The false dichotomy of climate change remediation
Years ago, I had a Facebook friend from my hometown who was a big enthusiast of molten salt nuclear reactor technology. He wasn’t a scientist or engineer, but his dad had worked on MSRs in the ‘60s, and he fetishized his dad’s memory. As some point, I mentioned that we had installed rooftop solar on our house, and he began attacking me. Rather than see MSRs and solar as two parallel paths towards decarbonization, he was convinced that solar was the enemy of MSR technology–a false dichotomy. Needless to say, his personal attacks ended our friendship.
Nowadays, it looks like carbon capture/geoengineering is being vilified as the enemy of conservation/renewable energy on the path to reducing atmospheric CO2. This is both absurd and dangerous.
Look, the world is in no danger of ending its addiction to fossil fuels any time soon. To do so would mean (1) the loss of wealth in industrialized economies and (2) that industrialized national economies would have to commit to long-term second-class status.
“. . . net zero and even the Paris agreement have been built around the perceived need to keep burning fossil fuels, at least in the short term. Not do so would threaten economic growth, given that fossil fuels still supply over 80% of total global energy. The trillions of dollars of fossil fuel assets at risk with rapid decarbonisation have also served as powerful brakes on climate action.
“The way to understand this doublethink: that we can avoid dangerous climate change while continuing to burn fossil fuels – is that it relies on the concept of overshoot. The promise is that we can overshoot past any amount of warming, with the deployment of planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal dragging temperatures back down by the end of the century.
“This not only cripples any attempt to limit warming to 1.5°C but risks catastrophic levels of climate change as it locks us into energy and material-intensive solutions which for the most part exist only on paper.”
By this reasoning, carbon capture/geoengineering technology is the wishful justification for doing nothing to reduce fossil fuel consumption. I’ve lived long enough to see wishful thinking transformed to reality by science and technology. I was born before Sputnik and Telstar and lived to see men walk on the moon. I grew up reading about a 2-way wrist radio-TV in Dick Tracy comics and now carry around a cell phone that does all that and more. I grew up reading maps to get around in unfamiliar places and now use GPS. My fellow grad students and I speculated about a time in the distant future when the human genome might be sequenced; six years ago, I got my own genome sequenced for $200. Just because something seems far-fetched now doesn’t mean it can’t become commonplace.
Experience teaches me not to sneer at technology. Yes, Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima serve as warning for how technology can be dangerous. But technology is our only hope to avert climate change: technology to replace fossil fuel with renewables and technology to remove the CO2 already in the air with a half-life of 120 years if nothing is done. Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It’s too late for false dichotomies. We need *both* more conservations/green energy and more carbon capture/geoengineering if we are to succeed against a short timeline.
