Turning down global warming directly....

Today’s post: Wednesday, 4-8-2009

We have started far too late to reverse the increase of the level of CO2 in the earth’s air and the global warming that is clearly going on almost certainly because of this increase.

And, though we are making progress & there is reasonable hope for more soon, our progress is about 5% of what’s required to reverse the increase -- if that much.

It was in today’s news from AP that John Holdren, the president's new science adviser, said that the dangerous effects of global warming will be so damaging that the Obama administration is discussing radical ways to cool the Earth's air.

Two methods were in the news story.:

1. Purposely causing a dust cloud similar to the ones created by huge volcanoes that would cool the earth by preventing some of the thermal heating from the sun.

He did note that the negative side effects of using this would be quite severe.

2. Using a device that has been invented and apparently at least partly developed called “artificial trees” that effectively removes carbon dioxide from of the air and stores it was the second method listed. He also said that there may be a way to make this more affordable to do than was at first thought.

First the bad news.:

The first alternative simply has too many harsh side effects to be considering as more than an out of the box creative effort that we respond to by saying, let’s keep trying to generate some more, we might find one that we can do or upgrade to one we can.

Global warming will already reduce our food supply by floods and droughts in places we now grow food. Should we make this problem worse by shading the plants we grow as food or as animal feed? This alone makes this idea completely unusable. It would make a problem this potential solution is supposed to help worse instead!

Second, to avoid economic collapse when fossil fuels run out; &/or a repeat of price increases and shortages of energy from burning fossil fuels for energy for over 90 percent of our use of it; AND to begin to turn off CO2 induced global warming at its source and stop making that problem even worse, it is of critical path importance that we begin to switch to renewables and some nuclear and some biofuels and begin to stop using fossil fuels as close to 100 % as we can get.

Solar power, including both photovoltaics and solar thermal, has the potential to do close to 100 % of the job and so far, the sun is a far safer source than nuclear power. And, if we fully fund making nuclear terrorist proof and its waste safely stored, it costs at least 10 times as much. So, if we purposely turn off a significant enough percentage of solar energy the earth gets to cool our planet, we quite literally will be shooting ourselves in the foot.

Last but potentially the most important, we already are massively impacting the ecology of our planet in enough ways already that it may make the living system we depend on to live dangerously unstable if we do this sun shading and make it a permanent state of affairs also.

In short, purposely shading the earth to cool it has what the computer people call several “fatal errors.”

Desperation has nothing to do with it, planetary sun shading will cause more problems than it would solve and must not be used.

However, the second method sounds promising in the extreme. That’s part of the good news.

If every coal fired plant we keep using was able to send its exhaust to algae that use the CO2 to make biofuels and any left over went to these CO2 removing artificial trees, that would enable us to keep using the plants longer and still stop releasing CO2.

And, since the costs of doing this would be added to the cost of the energy produced at these plants, that would make renewable energy less expensive sooner.

Second, if every urban area planted trees and made an effort to preserve those it already has AND built thousands of these artificial trees and hundreds of algae growing for biofuel and artificial tree using stations, far more C02 would be removed from our air as we generate it.

If this technology is developed and the cost of doing this is added to the price of fossil fuels still in use, it will also make renewable energy less expensive sooner.

So, that one is potentially a game winner and should be very aggressively pursued.

The other part of the good news is that we already a have proven way to massively increase our supplies of renewable energy that we are not using yet.

If we simply begin using it everywhere, we will begin to make enough progress on switching to renewable energy it will make the problem of excess CO2 more manageable and less extreme. It even will eventually turn off excess CO2 production. The sooner it’s used everywhere the safer we will be & the more solvable global warming will become.

Germany has already perfected this method & proved it works well to create new sources of renewable energy and to create jobs. With relatively little solar light and heat coming in due to their distance from the equator, in about 15 years, Germany has built about half the world’s solar installations, begun to get 16 % of its energy from renewable sources, and created 300,000 jobs.

Do you think we cannot use it because it would be hard to finance in today’s economy? You may be surprised to know you would be wrong. One of the reasons it works so well is that it makes financing renewable energy projects as safe or safer than investing in T-bills; but it pays a higher return.

It’s called the feed-in tariff, or FIT by acronym.

If used in every state in the United States, it has the potential to produce close to 100 % of the energy we are now using from renewable sources alone while creating 6,000,000 jobs. That’s enough jobs to end the recession all by itself.

So if your state’s Governor and state legislators don’t already know this kind of Feed-in tariff exists or why it’s important, let them know ASAP.

The main reason it’s not being used is they don’t know yet. My guess is that less than 1% now do.

Given what’s at stake, that’s not acceptable. So, let’s change it.