*Or, When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Is there is problem? Running out of cheap oil? Fucking up the climate? Laying waste to the oceans?
Never fear, humans have a solution. It's always the same solution, of course, because ... well, they're humans!
I was going to write one final post about geoengineering to fix global warming, but we're in the End Days here, so I wanted to generalize the problem. Please recall my recent post A Green Venture —Tuna In A Tank. As you may recall, bluefin and yellowfin tuna are being hunted to extinction in the world's oceans. That sounds like a problem to me. But as I said, never fear, humans have a solution. I'll quote that post.
Let us move beyond the absurdity of raising tuna in a tank. How does this project reflect the human relationship with the natural world?
♦ What is the best way to "take pressure off wild stocks" of tuna?
That's an easy one—humans need to stop catching tuna in all the world's oceans right now. But banning tuna fishing is impossible for humans to achieve. Thus the obvious behavioral change required to save these magnificent animals is off the table.
♦ What will humans do instead?
Well, what do humans always do? Start a business! Make some money!
According to Bradley and Mottur, it's the ideal time for a tuna aquaculture venture.
"Japan can't produce all the tuna it needs for the country's own purposes, and the U.S. is a net importer of fish, including tuna," Bradley said. "So there is tremendous potential for us to produce fish that could easily be sold in the U.S., especially if it's a sustainable product in an environmentally responsible manner."
It's an ideal time for tuna aquaculture because the world's tuna stocks are declining precipitously. Clearly this project is going to be a money-maker, both before and after the wild tuna are gone.
And now, let us turn to what seems at first glance to be an entirely different problem—there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere! Not only have humans put billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (and the oceans), but they're putting more of it into the atmosphere (and the oceans) all the time. That definitely sounds like a problem to me.
But never fear... because Peter Eisenberger, distinguished professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University, has an answer. Actually, he has the only humanly possible answer, as NPR recently reported in This Climate Fix Might Be Decades Ahead Of Its Time (with audio). Here's a partial transcript.
Lead In — When President Obama laid out his ambitious plan to address climate change this week, he focused especially on reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we put into the air. A few pioneering scientists are taking the idea of reducing carbon dioxide in a different direction. They're thinking about ways to remove what's already in the atmosphere, and possibly turn a profit in the process. NPR's Richard Harris caught up with one of the scientists who is exploring this new approach.
Richard Harris — Lots of researchers are trying to tackle climate change by inventing better batteries, better solar cells, better wind mills, and more efficient vehicles. Peter Eisenberger has been looking at the problem from another perspective.
[ My note — another perspective????? ]
He's not trying to invent anything, he's trying to take advantage of the vast wealth of knowledge that we already have at our fingertips.
Peter Eisenberger — If we look at knowledge as a commodity ...
[ My note — what else could knowledge be? ]
... we have generated this enormous amount of knowledge, and we haven't even begun about the many ways we can apply it. So I felt that if we reversed the normal process of innovation, that is somebody goes into the lab and says Eureka! I've got this new material, look what it can do, I've got this new process, but rather said, this is what the world needs. You could go and find ready, existing knowledge that would enable you to do it.
Harris — He decided what the world needs is a way to suck carbon dioxide right out of the air. We're putting 30 billion tons [30 gigatons] of it into the air every year, and it's driving climate change. So he and another professor who works with him at Columbia University ...
[ My note — The co-founder is Graciela Chichilnisky, who helped invent Europe's carbon market. ]
... founded a company to do just that.
Eisenberger — And it turned out that the best device already exists. It's called a monolith, [and it's] the same type of instrument that's in your catalytic converter in your car that cleans up your exhaust.
Harris — He put together a bunch of these monoliths... [image below]
... They grab carbon dixoide from the air, and release it again when you heat them up. Their company, called Global Thermostat, was bankrolled with seed money from liquor and music magnate Edgar Bronfman. The company has built two pilot plants at Menlo Park, California. But of course there were big issues to solve: what do you do with the carbon dioxide once you've captured it, and how do you make money?
Eisenberger — So then we looked for these ways to monetize CO2, and found out lots of people wanted to use CO2 as an important feedstock for making a valuable product.
OK, that's enough. In fact, that's more than enough because the NPR story now goes off into the weeds and discusses the merits and drawbacks of this absurd solution (also see here). If we focus on the trees, we will never see the woods.
"If they don't tell you you're crazy, you're not doing something worthwhile," says Peter Eisenberger, co-founder of Global Thermostat, a firm that's building a device to pull carbon dioxide from the air.
Now think back to my save-the-tuna post. Here's the quoted text from that post, suitably modified to fit this new case.
♦ What is the best way to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere?
That's an easy one—humans need to stop putting so much CO2 into the atmosphere right now. But curtailing carbon emissions is impossible for humans to achieve. Thus the obvious behavioral change required to halt dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate is off the table.
♦ What will humans do instead?
Well, what do humans always do? Start a business! Make some money!
According to Eisenberger and Chichilnisky ... Global Thermostat (GT) offers low-cost solutions to capture CO2 promoting sustainable and harmonious use of the earth's resources. It utilizes low-cost process heat left over in a range of industrial activities to capture carbon from air [quote from the website]...
It's an excellent time to suck CO2 right out of the air because humans are putting it into the atmosphere at an alarming rate, which is fucking up our benign Holocene climate...
I assume you see the obvious similarities. And I'm sure it will be a green, sustainable business too!
Eisenberger says if they don't tell you you're crazy, you're not doing something worthwhile. But Eisenberger is not crazy in any conventional, consensual sense—how could he be? He's doing what all the other humans are doing to address the various problems humans have created.
Now recall this line from my recent post The Heart Of Darkness, which was my last serious post before I announced that I am ceasing publication.
Humans are crazy, but since they're all crazy in more or less the same way, nobody is crazy. Go figure.
That observation captures Peter Eisenberger perfectly. It also captures the Human Condition perfectly. When Eisenberger says people are calling him "crazy," he means that people think his profitable, technological solution to a surfeit of CO2 in the atmosphere is particularly over-the-top, perhaps more appropriate to the 22nd century (see the NPR story). But when I say humans, and Peter Eisenberger in particular, are "crazy," I mean that humans always employ such inappropriate solutions.
The people calling Eisenberger crazy, like "Mr. Stabilization Wedge" Peter Socolow of Princeton, also want to use current technologies to reduce carbon emissions instead of cutting them off at the source by shrinking economies and populations. He merely wants to use different technologies. Socolow's program is funded by British Petroleum and Ford.
Given the scale of the problems humans have created, these alleged "solutions" are totally absurd. Using catalytic converter technology to "clean up" the atmosphere is totally absurd, it is inappropriate beyond measure, and not just because it's expensive, you've got to use all kinds of resources to build the monoliths, there's no place to put the collected carbon, you've got to transport the carbon, and so on.
But significant behavioral changes are off the table, so there we are.
Humans have a hammer—the growth-stimulating, market-based, applied technology hammer—and that's the only thing they have. And why? Because they are humans. With Homo sapiens, what you see is what you get. Therefore, to humans, who have only this one hammer, everything looks like a nail. And that's very crazy.
Where are the space aliens when you really need them? I'll bet those aliens could sort these humans out
And the only solution available, the profitable, technological solution, is one very important reason why humans are destroying the biosphere, and can not stop themselves from doing so.
I may post tomorrow, and there will be a Remedy du Jour on Sunday.
Have a nice weekend.
That’s like a human metastatic cancer trying to support the homeostasis of a body that it is in the process of killing. Eventually the negative externalities cause a paraneoplastic syndrome that cannot be reversed. That is, any effort to reverse the failing homeostasis of the body (ecosystem) by neoplastic metabolic activity only results in an accelerated deterioration and death. The cancer is widely disseminated, stage IV and apparently unstoppable as most every human on the planet strives to convert the natural world into a fixed stock of wealth and/or ephemeral experience of pleasure. Any ecosystem radiation or chemotherapy would likely be ineffective at this point as each cell (business) competes for maximal growth and has metastasized into all tissues of the ecosystem.
Posted by: James | 07/12/2013 at 10:35 AM