”
“This panel seeks to explore the politics of these prospective negative emissions technologies and what they imply for our changing relationship with nature in the age of the Anthropocene. We ask: what political imaginaries and interests are co-produced with negative emissions ideas in climate models, experiments and policies? How might research, development and deployment of carbon removal be governed responsibly where power relations and socio-technical systems are co-evolving? What are the implications for power, knowledge and politics of (discursive) decoupling of carbon removal from other forms of geoengineering? How does negative emissions politics compare to other technoscientific politics? What should our roles as STS scholars be when engaging with negative emissions? “
“It seems as if the concept of an artificially altered planet has begun to capture the public’s attention. But what exactly is the technology that these sources are talking about? Can we really control our climate?”
“In this post, I sketch some of the major ethical issues. For the most part, all I can do here is pose questions. Many of them can’t be answered without saying more about exactly what kind of geoengineering we’re talking about, exactly how it would be used, and the context in which it would be used.”
“A geophysicist on balancing God’s sovereignty over nature with human understanding of weather.”
Sanchez, Daniel Lucio; Amador, Giana; Funk, Jason; Mach, Katharine J. (2017): Federal research, development, and demonstration priorities for carbon dioxide removal in the United States. In Environ. Res. Lett. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aaa08f.
“Needs for commercialization span research, development, and demonstration (RD[&]D) activities, including development of new materials, reactors, and processes, and rigorous monitoring of a portfolio of demonstration projects. As a world leader in supporting science and engineering, the United States (US) can play an important role in reducing costs and clarifying the sustainable scale of CDR. To date, federal agencies have focused on voluntary or piecemeal CDR programs. Here, we present a synthesis of R[&]D needs, relevant agency authority, barriers to coordination, and interventions to enhance RD[&]D across the federal government of the US. “
“That is why I pushed for a hearing last month in the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space [&] Technology, to engage geoengineering experts in a discussion about the potential use of these mechanisms to combat climate change. A federal commitment to research is now in order, and, earlier this month, I introduced legislation calling for a modest federally funded program to lay out a research plan to determine the potential opportunities and risks of geoengineering.”
“More specifically, the talk focuses on Marine Cloud Brightening, an idea that explores the possibility of “brightening” clouds over the ocean to make them reflect more sunlight away from the Earth. David then encourages the audience to consider the implications of such a drastic and far-reaching solution to global warming, and whether we, as humans, have the right to intentionally perturb our Earth’s natural climate systems.“