Who's afraid of carbon capture?

Everyone, apparently

If you’re currently panicking about the new study showing that plankton in the Atlantic Ocean has been “wiped out”, I have some good news for you: apparently the study in question was funded by someone who sells wastewater filters, and is directly contradicted by other, wider-ranging surveys. So the claim that the “plankton catastrophe” is a bigger problem than climate change is probably not correct. Which is not to say that the Atlantic Ocean, or any ocean on the planet for that matter, is in particularly good shape. It’s just not that bad.

Perhaps you didn’t see the plankton story because you were busy reading a different story about how an airport in the UK had to suspend operations due to a “melting” runway. That, too, seems to be at the very least exaggerated — they are now saying that the runway “briefly lifted”, whatever that means — but it’s certainly true that parts of Europe are experiencing extraordinary heat at the moment, and that the Establishment has wasted no time in linking that weather to the climate-change issue.

Here’s what I want you to do for me: Regardless of whether you believe in anthropogenic (man-made) global warming, or AGW for short, I want you to join me in temporarily affirming the following statements:

0. AGW is real, it is harming the planet, and it will only get worse;

1. The primary mechanism of AGW is carbon-dioxide emissions.

I’m not trying to convert you if you don’t believe, or mock your beliefs if you do. The purpose here is to agree on basic premises so we can look at what’s being done by the people who, nominally at least, share those beliefs and are acting accordingly. Fair enough? Good.

During the past month or so, my son and I have visited a half-dozen airplane museums from SoCal to NEOhio.. We’ve seen a lot of WWII planes, a lot of Cold War fighters, and enough four-engined bombers to burn Dresden back into ashes. John has a practical mind and he has asked more than once why we had to have so many different fighters and bombers for very similar tasks. Was there any particular reason to have both the P-51 and the P-47? What about the Corsair and the Hellcat/Bearcat? The B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-24 Liberator? And what about the Century Series of the immediate postwar era?

I wasn’t around in 1940 so I have no real idea why the United States spent so much time on such a diversity of designs, other than: Winning World War II and then deterring the Cold War was of utmost importance and therefore it was critical that every possible approach to every problem be explored to its natural limits. So the F-105 Thunderchief is a piece of shit, which it apparently was? You have the F-100 and F-101 right there waiting to take over. A gorgeous biodiversity rendered in polished aluminum.

Now, as I recall, the worst case scenario from World War II was that the Japanese would conquer Hawaii and the Germans would be able to fight the Russians off until 1948. The worst case scenario of the Cold War was in theory GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR but the vast majority of the money and effort spent was actually on more prosaic goals, like securing air superiority over Korea or maybe sneaking a peek at some Soviet installations from 90,000 feet up.

As I understand the climate-change challenge, the worst case scenario is in fact far worse than either of these, and involves the extermination of human life on the planet. This is more serious than losing Hawaii to the Japanese, unless you are Barack Obama and you just got done tearing down Robin Masters’ house from Magnum, P.I. in favor of some much swankier digs.

Speaking of former Presidents… Now I want you to imagine someone bringing the climate-change problem to Harry Truman in 1948. “Sir, there is an, ahem, global consensus among scientists that we need to stop putting CO2 into the air pronto, or the world is gonna blow up. In fact, things are going to be pretty screwed-up even if we stop right now.”

I think he would have asked two questions. The first would have been “What can we do to stop putting CO2 into the air?” and the second would have been “Is there anything we can do to get the CO2 back out of the air?” FDR would have done the same thing. Heck, pretty much any of your action-oriented Presidents would have done the same thing. Let’s get back to Truman, though, because he’s the prototype of “buck stops here”. Someone would have shown him this chart:

and I suspect he would have done something very command-and-control, very Civ III, very War Production Board. He would have appointed someone to oversee carbon reductions in each of the five sectors. He would have appointed someone to negotiate corresponding carbon reductions with our allies and even our enemies. The notion that China and India “deserve to have their own industrial revolution” and therefore should be building new coal-fired electrical plants at an astounding rate wouldn’t enter into Truman’s calculations.

“The whole world is at risk,” he would thunder, “so the whole world must cooperate.” And then he’d threaten the stragglers with Curtis LeMay, the B-36, and whatever fissionable material we actually had in 1948. (Which wasn’t much.)

Having done that, he would do the next logical thing, which would be to fire up a new Manhattan (or B-29) Project to get the CO2 out of the air. Once the technology was understood, the next logical step would be a (New) New Deal to get the carbon capture installed on a national scale, just like the power grid and the interstate highways. There might be rationing of certain materials, expenditures, and behaviors. I doubt that “Give ‘Em Hell Harry” would have much patience for private jets or heated pools or the Bunker-C-fueled transshipment of worthless plastic trash from China to this country.

As the carbon-capture technology improved, Truman and his successors would ease up on the rationing and behavior modification. Eventually someone would come up with a way to directly link the cost of carbon capture with the source of carbon emissions. Managed correctly, this could take the country (and the world!) to a carbon-neutral state.

There you go. Crisis averted. No doubt there would be plenty of heated recriminations after the fact if the global temperature continued to rise, but… remember that we agreed at the start not to engage in that sort of speculation within the context of this article. And I further apologize to my international readers for being so US-centric here. The same discussion and action could easily have taken place on the other side of the still-nascent Iron Curtain, and more rapidly since those economies were centrally planned.

You get the idea, however. To really tackle AGW, you have to substantially reduce everyone’s emissions, then you have to undo the damage you’ve already done. This model of environmental restoration — stop doing harm, then ameliorate existing harm — is the gold standard for everything from EPA Superfund sites to the restoration of whitetail deer.

Given that Harry Truman was long dead when global warming became a thing, what actually happened? Well, we got the Kyoto agreements. George Bush pointed out that they didn’t apply to 80% of the world, and he was right. Under Kyoto, the biggest polluters got a free ride while certain other countries (and sectors) were placed under intense scrutiny. The British motorist, for example, was bullied into switching to diesel in the name of reducing CO2, a change that killed tens of thousands of British citizens through particulate poisoning and didn’t appear to result in any measurable change for the better.

The additional regulation and restrictions placed on Western countries simply opened the door wider for the emerging world to pollute without concern or regard for AGW — and it wrecked a bunch of economies along the way. Greenhouse gases (GHGs) are way up since Kyoto, and they will continue to go up as long as it is wildly profitable for the First World to outsource manufacturing to the Second and Third Worlds where Kyoto does not apply. The response of the international community to climate change has literally been to pick up a rug and sweep the dirt under it, with that rug being marked “China”.

Again, put aside what you personally believe. A complete and thorough belief in AGW is a cornerstone policy of every ruling party from Sacramento to Helsinki. Most liberal democracies consider “AGW skepticism” to be punishable by unpersoning, if not actual incarceration. Yet almost nothing substantial has been done to address the problem. Think about that the next time you read some passionate grad student’s Instagram diatribe about the hypocrisy of: the Mormons, the Puritans, the Carnegies, the Babylonians. Our modern religion of climate change is getting the same kind of lip service we gave Christianity back when we had chaplains pray for the success of Paul Tibbets and Charles Sweeney.

That’s what we are doing on the “carbon creation” front. What’s happening on the “carbon capture” front? If we have agreed as a globe that China’s right to make iPhones is more important than the right of everything less than twenty feet above sea level to not become two feet below sea level — if we believe that the industrialization of “developing countries” is more critical to the future than having an ocean filled with something besides acidic jellyfish — what’s being done to balance that decision out?

I don’t think you will like the answer, and I really don’t think you will like the reasoning behind it.