Geoengineering vs. Gesturengineering

We took some heat recently because of a story I wrote about a geoengineering scheme to lime the oceans, which reduces their acidity and increases their ability to sequester carbon.

There was a lot of hemming and hawing in the comments about the proposed scale of the project. For example, Nils wrote (emphasis added):

As a long-time reader I know that Wired is about futuristic gadgets and such but to report on harebrained schemes as this one shows really bad judgement. To lime the sea or any of these other monstrous ideas, will not be part of the future.

The argument seems to be that any global-scale scheme is by definition monstrous. We're already manipulating the atmosphere and the oceans at a massive scale; we're just doing it unintentionally by living in the world that cheap energy built. Any project to tackle CO2 accumulation has to be big! That's the only way we're going to have a meaningful impact on the problem and buy some amount of time to decarbonize an economy completely built on fossil fuels.

In fact, the real problem with the Cquestrate scheme is that it might not be able to get big enough to truly combat atmospheric CO2 accumulation. Ken Caldeira, Stanford ecologist and geoengineering expert, got back to me today with this critique of the proposal:

Solving even 10% of the problem with this approach would mean mining 10 billion tons of
calcium carbonate (limestone)... The proposed approach is energy intensive and depends on having large amounts of cheap or free stranded energy. For both of these reasons (high amounts of mass handling, high energy input needed), I think this is likely to remain a niche player at best.

In covering the environment and energy, I see far too many ideologically pure, conceptually perfect, beautifully symbolic, and totally ineffectual ideas floated for "helping the planet." From here on, I've got a name for nice ideas that will have no impact on the world's very real environmental problems: gesturengineering.

Geoengineering might not be the best solution for combating the impacts of burning too much fossil fuel. Liming the oceans, in particular, might end up a partial solution, or out of the mix entirely, but at least it attempts to address the problem on the scale that's necessary.

Image: TheUSB powered greenhouse. Yeah, you read that right.

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