Dangerous ‘fixes’ for climate
Too often, we humans are determined to run the show. This is becoming increasingly obvious in our efforts to counteract the ongoing climate change.
Forests have a proven ability to moderate temperature and even the water cycle for life’s benefit. Already, they help consume about a third of society’s emissions of the carbon dioxide spurring on global warming.
Instead of supporting Nature’s well-honed skills, though, we continue to cut down the forests doing this unpaid work. What’s more, many of the tech solutions involve sacrificing trees in the quest for climate control.
It’s a disaster in the making.
Below, I highlight several ongoing efforts—all of them with ties to Bill Gates, incidentally—to turn these dangerous schemes into reality.
Pollute the air more
A scattering of scientists and entrepreneurs suggest injecting the upper atmosphere with more pollution, often sulfuric acid. They argue it will darken the sky and thus “dim” the sun. While it would cool the planet slightly, it would have many negative ramifications too.
Yet, even without any governmental regulation or sufficient scientific testing, this idea is moving forward.
A two-person startup, Make Sunsets, is selling balloons filled with sulfur dioxide in an unregulated effort to put extra pollution into the atmosphere. Like the ones children release at birthday parties, these balloons eventually pop (in this case, that’s the plan) and their remnants can harm wildlife when they fall back to earth.
A more sophisticated approach comes from “Stardust Solutions,” a secretive company with at least two dozen employees. An Israeli company registered in Delaware, Stardust is seeking governmental support to get rolling soon. A November 21 story in Politico reported the company was aiming to begin a “gradual temperature reduction demonstration” in 2027.
Yet it has yet to reveal the specific type of “patent pending” pollutant it would use.
Typically, these companies downplay the potential pitfalls, which include health risks to the heart and lungs, the further concentration of power globally, extreme planetary withdrawal symptoms, and even global nuclear war.
Less apocalyptically but also relevant to planetary regulation, this artificial sunblock risks disrupting plant growth, including the forests consuming much of the carbon dioxide released in the burning of coal, oil, gas.
Replace trees with hot warehouses
Millions of dollars are supporting projects to do the work of trees and other plants that naturally collect carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Several companies have worked out how to pull carbon dioxide from the air into (mined) lime compounds. Then they heat up the mixture—in the case of Heirloom Carbon Technologies, to about 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit—to dislodge the carbon so the lime can be reused, and the carbon stored or used for other purposes.
These open-air warehouses will heat up their local environments, even as they displace real trees, which naturally cool the environment.
Real trees have evolved to pull carbon dioxide from the air, with strong evidence they grow bigger, faster as carbon dioxide levels rise. Along with shading the ground to protect soil and the life forms in and on them from direct sunlight, real trees also provide habitat for birds and other wildlife.
In contrast, building warehouses displaces trees. Meanwhile, warehouse construction and the mining of the limestone and metals needed for the warehouse and its contents kills additional trees and does other extensive damage to the environment.
Chop trees, drown them
The authors of a scientific study published last month in npj Climate Action suggest logging about 45 million acres a year of northern forests to chuck the logs into rivers that will carry them to the ocean for a sea burial. As if cutting down more trees could help climate more than it would hurt it. Hello!
The thinking is that waterlogging the dead trees would block them from eventual decay. Decomposition of wood occurs only in the presence of oxygen, which snags carbon from wood (or any carbon-based life form) and converts it back into airborne carbon dioxide.
As I explained last week, though, scientists are almost certainly overestimating how much additional carbon would be protected by burying trees they killed, ostensibly to protect them from burning in fires.
For instance, while typical calculations for these type of assessments assume all the wood from trees burned in wildfires go up in smoke instantly or at least in the same year, researchers in fire-affected forests found about two-thirds of the carbon in tree trunks typically remains on site following wildfires—often in the durable form of charred wood.
Meanwhile, any regrowth of new trees would be stunted without the shading, nourishing presence of neighbors. What’s more, the small, even-aged stands that the authors propose to plant would soon be far more likely to face severe burns than a natural forest stand with a mix that includes protective large trees.
Chop trees, bury them
A potentially even more disruptive technique than killing trees specifically to bury them at sea calls for burying logged trees in “vaults” under the ground. Some private companies, such as Kodama Systems, are already moving forward on this concept.
Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy provided about $6 million in seed money to US-based Kodama Systems. Gates’ investment helped the company develop ways to log trees remotely, eliminating the need for most human labor by using equipment fitted with technology similar to that powering self-driving cars. The company bills the equipment as allowing logging day and night.
Once cut and stacked, these logged trees would be buried in waterproof “vaults” designed to keep out the oxygen that could lead to their decay. This plan would displace forests and other ecosystems, destroy soil profiles and disrupt water flow on a landscape burdened with a series of hill-like, water-proof vaults.
As with displacing forests to build carbon-collecting warehouses and mines to support them, the cure would be worse than the disease at the level of the landscape, where life thrives.
Backed by Bill Gates
Gates has put his money into the other two types of projects mentioned above as well. He has financed experiments designed to use sulfuric acid to block sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface.
He also funded several start-ups to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using limestone derivatives and energy-intensive technology.
Heirloom Carbon Technologies is one of the Gates-supported startups. Heirloom has become a force in Louisiana, where it is setting up a huge warehouse in Shreveport.
I had hoped some of the current administration’s cuts to climate change projects would slow Heirloom down a bit. Unfortunately, Louisiana Representative and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson intervened, allowing Heirloom to dodge the budget axe that hacked away federal funding from projects to produce electricity from solar and wind energy.
On a positive note
Given the type of projects funded by Gates, it wasn’t all bad news to me to hear that he was shifting his focus away from climate change. In late October, Gates announced he was backing away from climate issues to focus on health and welfare in developing countries.
It’s pretty obvious he’s doing that because of Microsoft’s ongoing expansion into energy-sucking Artificial Intelligence, as I wrote in November. Mere days after he stepped away from climate change concerns, the company he co-founded, Microsoft, announced its financial stake in the newly for-profit OpenAI and other plans to boost AI development.
The push to create energy-intensive data centers for AI has derailed international efforts to fight climate change as multi-billionaires such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk seek to expand their influence. (As an irresistible aside, Gates and Musk are among those named in the Epstein files.)
Any renewable energy used to power these massive, electricity-guzzling centers will require mining, even as they hamper ongoing efforts by the rest of the world’s people to switch to renewables for their non-AI needs. The same holds for any renewable energy powering the tech-heavy schemes described above.
Those watching AI warn we’ll be losing many human jobs to machines if the AI-powered vision of these billionaires comes to pass. There’s some evidence that the work force reduction has already begun.
Now we can start adding trees to the list of those who will lose their jobs—that is, if billionaires like Bill Gates and other profit-minded people continue to shift us into a future dominated by machines.