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The Green Alchemist: A Strategic Approach to Climate-Driven Material Innovation

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Exploring how cutting-edge material science is pivoting to solve the global climate crisis.

As the world faces unprecedented environmental challenges, the shift toward climate-driven material innovation has become a necessity rather than a choice. This approach focuses on developing new substances that are not only high-performing but also leave a minimal carbon footprint throughout their lifecycle.

The Core Pillars of Sustainable Material Development

To achieve true eco-friendly innovation, researchers and industries are adopting a multi-faceted strategy:

Carbon-Negative Sources: Utilizing bio-based polymers and captured CO2 to create plastics and construction materials.
Circular Economy Design: Ensuring materials are 100% recyclable or biodegradable, reducing industrial waste.
Energy-Efficient Synthesis: Revolutionizing manufacturing processes to use less energy and renewable power sources.

The Role of AI in Material Discovery

Modern material science is now powered by Artificial Intelligence. By using machine learning algorithms, scientists can predict the properties of millions of hypothetical compounds, drastically accelerating the timeline for climate-resilient solutions. This synergy between technology and ecology is the hallmark of the next industrial revolution.

Why Climate-Driven Innovation Matters

Investing in sustainable materials is key to achieving net-zero emissions. By replacing carbon-intensive steel, cement, and plastic with innovative alternatives, we can build a future that harmonizes human progress with planetary health. The goal of climate-driven material innovation is to ensure that every product we use contributes to a cooling planet.

A Test Case For How To Lower Carbon Emissions: Texas

No, I haven't gone off my nut with blind patriotism toward my native state. Yes, I know that ex-governor Rick Perry said in 2014, "Calling CO2 a pollutant is doing a disservice [to] the country, and I believe a disservice to the world." But the fact of the matter is that Texas has the most installed wind-generation capacity of any state, more even than California, and shows no signs of turning back. How we got here is a lesson in the effects of government regulation, and shows that sometimes less is more.

In an Associated Press article, reporter Michael Biesecker points out the irony that three of the leading wind-generation states—Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas—are also home to state and federal lawmakers who have been the most critical of climate-change ideas and most supportive of fossil fuel businesses such as oil and coal. He shows that in both 2014 and 2015, U. S. utilities spent more money installing renewable-energy sources such as wind and solar than they did building fossil-fueled power plants. And the fossil-fuel plants they did build mostly burn natural gas, which contributes less to the carbon-dioxide burden of the atmosphere than coal does. The fact that natural gas is so popular is largely because it's cheaper these days, and that's because the largely Texas-based oil-and-gas-extraction industry figured out how to do fracking, which has made more natural gas available now than we've had for a long time.

A few years ago we were hearing calls for carbon taxes, heavy regulation of fossil-fuel industries, and draconian mandates for Federal- and state-funded renewable energy projects imposed from Washington and other centers of governmental power. Largely because Washington has been gridlocked for the last five or six years, no significant Federal laws were passed, although the Obama administration has done what it could through executive actions in those directions.

Meanwhile, in Texas we enjoy some peculiar advantages when it comes to doing new things with electric power. Because years ago, Texas refused to interconnect in a major way with the electric grids in the rest of the country, most of the state gets power from an entity called ERCOT—the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Both physically and legally, ERCOT is independent from both the rest of the U. S. power grid and from the tangle of regulatory requirements that the rest of the country has to deal with whenever a power utility wants to do something different.

As Kyle Downey points out in an article at lawstreetmedia.com, this freedom from outside utility regulations has allowed Texas to pass innovative laws such as the Renewable Portfolio Standard in 1999, which created mandates and funded incentives for utilities to develop renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Modified over the years and threatened with repeal but never revoked, the Standard has succeeded beyond most people's expectations. From barely 1,000 MW of installed wind-generation capacity in 2002, wind power has grown to the extent that about ten percent of all power produced in the state is generated by wind farms—some 17,000 MW as of 2015. Many Texas utility customers can choose to "buy" only wind power through a trading system that gives choices of sources and pricing plans, and this has also allowed private individuals to vote for wind power with their wallets, rather than much more indirectly at the ballot box.

The other factor Downey mentions that has made Texas a wind-power leader is that we have a lot of land in the Panhandle where the wind blows steadily almost all the time, and even conveniently gets stronger at night when other renewables such as solar conk out. That everlasting wind on the prairie that early settlers often found so annoying is finally turning out to be a money-making asset. The state has also provided a fund to connect the remote wind-generation farms to the demand centers in populated areas of the eastern and central part of the state with transmission lines, an essential ingredient of the process that legislatures often overlook when planning renewable-energy futures for their constituents. Overall, the wind-power picture has never looked brighter in Texas, and there are more wind farms yet to be built. One study has shown that even without government incentives, building a wind farm is now the cheapest way to install new generating capacity—even cheaper than fossil-fuel plants.

What are the implications of this story for the current debate over carbon emissions and global climate change? For one thing, it tells me that predicting what people are going to do is hard, unless you restrict them with so many regulations that they don't have much choice. Few forecasters a decade ago would have foreseen the U. S. getting to a point where it is nearly independent of oil imports, as we are now. And even I thought that when certain wind-power subsidies came to an end, that the bottom would fall out of wind-generation growth in Texas. I was wrong, obviously, and not for the first time.

On a personal level, much of what an individual worries about does not in fact come to pass. Something like this may be the case with carbon emissions. In researching this article, I came across a chart showing that in 2013, China built more wind-generating power plant capacity than nuclear-powered plants. China is still one of the world's largest offenders when it comes to carbon emission because of its huge number of coal-fired power plants, but it is an encouraging sign that even a highly autocratic government such as China's recognizes the good sense in encouraging renewable energy sources.

All that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere isn't going to go away overnight, and we will be dealing with the consequences of burning fossil fuels, whatever they turn out to be, for many decades. But those who would like to empower a world government with the means of forcing people to quit burning fossil fuels should take a look at Texas, where climate-change deniers are happily building wind farms, making money, and thumbing their noses at regulators who are everywhere else but in Texas. It's paradoxical, but it seems to work.

Sources: The AP article by Michael Biesecker on how conservative states are leading the renewable-energy drive was carried by numerous outlets and is available on the U. S. News & World Report website at http://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2016-05-06/gop-states-benefiting-from-shift-to-wind-and-solar-energy. Kyle Downey's article "The Mystery of Wind Energy in Texas" is at http://lawstreetmedia.com/issues/energy-and-environment/mystery-wind-energy-texas/. Rick Perry's quotation is from http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/12/31/top-10-misguided-climate-deniers-quotes-2014and the article about wind energy in China is at https://www.statista.com/chart/1233/wind-outpaces-nuclear-in-china/.

The Ironies of Carbon Capture Technology

In a recent article in Scientific American, reporter David Biello summarizes the current state of carbon-capture technology, and it's not good. If a negative view of carbon capture appeared in some obscure climate-change-denier publication, it could be dismissed as biased reporting. But the elite-establishment Scientific American has been in the forefront of the anti-climate-change parade, and so for such an organ to publish such bad news means that we would do well to take it seriously.

The basic problem is that capturing a gas like carbon dioxide, compressing it, and injecting it deep enough underground where it won't come out again for a few thousand years is not cheap. And the worst fossil-fuel offenders—coal-fired power plants—make literally tons of the stuff every second. It would be hard enough to transport and bury tons of solid material (and coal ash is a nasty enough waste product), but we're talking about tons of a gas, not a solid. Just the energy required to compress it is huge, and the auxiliary operations (cleaning the gas, drilling wells, finding suitable geologic structures to hold it underground) add millions to billions to the cost of an average-size coal-fired plant. Worst of all, the goal for which all this effort is expended—slowing carbon-dioxide emissions—is a politically-tinged goal whose merit is doubted by many, and which is being ignored wholesale by some of the world's worst offenders in this regard, namely China and India.

However, shrinking the U. S. carbon footprint is regarded by many as a noble cause, and a few years ago Mississippi Power got on the bandwagon by designing a new lignite-burning power plant to capture its own carbon-dioxide emissions and send them into a nearby oil field, whereupon they expel oil that is, uh, eventually burned to make more carbon dioxide. Here is the first irony. Evidently, one of the few large-scale customers for large quantities of carbon dioxide are oil companies, who send it underground (good) to make more oil come to the surface (not so good).

The second irony is an economic one. It is the punishment meted out by economics to the few good corporate citizens in a situation where most citizens are not being so good.

Currently in the U. S., there is no uniform, rational, and legally enacted set of rules regarding carbon-capture requirements. So far, the citizenry as a whole has not risen up and said, "In our constitutional role as the supreme power in the U. S., we collectively decide that capturing carbon dioxide is worth X billion a year to us, and we want it done pronto." Instead, there is a patchwork of voluntary feel-good individual efforts, showcase projects here and there, and large-scale operations such as the one Mississippi Power got permission to do from the state's utility commission, as long as they didn't spend more than $2.88 billion on the whole thing.

So far, it's cost $6.3 billion, and it's still not finished. This means big problems for the utility and its customers, in the form of future rate hikes. Capturing carbon is not a profitable enterprise. The notion of carbon-trading laws would have made it that way, sort of, but for political reasons it never got off the ground in the U. S., and unless we get a world government with enforcement powers, such an idea will probably never succeed on an international level. So whatever carbon capturing is going to be done, will be done not because it is profitable, but for some other reason.

The embarrassment of Mississippi Power's struggling carbon-capture plant is only one example of the larger irony, which is that we don't know what an appropriate amount is to spend on carbon capture, because we don't know exactly, or even approximately, what it will cost if we don't, and who will pay. Probably the poorer among us will pay the most, but nobody can be sure. (There's a lot of very expensive real estate on coasts around the world, and sometimes I wonder if that influences the wealthy class to support anti-global-warming efforts as much as they do.)

The time factor is a problem in all this as well. Nearly all forecasts of global-warming tragedies are long-term things with timelines measured in many decades. That is good in the sense that we have a while to figure out what to do. But in terms of making economic decisions that balance profit against loss—which is what all private firms have to do—such long-run and widely distributed problems are chimerical and can't be captured by any reasonable accounting system. Try to put depreciation on an asset you plan to own from 2050 to 2100 on your income-tax return, and see how far you get.

So the only alternative in many places for large-scale carbon capture to happen is by government fiat. A dictatorial government such as China's could do this tomorrow if it wanted to, but as the recent Paris climate-accord meeting showed, it doesn't want to—not for a long time yet, anyway. In a nominal democracy such as the United States, the political will is strong in some quarters, but the unilateral non-democratic way the present administration has been trying to implement carbon limits has run into difficulties, to say the least.

My sympathies to residents of Mississippi who face the prospect of higher electric bills when, and if, their carbon-capturing power plant goes online. Whatever else the project has done, it has revealed the problems involved in building a hugely expensive engineering project for a payoff that few of those living today may ever see.

Sources: The article "The Carbon Capture Fallacy" by David Biello appeared on pp. 58-65 of the January 2016 edition of Scientific American.

Did Exxon Mobil Lie About Climate Change?

The energy giant Exxon Mobil is being investigated by New York State's attorney general, according to a report last week in the New York Times. The issue appears to be whether Exxon properly stated the risks of climate change to its future business in light of its own internal scientific climate research. Critics of the company say it has engaged in deception similar to what tobacco companies did in the 1960s and 1970s, when cigarette makers funded research that cast doubt on the health dangers of tobacco use even as they knew the grim truth and concealed it. For its part, Exxon's spokesman Kenneth P. Cohen said, "We unequivocally reject the allegations that Exxon Mobil has suppressed climate change research."

Under a law called the Martin Act, the New York attorney general is charged with the investigation of financial fraud, and can issue subpoenas for records and documents relating to such an investigation. Exxon got a subpoena along these lines last week, and is in the process of responding to it.

Let's step back a moment and examine the question of how this case relates to the well-known practices of tobacco companies that attacked the credibility of research that showed smoking and chewing their products was hazardous to one's health.

The history of how Big Tobacco muddied the research waters is pretty clear. After the tobacco firms fought what became a rear-guard action against the mounting evidence that smoking kills, both state and U. S. federal attorneys general sued large companies such as R. J. Reynolds beginning in the 1990s, claiming that they deceived consumers about the dangers of smoking even as the company's own internal research revealed the hazards involved. These successful suits cost the companies billions of dollars in fines and continuing payments into state-controlled public-health funds.

One of my high-school teachers loved questions that began, "Compare and contrast. . ." so let's do that here. What are the comparisons and the contrasts between what Big Tobacco did, and what Big Oil is supposedly doing?

First, the comparison for similarities. Exxon may have funded some researchers at times who opposed the general scientific consensus about climate change. This consensus has itself been somewhat of a moving target as more data, more sophisticated computer models, and a better understanding of climatology in general have contributed to knowledge of the problem. So for Exxon to be liable in the way that, say, R. J. Reynolds was liable, someone would have to show that (a) Exxon was publicly saying climate change isn't going to bother us, and (b) Exxon privately knew pretty much the opposite.

There is also the question of harm. It's pretty easy for a lawyer to argue that his late client died from smoking, which the client might have ceased and desisted from doing had he not been lied to by the maker of his cigarettes. If some of the more dire forecasts of the climate-change prophets come to pass, we will also have widespread death and destruction from it too. And to the extent that companies like Exxon were responsible for it, they could conceivably be held liable in some way.

Now for the contrasts. Apparently the worst thing that the New York attorney general thinks Exxon has done is not murder or criminal negligence, but financial fraud. Fraud generally involves the premeditated intent to trick or deceive someone to your own advantage. The idea here seems to be that if (and that is a big "if") laws are passed or other factors intervene to make it harder for Exxon to profit from fossil fuels because of climate change, and Exxon knew this was likely to happen, and Exxon told its investors otherwise, then they have tricked their investors.

Whatever you want to call this alleged action, it's a far cry from what blatant deceivers like Bernie Madoff did. Madoff, you may recall, ran a Ponzi scheme and kept one set of books for public consumption and another set for his secret fraudulent operations. While some European countries have begun to restrict fossil-fuel use in various ways—high fossil-fuel taxes, for example—their reasons for doing so often go beyond the threat of climate change. And in the U. S., to the frustration of environmentalists, very few meaningful climate-change-inspired restrictions have been placed so far on the consumption of oil, gas, and coal. This may change in the future, but it's hard to sue somebody for something that hasn't happened yet. Oil prices have recently tanked (so to speak), but the reasons have little or nothing to do with climate-change laws and a lot more to do with higher domestic production and international politics.

Another question is whether an engineering-intensive firm that operates legally to fulfill a widespread public need, as energy companies do, can be held liable for the free consumption decisions of millions of its customers. Again, we come to the question of who has been harmed. While lying is bad, if we find out that Exxon made some forecasts of future climate change that turn out to be wrong, that's not exactly the same as lying. Overall, this investigation seems to be based on speculation about future harms more than it is a realistic assessment of how investors have been harmed up to now. And such a thing will be hard to put across to a reasonable jury, assuming the case gets that far.

Of course, this may be the beginnings of what some might view as a government shakedown. Rather than face the prospect of spending years or decades in court, Exxon may choose to settle out of court by paying fines or changing its way of business to make the New York attorney general happy. Such proceedings always smack of blackmail to a greater or lesser degree, although sometimes they are the least bad alternative if a genuine wrong has occurred.

But to find out if that is the case, we'll just have to wait. Wait to see what the attorney general of New York does next; wait to see if states and countries pass much more restrictive legislation inspired by climate change; and wait to see how much hotter it gets. It may be a long wait for any or all of these things, so stay tuned.

Sources: The New York Times article "Exxon Mobil Investigated for Possible Climate Change Lies by New York Attorney General" appeared on Nov. 6, 2015 at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/science/exxon-mobil-under-investigation-in-new-york-over-climate-statements.html. I also referred to the Wikipedia article "Tobacco politics." I blogged on a related matter pertaining to climate change and university-funded research in "A Chunk of (Climate) Change", posted on Mar. 2, 2015.

Residential Solar Energy: Power to How Many People?

A friend of mine recently installed an array of solar panels (photovoltaic generation) on his roof. It's part of an Austin Energy plan that makes it straightforward for well-heeled consumers to get a turnkey installation done. After a stretch of sunny days he'll meet me for lunch and tell me how much power he sold to the utility that week.

I was reminded of this when I read a recent article by environmental writer Bill McKibben in The New Yorker. Entitled "Power to the People," McKibben describes how residential solar-power installations such as the one at my friend's house are getting cheap enough so that ordinary blue-collar workers and other middle-class types can afford them, at least when their electric utility cooperates in various ways. McKibben starts his piece with the story of a couple in Vermont who had their house made over for energy conservation and production: better insulation, a heat-pump heating unit, all-LED lighting, and a solar panel on their garage. After the installations, their electricity usage for a heating season (October to January) went down by 16%, and they were able to get by without starting up their old oil-burning furnace at all.

McKibben is supporting the presidential run of Bernie Sanders, the far-left independent senator from Vermont. But to read his New Yorker piece, you might not guess it—he sounds more like a free-market libertarian. His main point is that it's starting to make not only environmental and political sense (depending on your view of the environment and politics) but economic sense for more people to go solar and invest in energy-saving technology, simply because it's getting cheaper to do so. And so McKibben is looking to the free market to do what his years of playing a prophetic Cassandra in the wilderness of environmentalism haven't done so far: to foster a major move away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy for electric power.

While I welcome Mr. McKibben's newfound friendliness toward the market economy, one can question how realistic his optimism is. As he points out in the article, one of the main obstacles in the way of further adoption of solar power in private housing is the electric utilities themselves. While some, notably in California and Vermont, have been in the forefront of renewable-energy initiatives, others feel threatened by the idea of home-grown electricity. And the reason is money.

Nearly all electric utilities are regulated to some degree by state utility commissions, which allow them to set rates that guarantee a certain profit in exchange for highly reliable delivery of power. This sort of environment fosters conservative behavior and a set of rules that favors the status quo. For example, if people start making their own power, who pays for the expensive and maintenance-intensive electric grid, especially if more and more fossil-fuel-burning power plants that feed it are shut down? The economic incentives built into the system were not designed for power to go backwards, and it's not clear how the organizations that operate distribution networks are going to get paid for what they do in a highly distributed power-generation situation such as the use of extensive solar power would create.

Here in Texas, things are a little less regulated than in other places. It's not quite true here, as McKibben states in his article, that "utilities are granted exclusive rights to a territory." That's true for electric distribution companies, but not for electric generation in Texas, where most electric-utility customers can choose from a variety of generation sources, including renewables such as wind power. And partly due to a recently phased-out subsidy, Texas leads the nation in terms of wind-powered electric generation. So in a way, there's evidence even in fossil-fuel-friendly Texas that what McKibben hopes will happen is already happening.

But a totally free market for electric power is almost inconceivable, and so we have to look soberly at what it would take for renewables (solar being the newest contender) to make a significant dent in the use of fossil fuels for electric power in the U. S. According to the U. S. Energy Information Administration, about two-thirds of all electric power in the U. S. is produced by burning coal, oil, or natural gas. Say we wanted to reduce that fossil-fuel usage by a third, out of concern for climate change and so on. Anything smaller would be a drop in the bucket (and we're not even getting into the question of what other countries are doing and whether this U. S. contribution would make a difference globally). That's about a trillion kilowatt-hours per year (10¹⁵watt-hours, for you exponential-notation fans).

Now, suppose everybody—not just upper-class environmentalists, but everybody in every kind of rental and owner-occupied housing in the U. S.—installed solar panels with an average generating capacity of 5 kW, which is the typical size for residential installations. That is an upper limit, by the way—clouds, nighttime, and other issues mean that you don't get 5 kW twenty-four hours a day. Even if everybody had solar panels, we would still need the utility network for emergencies, to ship surplus power to places where it was needed, and so on. The question is, would we be able to make a dent in that trillion kilowatt-hours?

My very sketchy back-of-the-envelope calculations say yes, sort of. You would still need peak-capacity generators hooked to the grid to deal with hot days and so on. But yes, you could afford to shutter a lot of old coal-burning power plants if everybody installed solar panels.

And while we're dreaming, how would we pay for all those solar panels? A typical residential solar installation today is still expensive—$18,000 might be a typical actual cost, not including subsidies, tax breaks, and so on. While this figure is going to decline in the future, it can't follow the path of Moore's Law and get down to practically zero, because there's a certain amount of labor involved, and even if we could make solar panels for free they don't climb up on the roof by themselves. Multiply $18,000 by over a hundred million U. S. housing units, and you get $1.8 trillion. The U. S. federal budget for 2015 is $3.8 trillion. As you can see, this solar-installation idea is not a trivial deal. Even if it were spread out over a decade, you'd be spending each year as much on solar panels in the U. S. as one optimistic solar-industry estimate says annual global sales will be by 2021.

Yes, it could be done. But I think it's clear that unless there is a huge degree of government intervention in the forms of subsidies, incentives, or other external market manipulation, the free market isn't going to put solar panels on everybody's roof any time soon. Maybe President Bernie Sanders could do it, but offhand I can't think of any other way.

Sources: Bill McKibben's article "Power to the People" appears in the June 29, 2015 edition of The New Yorker, pp. 30-35. I used statistics on the fraction of electric energy produced with fossil fuels from the website http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3. The Solar Energy Industries Association website www.seia.org has plentiful data on historical and current trends in solar-energy installations. The 180-billion-sales-by-2021 figure is from http://www.solarmaxtech.com/global-solar-market-could-exceed-180-billion-dollars-by-2021/.

Pope Francis' Vision for a New Ecology

When the spiritual leader of the largest division of the Christian faith says something about climate change and the problems of technological progress, engineers of all faiths and no faith should take notice. Last Thursday, Pope Francis released his latest encyclical, Laudato Si', known in English as "On the Care of Our Common Home."

Contrary to some reports, in the encyclical Pope Francis doesn't come out in favor of Marxism, though he does say that international efforts to control greenhouse-gas emissions have failed and that something stronger is needed. And he doesn't say you can't be a good Catholic if you use air conditioning, though he does use air conditioning as an example of a "harmful habit of consumption." What he does is to lay out a vision for how humanity can turn around from a lot of wrong paths and get back on the right path, which is all a good sermon does anyway.

What are the wrong paths? While most environmental activists concentrate on actions, statistics, and policies, Pope Francis goes to the heart of the problem: sin. God's world as originally created was good. But when man decided he knew better than God, things started to go wrong. There's nothing new about sin, but what is new in the last couple of hundred years is mankind's ability to transform the environment through technology. A few hundred thousand cave men armed with spears couldn't make much difference to the global environment no matter what they did. But seven billion people using massive amounts of organized technological power and treating the earth simply as a raw-material resource can cause tremendous harm, both to the environment and many of the poorest people who try to live in it.

Pope Francis's roots are in the Global South, and his concern for the billions of the poorest people around the world is evident on every page of Laudato Si'. What if you are the father of a family on the coast of Africa, trying to feed yourself by fishing, and some pollution kills the fish and the ocean rises so much that your land is flooded out? What if you then move to the city and try to commute to a low-paying job three hours a day on filthy, crowded buses while breathing soot-filled air that gives you a lung disease that makes you so sick that you lose your job? While the physical environment and the marvelous biodiversity of plant and animal life on our planet come in for mention, Pope Francis's fundamental concern is for people, each one of whom is a child of God and deserving of respect, attention, and love. But when giant economic and technological systems conspire to deprive millions of their culture, their land, and their livelihood, these folks can no longer receive what they have a fundamental right to as human beings.

What are the answers? Pope Francis wisely refrains from making explicit scientific pronouncements or calling for specific laws or policies. Instead, he spends much of his time asking for dialogue between governments and citizens, between the privileged and the empoverished, and between scientists and religious believers. He hopes—and there are many places where he expresses hope—that men and women of good will, emboldened by a vision of humanity as one family sharing one planetary household, can change their ways for the better. These changes include everything from family efforts to save energy and recycle products up to stronger international agreements that could make a real difference in the rate at which fossil fuels are being used.

At the beginning and again at the end of the encyclical, he mentions the saint whose name he bears, St. Francis of Assisi. St. Francis was a revolutionary figure in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Jesus himself. He lived in utter poverty, but with such love for all creatures, both animal and human, that he collected followers who sought to carry out his vision of Christian love in a unique way that was both humble and vastly effective.

Much of what Pope Francis criticizes is the byproduct of pride, which theologians know is the root sin, the sin that enables all the others. If we think we have all the answers and that the material world is simply waiting for us to bend it to our whims, we are in fact enslaved to the sin of pride, and all the problems mentioned in the encyclical can be traced in one way or another back to that attitude.

On the other hand, if we look on the world as a wonderful gift, packed with hidden prizes and meanings to be treasured, not just exploited, we will tread more gently. We will think before we act, or buy, or sell, or design. We will bear in mind not only our own family, and our friends and social groups, but also others who might be affected by what we do, or purchase, or waste. And we will change our ways accordingly. Among other things, that is what engineering ethics is all about.

With Laudato Si', Pope Francis has not gone off the deep end politically or theologically. The encyclical emerges from a deep consideration of the entire Christian tradition and its meaning for how spiritual beings can best live in a material world, being themselves material as well. While not many previous popes have made ecological concerns a focus of their ministries, I think Pope Francis has chosen the right time to do so. And anyone who has any dealings with modern technology, whether as an engineer or an ordinary citizen who simply lives in the modern world, needs to give serious consideration to what he is saying.

Sources: The 45,000-word encyclical Laudato Si' can be downloaded from the Vatican website at http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html. Besides that document, I referred to online articles about it by Matthew Schmitz at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/06/18/pope-francis-wants-to-roll-back-progress-is-the-world-ready/and Christiana Z. Peppard at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/06/18/what-you-need-to-know-about-pope-franciss-environmental-encyclical/.

A Chunk of (Climate) Change

An old saying in investigative journalism is "follow the money." According to a recent article in the New York Times, that's just what the environmental organization Greenpeace did when it began to look into the funding of publications written by one Wei-Hock "Willie" Soon. Soon is a researcher associated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and has attracted a lot of publicity for his outspoken comments on global warming, which he appears to doubt is due to man-made causes. He has made the rounds of conservative talk shows to express his doubts, and that is probably why Greenpeace decided to investigate him. While Soon has made no secret of the fact that some of his funding came from energy industries and interests, documents obtained by means of the Freedom of Information Act showed that Soon was producing papers to order for specific funders, referring to the papers as "deliverables." He received over $400,000 from a prominent electric utility and $230,000 from the Koch Charitable Foundation. The New York Times reports that the Smithsonian Institution is mounting its own investigation into Soon's dealings, and its acting director admits that the Institute may need to clean up its ethical act with regard to disclosure of funding sources.

As Newton taught us, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, at least in physics. The opposite reaction inspired by the Soon affair has come from the U. S. Congress, which has now showered universities and energy companies with letters demanding information about funding sources for scientists who have criticized the establishment view of climate change. This has prompted Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University, to criticize what he calls "fishing expeditions" by Congress, because of the chilling effect it has on academic freedom.

I heard Prof. Dessler speak about a year ago at Texas A&M on the topic of the history of climate-change science. In general, he is in sympathy with the Greenpeace view that corporate interests are trying to sow discord in the climate-change area, in much the same way that tobacco interests sowed doubt about the link between smoking and cancer in the 1960s. But he is objective enough to realize that when Congress sends your university a letter asking for documents concerning your own research funding, it doesn't help you sleep better at night, and it doesn't make it any easier to follow the data wherever it leads.

If everybody would recognize the wisdom of a couple of well-established principles, things like the Soon investigation and the congressional reaction to it might be avoided.

The first principle is, always acknowledge your funding sources in sufficient detail. I haven't read any of Dr. Soon's papers and I don't know how or whether he acknowledged the specific ties between dollars and articles, assuming these ties existed (and while the investigation is still ongoing, it looks like they did). As far as I'm concerned, the only time an academic should take money for publishing a specific piece of writing with a specific point of view, is when the funding source itself publishes the piece, as in book publishing. (Full disclosure: I am currently waiting for Wiley to publish a textbook I've written, and while I don't expect to get rich from it, I will get royalties if they sell any copies.) Any time someone comes to you and offers you money to "place" specific publications in other venues not controlled by the funder, especially if readers of the publications will think that what you write is objective and not influenced by outside agencies, you should see bright flashing red conflict-of-interest lights and think about it a long, long time.

Now, I myself have taken money from agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) with the expectation that I would do work and publish papers as a result. What's the difference? Sometimes it's not easy to tell. Everybody expects that scientists and engineers who take research money from NSF will publish papers about their research. And nobody I know looks at the acknowledgment section and says, "Ah-hah! The NSF paid for this. No wonder it's X, Y, or Z." This is because the NSF has, overall, done a reasonably good job of letting scientists themselves judge what is good research and what isn't, and whether it should be funded or published.

The problem that comes up with climate-change research is that it has become a political hot-button issue. Billions of dollars of corporate revenue are at stake if unfriendly climate-change-related legislation comes to pass, and so corporations that feel threatened are eager to see ostensibly objective research published that favors the views which allow them to keep making more money. This is rational behavior on the part of the corporations, but the danger to objective science research is clear.

And that brings me to my second point: the fiction of truly 100% "objective" science. Guess what: there ain't no such animal. Every scientist has biases, prejudices, and hunches that prevent him or her from being the perfect, suspended-in-the-air, dispassionate, Mr.-Spock-like viewer of objective truth. In the choice of research topics, in the selection of funding agencies, and in the way research is performed and presented, scientists betray their biases—and yes, even their political convictions—all the time, often while fooling themselves into thinking they are being perfectly objective.

When the subject of study is not of widespread public interest and influence—say, nematodes—it's fairly easy for the small group of folks who just can't know enough about nematodes to get together and pursue the truth about nematodes, and sometimes come pretty close to ideal objectivity. But when the subject has vast and time-extended implications for every resident of the planet, as climate change does, everybody wants to get in their two cents, or two hundred thousand dollars, as the case may be. And while I won't go so far as to say that everyone has their price, if a researcher's salary depends 100% on raising external funding, it's hard to resist the blandishments of a corporation or political group that wants a quid pro quo in the form of research with a predetermined outcome.

While the jury is still out, that's apparently what happened to Dr. Song. His case can serve as a warning to every funded researcher not only to disclose one's funding in enough detail, but to ask whether one has betrayed the ideal of objectivity for cash. Congress can think about restraining itself from scaring academics and making it even harder to do objective science in the academy. And everybody can realize that scientists are human beings for whom the ideal of absolute objectivity is just that—an ideal that is rarely, if ever, realized in practice.

Sources: I referred to the New York Times articles "Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Researcher," appeared at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html

on Feb. 21, 2015, and "Lawmakers Seek Information on Funding for Climate Change Critics" on Feb. 25 at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/science/lawmakers-seek-information-on-funding-for-climate-change-critics.html. After this blog was written, I was saddened to read of the passing of the original Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame, Leonard Nimoy, at the age of 83.

Imagining Geoengineering

Okay, suppose some of the most extreme voices warning of global warming are right. Suppose we really do face the inundation of much of the world's coastlines in a generation or two. Even if, starting tomorrow, nobody ever burned a drop or a gram of fossil fuel ever again, the carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere might take hundreds of years to fall to pre-industrial levels. So simply implementing restrictions on fossil fuels to reduce carbon-dioxide levels may not do the job fast enough. What do we do in the meantime? To use an automotive analogy, if you're going too fast and you see that the road ahead of you ends in a cliff, it might not be sufficient simply to take your foot off the gas. You might actually have to apply the brakes. David Keith says we ought to at least talk about applying the global-warming brakes. But the question I have is, how could it ever get beyond talk?

Keith is a professor with appointments at both the Harvard Kennedy School, where he teaches public policy, and Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. An environmental engineer by training, Keith thinks that "geoengineering" ought to be considered along with reductions in fossil-fuel consumption as a way to reduce the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Geoengineering refers to intentional efforts to manipulate the climate. So far, the only moderately successful geoengineering projects have been cloud-seeding efforts that arguably increased rainfall in some areas. But Keith is talking about a worldwide effort to do something that will counteract global warming by artificially cooling the planet somehow.

Interviewed last March by the CBC (Keith is Canadian), he admitted that ideas such as spreading small sulfur particles in the stratosphere to reflect solar radiation as a way of countering global warming are a "brutally ugly technical fix." But he thinks such geoengineering solutions should be on the table, rather than brushed aside scornfully, as they are by many environmental activists.

Let's try to imagine how such a geoengineering fix would work, not just technically, but politically. Many of the geoengineering solutions that have been posed are not terribly expensive, globally speaking. We are talking about industrial quantities of sulfur or other chemicals dispersed in the upper atmosphere, but the cost in terms of the global economy is miniscule. There is no question that such a project could be mounted by even one well-prepared industrial nation. The question I'd like to examine is: could the nations of the world ever reach a consensus on what geoengineering solution to adopt?

If we examine the track record of united global action on the main cause of the carbon-dioxide increase, namely the use of fossil fuels, history is not encouraging. The most significant effort in this direction is the Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997. It is technically an extension of a 1995 UN agreement that parties signing it will reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases in accordance with certain goals spelled out in the document. While 192 countries signed the accord, some of the most significant producers of greenhouse gases either did not participate at all (e. g. the U. S. A., China, India) or have not met their targets (e. g. New Zealand).

The only global environmental agreement I can recall that actually worked was the way we kept chlorinated fluorocarbons (CFCs) from destroying the ozone layer. CFCs were once used widely as refrigerant fluids (e. g. under the trademark "Freon"), but in the 1970s, scientists figured out that (a) these compounds lasted for a long time in the atmosphere and (b) they catalyzed the destruction of the important ozone layer in the stratosphere, which protects us from harmful UV radiation from the sun. The Montreal Protocol, which went into effect in 1989, set its signatories on a path to eliminating the production of new CFCs and phasing out their use by finding alternatives. By and large, the Montreal Protocol is a success story in international technical agreements, because most of the industrialized world signed on and actually did what they agreed to do.

Why can't we get such cooperation with the global-warming issue? The simple answer is, it would cost more. Telling the world economy to give up CFCs was like telling a dieter to give up the tutti-frutti milkshake he has every Shrove Tuesday. CFCs were a minor part of the global economy compared to fossil fuels. If we accept the most radical recommendations of those alarmed about global warming and implement restrictions as fast as they want us to, well, the point is, the world won't do it without something approaching a global police state. Developing nations such as China and India will not willingly forego the advantages of wider use of fossil fuels to grow their economies. It would take a world war and dictatorial economic domination by a single global-warming-prevention entity to make the world go on a fossil-fuel diet. And that doesn't sound like a good tradeoff.

The thing that geoengineering proponents like David Keith have going for them is that many geoengineering proposals would cost a lot less than replacing fossil fuels with a sustainable alternative. Whether geoengineering would work is another question, unfortunately even more complicated than the still-controversial question of exactly how bad climate change is going to get, and what adverse effects it will have in the future.

Besides the technical issue of whether geoengineering would work, I think there is an esthetic or philosophical factor involved. Many of those who advocate harsh restrictions on fossil-fuel use to avert further climate change seem to have bought into the "deep-green" assumption that humanity is really a net liability for Planet Earth. Burning fossil fuels represents meddlesome tinkering with what Mother Nature was up to naturally, and geoengineering would be another step down that evil road of manipulating the environment. Better we just fold our tents, globally and economically speaking, and go back to living off nuts and berries. The trouble with that notion is that there would not be enough nuts and berries to go around unless we keep burning fossil fuels, or find an energy-equivalent alternative that won't bankrupt us. Such an alternative is not yet at hand.

I admire engineers like David Keith for thinking through important problems such as climate change to arrive at possible solutions that might actually work, at least technically. Given the dismal track record of the Kyoto Protocol, the chances of arriving at a truly global accord to implement significant fossil-fuel reductions are vanishingly small. If some of the more dire climate-change predictions come to pass, it might be easier to get international agreement on a geoengineering strategy than it would on fossil-fuel reductions, especially if the price is right.

Sources: An article on David Keith's ideas about geoengineering appeared on March 29, 2014 on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's website http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/give-geoengineering-a-chance-to-fix-climate-change-david-keith-1.2586882. I also referred to Wikipedia articles on solar radiation management, the Kyoto Protocol, and chlorofluorocarbons.

Climate Change Accelerating

Methane levels as high as 2562 ppb were recorded on October 9, 2014, as illustrated by the image below.

Many grey areas show up in the image where QC (quality control) failed, as it was too hard to read methane levels in the respective area, apparently due to high moisture levels (i.e. snow, rain or water vapor) in the atmosphere.

As above image illustrates, cloud cover is high over the Arctic, while there is also precipatation in the form of snowfall.

In other words, high levels of methane (above 1950 ppb, colored yellow) could be present over a much larger part of the Arctic Ocean, while methane in these grey areas could be even higher than the measured peak level of 2456 ppb.

This appears to be confirmed by persistent high methane levels over vast areas across the Arctic Ocean both in the morning (top part of the image further above) and in the afternoon (bottom part of image) on 9 October 2014.

Methane levels are this high over the Arctic Ocean for the number of reasons, including:

The Gulf Stream keeps pushing warm water into the Arctic Ocean.
The resulting eruptions of methane from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean constitute a feedback that accelerates warming in the Arctic.
As the Arctic warms up more rapidly than the rest of Earth, the Arctic's ice and snow cover will decline, further accelerating warming in the Arctic.
As the Arctic warms up more rapidly than the rest of Earth, the speed at which jet streams circumnavigates the Northern Hemisphere will weaken, making it meander more, resulting in a greater frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as heat waves, droughts and wildfires.

Here's an example of intense warming. Look at what is currently happening on Greenland.

As the image above right shows, sea surface temperature anomalies as high as +1.89°C hit the North Atlantic (on October 8, 2014).

Furthermore, high cloud cover over the Arctic (image further above) makes it hard for the heat there to radiate out into space, further contributing to high temperature anomalies.

The image on the right shows high temperature anomalies over Greenland and parts of the Arctic Ocean on October 11, 2014. Note that anomalies are averaged out over the course of the day (and night).

The image below (right) shows anomalies at the top end of the scale hitting large parts of Greenland at a specific time during this day. The left part of the image below shows how this could happen, i.e. jet streams curling around Greenland trapping warm air inflow from the North Atlantic.

As said, as the Arctic warms up more rapidly than the rest of Earth, the speed at which jet streams circumnavigate the Northern Hemisphere will weaken, making the jets meander more and creating patterns that can trap heat (or cold) for a number of days over a given area. Due to the height of its mountains, Greenland is particularly prone to be increasingly hit by heatwaves resulting from such blocking patterns. Warming changes the texture of snow and ice, making it more slushy and darker, which also makes that it absorbs more of the sunlight's heat, further accelerating melting.

As Paul Beckwith warns in an earlier post, melt rates on Greenland have doubled in the last 4 to 5 years, and melt rates on the Antarctica Peninsula have increased even faster. Based on the last several decades, melt rates have had a doubling period of around 7 years or so. If this trend continues, we can expect a sea level rise approaching 7 meters by 2070.

From: More than 2.5 m sea level rise by 2040

These are all indications that the pace of climate change is accelerating in many ways, the most dangerous one being ever larger methane eruptions from the Arctic Ocean's seafloor. As the image below shows, sea surface temperature anomalies are very high in the Arctic Ocean, indicating very high temperatures under the surface.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry recently said: “There are now – right now – serious food shortages taking place in places like Central America because regions are battling the worst droughts in decades, not 100-year events in terms of floods, in terms of fires, in terms of droughts – 500-year events, something unheard of in our measurement of weather.” Warning about looming catastrophe, Kerry adds: “Life as you know it on Earth ends. Seven degrees increase Fahrenheit (3.9°C), and we can't sustain crops, water, life under those circumstances.”

The situation is dire and calls for comprehensive and effective action, as discussed at the Climate Plan blog.

Post by Sam Carana.

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