Technology will lead us out of climate crisis
Humans have the ability to engineer a better world, Gwynne Dyer explains.
It was technology that got us into this global climate crisis and it will be technology that gets us out of it. Specifically, technology that lets us go on living in a high-energy civilization without burning fossil fuels and technology that keeps the heat from overwhelming us while we work toward that goal.
Solar, wind and nuclear power are already good alternatives to fossil fuels, and a promising new contender is emerging. Geothermal power was once limited to countries with hot volcanic rock near the surface (such as Italy, Iceland and New Zealand), but now startups are going deep and doing a different kind of fracking.
Four kilometres down, there's hot, dry rock (200 to 400 C) under half the land surface of the planet. Use high-pressure water to fracture the rock and the water flashes into superheated steam. It spins turbine blades to create electricity, then cools and is pumped back down to go around again.
This new fracking technology could end up bigger than solar or wind because it's not intermittent. It produces electricity day and night in any weather. The first megawatt-scale pilot plant opened in Nevada last year.
A global-scale solution is also needed for the accelerating loss of biodiversity. That can only be achieved by returning at least half the land human beings have appropriated for agriculture back to its natural state. Miraculously, such a solution has appeared.
It's called precision fermentation: Put the right bacterium in a bioreactor, give it water, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and sunlight, and it will double its mass every three hours. Drain the resultant soup off, dry it and you have 65 per cent edible protein, fats or carbohydrates.
Solar, wind and nuclear power are already good alternatives to fossil fuels.
Half the world's farmland is used to feed domestic animals. We could feed them this instead and re-wild most of that land. (The cattle won't mind a bit.) And if our own food supply shrinks as the temperature rises, we too can eat this “food from the sky” (as publicists are now calling it): It can be turned into any kind of food you want. The first factory opened near Helsinki this year.
The typical new technology takes 15 to 30 years to roll out at scale, and there is little reason to believe these new technologies are different. Given how fast the warming is proceeding already, plus the near certainty we will cross tipping points and unleash “feedbacks” (extra warming from non-human sources), we are still in great danger.
That's why we will probably need solar radiation management (SRM). This involves reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the planet's surface by just one per cent or two per cent to keep the heating below another 2 C while we work to reduce our emissions. It's not a longterm solution, but it may be a necessary stopgap measure to avoid political and economic chaos.
SRM is all about reflecting sunlight back into space, but it comes in several flavours. The leading candidate involves using special aircraft to put sulphur dioxide high in the stratosphere. Big volcanoes do exactly that from time to time, and it temporarily cools the Earth's surface without harming living things.
Forty-five years ago, scientist James Lovelock realized that all the Earth's natural systems are connected and named the ensemble Gaia. It was a good name, but too poetic for an academic subject. When it became mainstream science, they renamed it “Earth system science” — but under either name, it told us what was coming.
Lovelock knew we would be too slow in cutting our emissions, because that's how human beings are. He foresaw we would then have to intervene directly in the climate to save ourselves and predicted we would have to become “planetary maintenance engineers.”
I interviewed him just eight months before he died in 2022 at the age of 103. “Are we there yet, Jim?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, but he wasn't in despair. We have the tools to get through this, if we use them wisely.