Mark Stevenson
I was recently lucky enough to Wally Broecker and Klaus Lackner, arguably two of the most important men on the planet as part of the research for my book ‘An Optimist’s Tour of the Future’. Wally, a “towering scientist”, has played a crucial role in alerting us to, and helping us understand global warming… and Klaus has developed a technology that can help reverse its effects.
Wally isn’t always happy with how he’s described. “Of late, I’ve become known as the first person to use the words ‘global warming’. If my career has boiled down to that it’s a big failure”.
I meet Klaus in his 10th floor office at Columbia University (the building, inexplicably smells of ham sandwiches) from where he gives me lift to Wally’s office at the leafy campus of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, an institution dedicated to studying the planet at a ‘big picture’ level (understanding ‘earth-wide’ systems and how they interact).
Pinned to the wall outside Wally’s office is a huge furry pink and blue toy snake, underneath which a piece of paper bears the words, “I am the climate beast and I am angry!” It’s arguably Wally’s favourite metaphor. His assertion that “The climate is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks,” is one of the most quoted summaries of our problems with Carbon Dioxide.
When Wally talks about climate, people listen. He’s variously described as “the Grandfather of Climate Science”, “one of the world’s greatest living geoscientists” and is the recipient of a brace of awards, which if listed would make your eyes glaze over, but include the US National Medal of Science and the Tyler prize (awarded annually “for environmental science, energy and medicine conferring great benefit on mankind.”) Smart chap. (That Wally chooses to hang out with Klaus is no small endorsement).
He insists the warming we’re seeing now is fundamentally different to historical shifts in the climate. In summary he says, “It’s bigger and faster” which naturally begs the question ‘what are we going to do about it?’ One answer, argues Wally, is to invest in Klaus Lackner.
Klaus’ team has built a machine that strips CO2 out of the ambient air. Or to put it another way, on one side of Klaus’ machine is air that contains current levels of CO2 and on the other is air with roughly the same amount of CO2 in it as was present before the Industrial Revolution.
Think about this for a second. Klaus’ technology can begin to reclaim the CO2 we’ve been putting out, which is good news because the oceans and the land can’t sequester it fast enough to keep up with our prodigious output. This isn’t about reducing emissions, it’s about treating emissions in the same way we treat sewage. It’s a crucial component in a CO2 processing infrastructure for the planet.
It isn’t the whole answer (although with enough of Lackner’s machines it arguably could be). “If you’ve built a coal plant with carbon capture in mind I can’t compete with that,” says Klaus. He’s clear that capturing carbon at source is the cheapest way to curb CO2 concentrations. But even if every power station suddenly became a zero-emitter of carbon tomorrow there are plenty of other places pumping it out, especially in the transport sector, which accounts for nearly a quarter of the world’s emissions. As Klaus points out, “an airplane has a hard job running on electricity”. And let’s not forget the huge amounts of the CO2 we’ve already emitted is still hanging around and needs to be dealt with too.
The Lackner/ Broecker position is that creating waste isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Not dealing with it is the bad thing. Nobody suggests you stop going to the toilet, but we did install sewage systems once we began to suffer the numerous epidemics that lots of human waste visited on (especially) city-dwelling populations. (In the UK it was actually the fact that parliament got unbearably stinky, being next to the open sewer that was the Thames, that finally moved the legislators to action – a worrying parallel that has a resonance with how governments are behaving in response to climate change today).
In short, we stopped adding to the pollution problem, but could still go to the toilet. You’ll find few people arguing against sewers and sewerage treatment today (and if you do, don’t accept a dinner invitation from them).
Lackner’s carbon scrubbers are one option for treating our ‘carbon sewage’. What’s more Klaus’ machine isn’t just an idea on paper. Lackner’s has delivered a working prototype.
Carbon scrubbers aren’t a new invention. They’ve been used for decades, for instance, in submarines to keep the air breathable. Until recently however, the prevailing wisdom was that such scrubbing technology could not be adapted to remove the relatively small proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere without using up huge amounts of energy. Indeed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) dismissed Klaus’ work with a single line in a report of carbon capture and sequestration. “The possibility of CO2 capture from ambient air (Lackner, 2003) is not discussed in this chapter because CO2 concentration in ambient air is around 380 parts per million, a factor of 100 or more lower that in flue gas”.
In short you’d be nuts to try and find the CO2 needle in the atmosphere haystack. Anything that might work would take up too much energy (and thus add more CO2 to the atmosphere than it removed). Wally had his reservations too. The first time he saw Lackner talk he thought he was nuts. ‘Energetically nuts’ to quote him directly.
“Then we had more time to talk, and I immediately tried to hire him.” Lackner was even on the IPCC committee that dismissed his ideas as fanciful, perhaps because at that point he didn’t have a working machine to show them. Lackner set out to prove his methods could remove CO2 at acceptable levels of energy expenditure, and Wally was right behind him. That’s because Wally believes we’re not going to change over from fossil fuels fast enough to deal with the problem, and that a plan that only focuses on cutting emissions “is going to kill us”.
“People like Jim Hansen [the NASA climate scientist the Bush administration tried to silence for saying, climate-wise, ‘Houston, we have a problem’] say we’ve got to stop burning coal and that if you can capture and store carbon that just encourages burning coal. We look at it the other way. Coal is there. It’s going to be burned. We better damn well figure out what to do about it.”
Klaus now says that for every 20 CO2 molecules his machines will put in the atmosphere (if they’re powered by electricity generated from fossil fuels) they’ll take out 100. And he’s just at the beginning of his journey. With investment, experience and improved manufacturing that ratio will improve.
Which is why it’s scandalous that Klaus has struggled to raise the $20million he estimates he needs to turn his working prototype into a blueprint for a mass manufactured unit. In fact the two men are reeling from a recent decision by congress to block funding for a research hub dedicated to carbon capture and storage. The amount? $25 million a year for 5 years. Or 0.00016% of the $787 billion the US government pulled out the hat for its American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – money for stimulating the economy out of the economic crisis. The great irony here is that ambient air carbon capture could be a trillion dollar industry.
It strikes me as ironic that when it comes to saving the financial system governments around the world couldn’t move fast enough to act, citing it as the platform our economies run on, therefore justifying swift and decisive action. Yet there is another platform all the banks run on. It’s called the planet and the social and financial implications of global warming will do more to hamper Wall St. than anything they’ve done to themselves. When, I wonder, did a human-friendly atmosphere not become an infrastructural investment?
There’s no way around it. Klaus is good news for the planet, if he can get the money. Even better news is that he isn’t the only one developing machines that eat carbon out of the air. “I convinced David [Keith – renowned climate scientist] that this air capture stuff works so he now has a competing effort.” Peter Eisenburger, also at Columbia, is attacking the problem as well.
The more people working on technologies to take back the CO2 we’re putting into the atmosphere the better. “Who will actually take it forward is now a horse race,” says Keith.
Our talk is nearly at an end and I ask how Klaus how he goes about convincing people he’s onto something.
“The problem I’ve found (and it’s getting bigger all the time) is that I’m suspect to both sides of the debate. The people who make energy or are into coal feel I’m trying to stop them, because I’m saying you’ve got to take climate change seriously and business as usual is not acceptable.
On the other side you have people who have some idea of what ‘being green’ means and that allowing people to use fossil fuels and then capturing and putting the CO2 someplace is not acceptable to them.” (The issue of sequestering CO2 raises traditional anti-pollution hackles of many green, ironically hampering experiments that might help us understand the safest and best way to lock it away)
“Are traditional environmentalists part of the problem now?” I ask.
Wally snorts. “Oh yeah”.
Is he optimistic we can solve the CO2 problem?
“It’ll be solved. The question is where will CO2 get to before it’s solved?” Or to put it another way, how bad will things have to get? Klaus agrees. “I’m optimistic that ultimately it will be solved. But my view of human nature is that we will not solve it until we get seriously goosed.”
“Maybe in twenty years when the impacts become obvious we’ll get serious,” says Wally.
“But let me give you an optimistic view,” says Klaus. “Back in the 90s I was asked ‘how do you see this moving forward?’ and I said, ‘In this decade, the 90s, you will see scientists thinking about it and not much more. The next decade there will be a big political debate and not much more. The decade where steel starts to go into the ground is 2010 onwards. And people get really serious about it between 2020 and 2030. In a way, we are on that track.”
As Klaus and I get back into his car for return journey to Manhattan I turn to him and say, “You must be excited?”
“Oh yeah,” he says. “Oh yeah.”
By the time I get downtown I need something trivial to refresh me. Meeting friend I end up in long discussion about the relative merits of 80s popsters The Pet Shop Boys and Duran Duran. The latter, I suggest, were more fun and had better songs. Other’s disagree. It’s the kind of conversation I need. Sometimes after a day talking about things that really matter, you need an evening discussing things that don’t.
Note: Mark Stevenson is a UK-based writer and comedian who is currently traveling the world researching his forthcoming book – An optimist’s tour of the future (Penguin). You can follow his travels at www.optimistontour.com
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Written in February 2011