For decades, geoengineering — which describes various technical proposals, from the seemingly straightforward to ideas that sound like they were dreamed up on Star Trek — was a dirty word among environmental scientists, who wanted less messing with nature, not more. But with carbon dioxide emissions rising and political forces having little global impact, it’s an idea now openly debated at scientific and policy forums. At the same time, it has gone from a side interest of Keith’s to a full-time gig, including writing a book, A Case for Climate Engineering, that comes out next week.
Skeptics think geoengineering is hubristic overreach that is bound to backfire — either by removing the impetus to cut emissions or by causing new problems for the climate, or both. Keith welcomes the debate, but he bristles at being cast as gung-ho. The risks of climate tinkering are real, Keith says. But willful ignorance is riskier. Left unchecked, a warming climate could one day cause enough harm that mounting pressure to do something, anything, to cool the planet quickly would leave few other options. If that day comes, he says, we’d better know what we’re doing.
So it goes lately for Keith, who has become a one-man geoengineering band. In addition to teaching, writing, and attending speaking engagements and far-flung scientific symposiums, he runs a start-up company that plans to build and operate giant “scrubbers” to remove carbon dioxide from the air and then sell the gas to energy companies; they’ll send it deep underground to increase pressure in oil wells and extract hard-to-reach crude, leaving the gas buried, or feed it to algae engineered to make it into biofuel. The scrubbers — which use a chemical reaction similar to one that’s been used in the paper, pulp, and other industries for decades — are among the less risky geoengineering ideas.
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