Fund more climate research. By Matthew Yglesias

Read time: 10 minutes

MATTHEW YGLESIAS

APR 04, 2024

Fund more climate research

Technology offers global solutions to a global problem

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Sulfur dioxide (SO₂) is a serious health hazard that causes respiratory problems when inhaled. It’s a major contributor to the smog that used blanket American cities and the acid rain that marred much of the east coast. Decades of regulation have been implemented to get this toxin out of the air we breathe and the water we drink, and they’ve largely succeeded The most recent effort to de-sulfurize our lives, though, was an attempt to reduce the amount of sulfur dioxide emissions in trans-Atlantic maritime shipping. We appear to have succeeded in doing that, but in doing so contributed to the alarming rise in the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean, because SO₂ isn’t just toxic — it also reflects solar radiation.

Sulfur pollution is a long-standing problem, so this is a well-understood dynamic. And all things considered, SO₂ pollution seems to be more harmful than global warming, so the effort to reduce it isn’t a mistake. But it is suggestive of an idea that’s been bouncing around for a long time now: putting SO₂ and other aerosols into the stratosphere to block solar radiation without anyone breathing in the toxins.

Would this really work?

My understanding from talking to people over the years is that it probably would. As in, if you had to make a do-or-die choice tomorrow, most scientists and engineers who’ve looked at it think that it probably would.

But there are a lot of known unknowns about the idea, which is based on abstract modeling and general chemistry knowledge rather than specific experiments. And that’s where this conversation starts to annoy me.

Every discussion about whether we should use upper-atmosphere aerosol injections to curb global warming inevitably runs aground on the uncertainty and limited evidence base. And despite the obvious importance of the question, nobody is really investing meaningful resources into doing the science, even though there is a lot of money and political effort going into climate change.

Because climate change is a global problem that involves difficult coordination issues, the highest-impact thing any one piece of political geography can do is conduct research with positive externalities. If you solve technical problems that make climate stabilization easier, that’s a big lever with which to alter the trajectory of global climate. But it seems to be treated as almost an afterthought in ambitious climate legislation.

The specter of “social license”

As far back as I can remember, the climate movement has treated the specter of technological solutions as an enemy.

If “the science” tells us that we “need” to hit certain emissions targets by certain dates in order to hit certain targets for atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and total warming, then reasoning backwards from these targets, the goal of the movement is to block fossil fuel infrastructure.

And in this targets-oriented framework, ideas like carbon-capture and sequestration (burning natural gas and capturing the emissions at the source) or direct-air capture (sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere) or enhanced rock weathering (accelerating the natural carbon cycle) just create loopholes. A politician in Norway can say “we are committed to IPCC goals, but are also going to move ahead with long-term investments in extracting North Sea oil and gas — these things are consistent because in the future, geoengineering or carbon capture will make it possible to achieve net zero, even while we continue to do fossil fuel extraction.”

The goal has been to block or minimize discussion of these options in order to make the targets more binding on fossil fuel infrastructure, which in turn will force emissions down.

What the groups get right is that countries keep making emissions pledges and then making policy choices that are not really consistent with those pledges. But the right lesson to take from this is that the emphasis on emissions targets is misguided. Countries are willing to take steps to reduce emissions when those steps are cheap or when they have large co-benefits. But because each country internalizes the cost of emissions reductions while the harms of climate change are global, nobody wants to take costly measures to reduce emissions. This is a difficult problem that nobody has come up with a solution to.

The dynamic whereby policymakers opt for higher-than-ideal emissions while hand-waving in the direction of hypothetical technology really is bad. But the solution is to actually invest in the research.

Biden-era legislation features a lot of spending on technology-neutral subsidies for the production of zero-carbon electricity, which I think is great. Beyond that, though, the lion’s share of money has gone to subsidizing the purchases of EVs and plug-in hybrids. That works to reduce emissions, but it’s a very clunky policy design relative to pricing. What you can say for it, at least, is that there are significant network effects with plug-in vehicles, where the more people who drive them, the more charging infrastructure there will be, and the more convenient it becomes.

The next-largest budget item is subsidies for home energy efficiency and appliance electrification. Spending on research is minuscule compared to all the consumer focused stuff.

It’s really worth thinking about the scaling issues here. You can reduce emissions from the US by paying Americans to buy induction stoves rather than gas stoves. But that’s not going to influence the behavior of people in Nigeria as Nigeria (hopefully) develops and prospers over the years. And there’s no universe in which the American government is going to subsidize people living in Nigeria to purchase induction stoves. These are established companies selling mature technology that is widely used in Europe and other places. Subsidies can mechanically induce their adoption, but there's no reason to believe we're at a point where they will alter cost curves, incubate new companies, or change the calculus facing residents of foreign countries. It's certainly possible that new-generation appliances, like the Impulse Labs stove, will improve on existing electric appliances and have some of those kind of benefits. The IRA subsidies, however, are not structured to specifically advantage those companies or other leading edge products.

But if America funds science and research that develops useful new technology to address ecological problems, that really might be useful globally.

Decarbonizing the ocean

I don’t think I’ve ever written about ocean acidification, but as most people have probably heard, this is a kind of cousin of climate change — when atmospheric CO2. concentrations rise, extra CO2 is absorbed into the ocean. That lowers the pH of the ocean water by forming molecules of carbonic acid (H2CO3 ). This, in turn, has bad implications for ocean life.

But there is also an opportunity here.

If you find a way to raise the pH of ocean water, that not only helps the animals who live there, it speeds up the pace at which the ocean can absorb CO2 from the air.

There are “natural” ways to do this with mangroves (just like afforestation is a kind of direct air capture), and there are ideas about adding alkaline agents to the ocean and also things like Captura’s technology that runs seawater through some kind of membranes to remove the carbon and then release newly low-acid water back into the sea. That both directly reduces acidity, and also lets you locally counterattack acidification in particularly sensitive areas.

Some people I’ve asked about this say they don’t understand why targeting the ocean would be superior to trying to directly capture carbon dioxide out of the air. Others, like the authors of this National Academies report, say the ocean idea is promising because the concentration of CO2 is higher in the water than in the air. AP chemistry was my worst class in high school, so I will not weigh in on this other than to say it is a shame that research dollars are currently so scarce that rival forms of carbon capture technology are fighting against each other so fiercely.

There is a clear value right now to trying to further develop a wide range of carbon removal products to see what can and can’t be done cost-effectively at different scales.

But as with solar geoengineering, we also need to evaluate some of these proposals to make sure there aren’t hidden downsides or side effects that the world needs to be aware of. Beyond that, we need to develop frameworks for measuring carbon removal assertions. As long as these things are science projects, it sort of doesn’t matter exactly how much carbon dioxide is being removed. But if you think about a business model where significant amounts of money are being spent — either directly by governments and businesses or as offsets or reparations — then there’s obviously a big incentive to cheat or exaggerate. Which is why beyond the basic benefits of more funding, there is a very real need for government involvement. Even if carbon capture or geoengineering is technically workable, it doesn’t work as a solution unless there is agreement on standards and ground rules.

A better world is possible

While I was working on this piece, Terraform Industries announced that they successfully manufactured natural gas out of electricity and carbon sequestered from the air.

That kind of synthetic hydrocarbon manufacture has a lot of potential applications. It might be a solution for hard-to-electrify areas like aviation or maritime shipping. It could be a means of de facto energy storage for surplus solar power during the summer. It could just be fun because people enjoy grilling outside in nice weather and you can’t really do that with an induction stove.

But of course, we’re still subject to the laws of thermodynamics. If you burn fossil fuels to generate the electricity to manufacture synthetic hydrocarbons, that’s a wasteful and polluting (and pointless) process. That comes into focus in an incredibly clear way with synthetic hydrocarbons, but it’s true of essentially any carbon removal technology: Cleaning up the air and the oceans is a very promising idea, but if it requires just burning more fossil fuels, then it’s not going to work.

Which in turn is one respect in which I think energy abundance is underrated by environmentalists.

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We know that solar panels are now very cheap. We also know that our ability to place solar panels in enormous quantities is now primarily constrained by siting and permitting issues. Hopefully with better policy (one of my uncles and a couple of co-authors have a new paper on this) in the near future, we can alleviate those constraints. But if you look at replacing 100 percent of current coal and gas use in electricity generation with renewables, plus enough renewables to electrify the entire vehicle fleet, plus enough renewables to replace gas and oil furnaces with heat pumps, it’s just not obvious to me that we as a society would even want to build that many utility-scale solar and wind facilities.

And yet, even all that wouldn’t be enough energy, because there’s industry and aviation and shipping to somehow electrify or else offset with carbon capture or make green hydrogen or something else. So what are we going to do?

Helion says we’re going to have unlimited cheap clean energy thanks to the magic of nuclear fusion soon. Is that true?

I have no idea, and obviously many people have gone wrong with optimistic predictions about fusion in the past. On top of generalized skepticism, I always want to toss in the cautionary note that there’s no technology so promising that it can’t be ruined by regulatory constraints. That’s the bitter lesson of how despite the demonstrated safety and affordability of elevators, it’s still illegal to build an apartment building to overcome land scarcity across most of the American landscape. That said, it would be very nice to have an incredible breakthrough in fusion power. Something like that would accomplish dramatically more to address the global problem of climate change than anything we can possibly do in terms of tweaking Americans’ behavior. Because if the technology existed, everyone would want to use it.

It’s perfectly correct to say that we shouldn’t use these kind of hypothetical breakthroughs as an excuse to ignore the negative externalities of profligate use of dirty energy in the here and now. But especially to the extent that people think pricing the externalities isn’t politically viable, one of the very best things to spend money on is pursuing the breakthroughs. It’s true that you can’t directly connect research to climate targets, but that’s just another reason to move away from climate target frameworks and focus on the stuff that matters.

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