Edit: I ended up spending a bit over a day looking into geoengineering and the Copenhagen Consensus Center after writing this, so go look at my answer for a more informed take that includes what I learned from doing that. My below 2 long-form comments are not exactly wrong, but more poorly informed than that answer.
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Awesome! I’d wanted to know what the actually useful geoengineering stuff was.
I do buy the claim that public support for any sort of emission control will evaporate the moment geoengineering is realised as a tolerable alternative… Major emitters have already signalled a clear lack of any real will to change. The humans will not repent. Move on. Stop waiting for humanity to be punished for its sin, act, do something that has some chance of solving the problem.
From a game theory POV, “dont pressure emitters” is basically just “surrender”. In theory, “emitters who don’t want to change” can and should be coerced by force, whether that’s within a nation by laws (which will ultimately be enforced with force if broken), or internationally, by threat of military force that’s willing to follow through. Like, that’s how you’d game theoretically not lose.
In practice, fuck me if you’re able to get any coordination to work.
There’s a case for, “don’t do geoengineering until you have an actual solid international power alliance capable of doing regulation”. Because then the emissions agreements are set.
In practice, what’s the actual utilitarian thing to do? Well, the main unanswered question is, how much can cloud brightening be scaled? Can it keep temperatures constant if emissions levels go 5, even 20x? Secondly, what can be done about e.g. ocean acidification and other non-warming issues? I have zero knowledge here. But if it scales that well, then throw out the game theory and just do the geoengineering.
If you’re a lone EA and you’re trying to use this information, presumably your options are, “do startup and try to get >$10B”, and “gain control of a tiny country, boost military, start threatening emitters”.
added: or “do startup, make money, then fund research”.
If we could draw the borders differently, so that we had longtermist/conservationist nations and shorttermist nations, then maybe the longtermist faction could impose enough sanctions and threaten enough annexings of enough rainforest to do something. Instead we just have a bunch of moderate liberal democracies who are institutionally incapable of doing anything significant. Perhaps next year the US will have a government that would be willing to really threaten to take the amazon from Brazil, but they would have to wonder what that would would add up to, if anything, when the other guys take power again and call it off.
My hope is that this is cheap enough that a group of nations can do it without needing very much political energy.
I feel like it’s only a matter of time before China decides a drought-related loss of crop productivity (we should anticipate that eventually, yeah?) is unacceptable and does MCB unilaterally, but I wish they cared enough to move now. They do seem capable of projects of this level of weirdness and scale. Like, I can’t imagine they had to wait for a grass-roots political movement to emerge and start pressuring politicians to Build a Space Mirror Over Chengdu Now, The People Demand It. If the Chinese govt needed the interest of a large group of distracted, unimaginative people to get a thing like that off the ground they wouldn’t be doing it, surely.
what can be done about e.g. ocean acidification and other non-warming issues?
There are proposals for ocean acidification, but the ones I heard about don’t seem cheap. For carbon sequestration, I’d be very curious about the prospects of genetically engineered plants or algae. Empress trees have recently received a lot of attention for having an efficiency of 103 tonnes of carbon per acre per year.
www.projectvesta.com proposes using crushed olivine to capture carbon and reduce ocean acidification. It seems doable on a large scale and not very expensive.
Instead we just have a bunch of moderate liberal democracies who are institutionally incapable of doing anything significant.
Awesome burn! :D
a group of nations can do it without needing very much political energy.
I mean, if your plan is “convince people or governments to do a thing” rather than “do this thing myself”, you’re gonna have a bad time. It’s probably within the scope of an individual NGO or maybe a hella determined individual to pull this sort of thing off, no? I guess you’d have to try, and see if anyone decided it was illegal after you started!
Hey, important question: I liked your first two links at the top of this post, were there any others you found helpful in your own research? I’ve been meaning to do my own research on what geoengineering stuff would be effective.
Added: Ok, I spent a few hours actually reading science and looking into it. So this says the “make clouds over the ocean, so light + warmth gets reflected back into space” strategy has “the capacity to balance global warming up to the carbon dioxide-doubling point”. Which is like two to fourish degrees C. Which I can’t find a figure on how long that’s expected to take, except we went from like 355 to 415 ppm from 1991 to 2019. So this is roughly a century of warming you’d be undoing.
Further, the MCB seems like a very solid approach. I didn’t get a good quantified feeling for how big of a deal various types of non-warming climate are though. Any info there?
Note that you could (maybe) just do a fifth of the full version of Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB): spend a bit less and do it over less of the ocean, and then be like ” ‘oops’ I’m done funding this, but wow it lowered global temperatures by 0.4 C (hopefully a statistically significant difference?), guess someone else better fund it now”, and then see if anyone takes the bait, and then use the rest of your money for something else.
But overall, MCB seems… like the effect size might be enough to justify unilaterally doing it even though it’s not a great game theoretic idea. I’d have to think more about that part of it, but unless I come up with something better, I’ll fund it once I have a spare couple billion.
My preferred approach would be seeding political pressure. Focus on the conservatives, who will, with a little convincing, be eager to believe that there is a way to continue living as they have without anything changing. Then disarm the liberals. Then finally help Extinction Rebellion to see this thing they’ve been neglecting (you might think there must be some twisted reason they haven’t been talking about it, I suspect their discourse is just fairly centrally controlled, I can find no evidence of it having ever been discussed in the larger exposed body of the egregore, it simply hasn’t come up). Then the politicians will hear them all. The soil does seem receptive. One would think that if it were, the fruit would have already grown by now, this technology has been on the table for at least 25 years, but if the medium has not been conductive, maybe we are the part of the medium that’s been failing to respond.
I found most of my info by looking through news articles after hearing Bjorn Lomborg on econtalk. I think it was a critical post on an ideologue’s blog that lead to the royal society.
I’d say: stop wanting MCB to work out so much. Don’t just hope that it’s gonna get approved, mate. Convincing people of stuff if fricking impossible. I think you’re seriously overestimating how likely this is.
Edit: I ended up spending a bit over a day looking into geoengineering and the Copenhagen Consensus Center after writing this, so go look at my answer for a more informed take that includes what I learned from doing that. My below 2 long-form comments are not exactly wrong, but more poorly informed than that answer.
---
Awesome! I’d wanted to know what the actually useful geoengineering stuff was.
From a game theory POV, “dont pressure emitters” is basically just “surrender”. In theory, “emitters who don’t want to change” can and should be coerced by force, whether that’s within a nation by laws (which will ultimately be enforced with force if broken), or internationally, by threat of military force that’s willing to follow through. Like, that’s how you’d game theoretically not lose.
In practice, fuck me if you’re able to get any coordination to work.
There’s a case for, “don’t do geoengineering until you have an actual solid international power alliance capable of doing regulation”. Because then the emissions agreements are set.
In practice, what’s the actual utilitarian thing to do? Well, the main unanswered question is, how much can cloud brightening be scaled? Can it keep temperatures constant if emissions levels go 5, even 20x? Secondly, what can be done about e.g. ocean acidification and other non-warming issues? I have zero knowledge here. But if it scales that well, then throw out the game theory and just do the geoengineering.
If you’re a lone EA and you’re trying to use this information, presumably your options are, “do startup and try to get >$10B”, and “gain control of a tiny country, boost military, start threatening emitters”.
added: or “do startup, make money, then fund research”.
If we could draw the borders differently, so that we had longtermist/conservationist nations and shorttermist nations, then maybe the longtermist faction could impose enough sanctions and threaten enough annexings of enough rainforest to do something. Instead we just have a bunch of moderate liberal democracies who are institutionally incapable of doing anything significant. Perhaps next year the US will have a government that would be willing to really threaten to take the amazon from Brazil, but they would have to wonder what that would would add up to, if anything, when the other guys take power again and call it off.
My hope is that this is cheap enough that a group of nations can do it without needing very much political energy.
I feel like it’s only a matter of time before China decides a drought-related loss of crop productivity (we should anticipate that eventually, yeah?) is unacceptable and does MCB unilaterally, but I wish they cared enough to move now. They do seem capable of projects of this level of weirdness and scale. Like, I can’t imagine they had to wait for a grass-roots political movement to emerge and start pressuring politicians to Build a Space Mirror Over Chengdu Now, The People Demand It. If the Chinese govt needed the interest of a large group of distracted, unimaginative people to get a thing like that off the ground they wouldn’t be doing it, surely.
There are proposals for ocean acidification, but the ones I heard about don’t seem cheap. For carbon sequestration, I’d be very curious about the prospects of genetically engineered plants or algae. Empress trees have recently received a lot of attention for having an efficiency of 103 tonnes of carbon per acre per year.
www.projectvesta.com proposes using crushed olivine to capture carbon and reduce ocean acidification. It seems doable on a large scale and not very expensive.
Another comment claims that this would be relatively expensive.
(reason for retraction: Occurred to me that I’m not sure how this compares in cost to other carbon capture and anti deacidification measures)
Awesome burn! :D
I mean, if your plan is “convince people or governments to do a thing” rather than “do this thing myself”, you’re gonna have a bad time. It’s probably within the scope of an individual NGO or maybe a hella determined individual to pull this sort of thing off, no? I guess you’d have to try, and see if anyone decided it was illegal after you started!
Hey, important question: I liked your first two links at the top of this post, were there any others you found helpful in your own research? I’ve been meaning to do my own research on what geoengineering stuff would be effective.
Added: Ok, I spent a few hours actually reading science and looking into it. So this says the “make clouds over the ocean, so light + warmth gets reflected back into space” strategy has “the capacity to balance global warming up to the carbon dioxide-doubling point”. Which is like two to fourish degrees C. Which I can’t find a figure on how long that’s expected to take, except we went from like 355 to 415 ppm from 1991 to 2019. So this is roughly a century of warming you’d be undoing.
Further, the MCB seems like a very solid approach. I didn’t get a good quantified feeling for how big of a deal various types of non-warming climate are though. Any info there?
Note that you could (maybe) just do a fifth of the full version of Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB): spend a bit less and do it over less of the ocean, and then be like ” ‘oops’ I’m done funding this, but wow it lowered global temperatures by 0.4 C (hopefully a statistically significant difference?), guess someone else better fund it now”, and then see if anyone takes the bait, and then use the rest of your money for something else.
But overall, MCB seems… like the effect size might be enough to justify unilaterally doing it even though it’s not a great game theoretic idea. I’d have to think more about that part of it, but unless I come up with something better, I’ll fund it once I have a spare couple billion.
My preferred approach would be seeding political pressure. Focus on the conservatives, who will, with a little convincing, be eager to believe that there is a way to continue living as they have without anything changing. Then disarm the liberals. Then finally help Extinction Rebellion to see this thing they’ve been neglecting (you might think there must be some twisted reason they haven’t been talking about it, I suspect their discourse is just fairly centrally controlled, I can find no evidence of it having ever been discussed in the larger exposed body of the egregore, it simply hasn’t come up). Then the politicians will hear them all. The soil does seem receptive. One would think that if it were, the fruit would have already grown by now, this technology has been on the table for at least 25 years, but if the medium has not been conductive, maybe we are the part of the medium that’s been failing to respond.
I found most of my info by looking through news articles after hearing Bjorn Lomborg on econtalk. I think it was a critical post on an ideologue’s blog that lead to the royal society.
There’s some really wild stuff down this hole. I’ve barely started. Stephen Salter is a key individual, worth reading his files http://www.homepages.ed.ac.uk/shs/Asilomar%20Climate%20Intervention/
Found out about the salter sink yesterday and it’s fucking bananas.
I’d say: stop wanting MCB to work out so much. Don’t just hope that it’s gonna get approved, mate. Convincing people of stuff if fricking impossible. I think you’re seriously overestimating how likely this is.
I think we are talking about $10B/year. Which is according to Scoot roughly the total yearly private philanthropy budget.
That feels outside of the reach of startup funding. Funding research and PR is likely the more promising route.
It’s 750m/yr, and that’s including air capture costs as well. see p3 here