Everyday Erinyes #185

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

I won’t wait any longer on my request to republish, as I think I know where he is, and, if I’m right, there’s no telling when he’ll next see a computer. But, after listening to Gina McCarthy on Bill’s show (no, not the blooper, the content) I thought it might be nice to be able to spread a little hope. As she said, “Let’s just do what we can do.” And I just came across an article with some things that can be done (not necessarily personally, but they exist) which I wasn’t aware of in a new report from the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).

“I Want My Climate Back” (as we certainly all do) is the title of this report from Alex Carlin, who has been writing on climate for CMD for some time. As he points out (Bill mentioned this too), having gotten to the high PPM point of CO₂ where we are, most people are worried that there is nothing we can do, and we are simply looking at a future of misery and mass death.

 Many people think that we must merely stop putting CO2 into the air and we will be okay. But actually there are three essential tasks.

First, the most obvious step: yes, we should stop adding CO₂ to our skies — it’s called emissions reduction, or ER. Second, less obvious but absolutely mandatory: we need to remove the killer extra 110 ppm (trillion ton) overdose of CO₂ humans have already put into our skies and ER cannot do that — it’s called negative emissions, or NE. Third, we need to deal with how much the Arctic has already melted, a matter so pernicious that it can make all our efforts at ER and NE utterly futile. 

Notice the abbreviations ER and NE – they’ll come in handy not only for the rest of this article, but for any reading you may do on climate change in the future.

Emissions are, of course, what got us to this point, and reducing them is not going to take us backward. The best we can expect from reducing emissions would eave us where we are now, and that is not good enough. However, when halting climate change is discussed, it seems to be what everyone is talking and thinking about. If NE is mentioned (and it is beginning to be, a little),

 the NE methods getting reported typically cost trillions of dollars, or resemble contraptions which seem hopelessly impractical, or don’t scale up enough to solve the problem. Consequently, the general public is left feeling hopeless and depressed, up the proverbial creek without a working paddle. 

But there are methods – “several viable and very affordable” methods for NE, of which he discusses two.

The first involves synthetic limestone. Excuse me? What does limestone have to do with anything?

 There is a huge worldwide demand for concrete, which is mostly limestone, and limestone is 44 percent CO₂ by weight.

When natural limestone is used to create concrete, that process does not remove any CO₂ from the atmosphere. However, when synthetic limestone is created, that 44 percent CO₂ is obtained by a process that we desperately need — the CO₂ is pulled out of the sky (NE), or from stack gas from industrial plants (ER). 

The chemistry involved is similar to that by which shellfish make their shells. There is a company in California already starting to do this on order to make concrete to be used at the San Francisco Airport. They estimate that making 2 tons of synthetic limestone removes from the atmosphere almost one ton of CO₂. Of course the number of tons we need to remove is in the trillions. But, coincidentally(?), the number of plants required to produce enough synthetic limestone to do that is very close to the number of plants, world wide, currently mining natural limestone (about 50,000).

Natural limestone does not exist everywhere in the quantities in which it is needed, so using it carries transportation costs, which can be high. But those would be offset by the fact that materials to make synthetic limestone are locally available just about everywhere. And imagine what it would to for a builder’s bottom like to be able to advertise using “carbon negative concrete”!

A second route is the creation of limestone by other means than human plants. Synthetic limestone can be created by photosynthesis in what are called “ocean pastures,” which, even more than the Amazon basin, can function as “the lungs of the planet.”

 70 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere is produced by the oceans pastures’ marine plants. That’s big-time lung power. But also, 90 percent of the photosynthesis on Earth happens in these ocean pastures, and that is the CO₂ removal and repurposing power that we desperately need. 

The next part of his report reads a bit like a good news-bad news joke. Bad news: ocean pastures are in decline. Good news: that’s easily fixable because the decline is not from pollution, including plastic pollution – they only need a little bit of iron to revive. Better news: if they get that iron and start building back up, there will be more plankton, and hence more fish.

 This was already done successfully in 2012 in an ocean pasture off the southern Alaskan coast…. And if you need more good news, the plankton blooms will generate enormous amounts of white clouds that will cool the planet by their sunlight-reflecting “albedo” effect…which leads us to the challenge of restoring the Arctic. 

I did promise to get to the challenge (let’s call it that) of restoring the Arctic.

Alex points out that ice melting in the Arctic is not just the result of a warming planet – it is also one of the causes of the planet warming even more. Ice is white (please let’s skip the jokes about yellow snow. It’s basically white, at worst very pale.) Large areas of white reflect the sun’s heat back into space. If white areas become not-white, that heat is absorbed into the planet and speeds up the heating process exponentially.

 If the melt continues, we will face unstoppable melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Make no mistake, this is the kind of sea level rise that would put the entire southern half of Florida under water. Do you live on the coast? 

And I really cannot improve on this:

 A group called “Ice911” coming out of Stanford has developed the idea to spread a specially formulated safe, floating, reflective sand on top of ice. That sand increases albedo and causes the ice to absorb less heat, so the ice can survive the Arctic summer, building thicker, multi-year ice.

It is not necessary to cover the entire Arctic, as applying the sand in strategic Arctic locations can rebuild ice volume. It is essentially just sand, so it is not a danger to birds or fish.

The estimated cost is only $5 billion dollars per year at full development. 

The fact is, we have the possibility of actually reclaiming our climate – a better outcome that any of us probably dares to hope. I urge everyone to click through to the article, as I have just skimmed the surface, and there is much, much more to think about and to do. (For one thing, we can throw our support behind Jamie Raskin, D-MD, who has already introduced a resolution referencing NE methods.) I can’t do it justice – and we really need some constructive optimism at this point.

Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, help us to learn what the real possibilities are, so that when we advocate, we can advocate strongly for things which actually will work. Especially since, though techniques are available, there can be no guarantees when not everyone is on board.

The Furies and I will be back.