Yahoo is now a part of Verizon Media
Where do most scientists stand?
The global failure to make major emissions cuts is causing many experts to reconsider geoengineering. Compared with the massive financial consequences of global warming, the estimated $2 billion annual price tag to develop solar engineering over 15 years is quite inexpensive. In March, an Australian team conducted one of the world's first geoengineering trials, using 100 nozzles to enhance existing clouds by blasting salt water into the air. In theory, it would take about 1,000 nozzles to save the entire Great Barrier Reef from dying off. "People are right to fear overreliance on techno-fixes," says Harvard professor David Keith. "But there's another nightmare: We realize in hindsight that early use of geoengineering could have saved millions of lives lost in heat waves and helped preserve some of the natural world."
Sucking carbon out of the air
The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the world must remove 1 trillion tons of carbon by 2100 to have any hope of avoiding more than 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming. A proposed solution, carbon capture, takes two forms: removing CO2 directly from the emissions of power plants and other industrial facilities or scrubbing it from the atmosphere. At least 19 large-scale projects worldwide are working to capture CO2 from smokestacks at coal or natural gas plants; such a system was created in 2017 at a Texas coal plant but shut down this May because it captured just 17 percent of emissions, not the targeted 33 percent. The more ambitious plan for carbon capture involves installing pipes to suck carbon from the sky, then store it deep underground. Several companies have developed technology to do just that, but the process remains very expensive. Stripe, a startup company, enables companies and individuals to contribute money to fund carbon removal, as a means of getting the technology off the ground. "This is a hardware problem; it's an infrastructure problem; it's a science problem," Nan Ransohoff, the head of Stripe Climate, told The Atlantic. "It takes a long time to develop carbon removal. This is not Snapchat."
I wonder what it’s going to take to get the liberal green team on board with tech solutions