The is a story currently running about some scientists having come up with some way of capturing CO2 out of the atmosphere and engineers building devices with that technology integrated in them with the prospect of storing that carbon back in disused coal and oil wells deep under the ground.
For some reason, geoengineering is becoming a rather popular topic of discussion in the fight against climate change. But can it really help?
Personally, I am extremely cautious about this. As my previous argument stated regarding Carbon Capture and Storage, this just gives coal and oil lobbies an excuse to do business as usual. Now those articles do say that this technology should be used in conjoncure with a strict reduction in carbon emissions and a development in more environmentally friendly ways to produce energy. However, we have been messing around with the climate (albeit unknowingly, err, mostly) for 200 years, so how are we to control the effect that these devices would have?
Climate Change is a global phenomenon, what would happen if those devices turned out to be too efficient? While working to return to a CO2 concentration of 350ppm is a good idea, how do you control that concentration on a global scale? What if it goes below that?
I was going to argue against the carbon footprint involved in their manufacture, but then, the same argument goes with solar panels and wind turbines, so we’ll skip on that. So we’ll see how this idea evolves, I’ve not read anything about cost yet but if the technology is as costly as CCS, this may end up being quite hard to implement.
Edited to add: To further my scepticism about the viability of bioengineering, please check out the lastest article at Climate Progress. It links to an article written in Science magazine about the risks involved in relying too much on tackling warming issues with this technology, and while this is not directly linked with engineering a “carbon sink”, it shows that there is still much doubt in the scientific community about bioengineering.
“Climate Change is a global phenomenon, what would happen if those devices turned out to be too efficient? ”
Erm, turn some of them off?
It’s not that simple. You can’t build those kind of devices as if they were some kind of giant thermostats. There’s a lag between the amount of carbon you put / take out of the atmosphere and the changes it has on global temperatures, ocean acidification and so on. You may end up having to turn them off when it’s far too late to do so.
But you’re not talking about temperature above, you’re talking about CO2 ppm, which is rather easier to measure. Too little CO2? Turn the buggers off. Too much? Turn them on again…
Obviously it’s not quite that simple, but I see no compelling argument why these devices are likely to bring about The End Of All Things either.
Note that my reserves on the viability of the technology isn’t so much that it will bring about armageddon but that geoengineering is just another form of using the planet as a test tube and consequently we can’t be sure what the outcome will be. Might help lots, might mess things up even more.