The following are key quotations (in italics or quotation marks) and a summary of points from this book that I’m storing here for easy reference:

Kolbert, Elizabeth. Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. New York: Random House, 2021.

This material is extremely relevant to my work on “cracked,” which I’ve since given a different working title: “A Pound of Cure.” I refer to a review of the book in a previous update on this project. I’m grateful to Mike for buying me this book for my birthday… what a gift!

From Kolbert’s intro (7-8):

An obvious lesson to draw from this turn of events is: be careful what you wish for. Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’ success. Such is the pace of what is blandly labeled “global change” that there are only a handful of comparable examples in earth’s history, the most recent being the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago. Humans are producing no-analog climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future. At this point it might be prudent to scale back our commitments and reduce our impacts. But there are so many of us—as of this writing nearly eight billion—and we are stepped in so far, return seems impracticable.

And so we face a no-analog predicament. If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to be more control. Only now what’s got to be managed is not a nature that exists—or is imagined to exist–apart from the human. Instead, the new effort begins with a planet remade and spirals back on itself—not so much the control of nature as the control of the control of nature. First you reverse a river. Then you electrify it.

A few of the Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs) and geoengineering solutions described in the book:

• CO2 scrubbing—blasting CO2 into basalt rock deep in the earth’s crust: Climeworks is a company doing this; one can purchase CO2 “credits” with them, but it’s still very expensive ($1,000 per ton CO2); (pages 143-44)
• Forcing CO2 into water sent deep into the earth where it “would react with volcanic rock and minearlize” (145): Reykjavik Energy power plant—a sign reading “out of thin air” placed at the cite of a the power plant (144-146)
• CO2 beads: Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at ASU in 2014; German-born physicist Klaus Lackner; tiny beads made of some kind of resin used in water treatment dried out—-the powder absorbs CO2 when dry, releases it into water when wet; the CO2-filled water can be “piped out of the container and the whole process restarted” (152)
• enhanced weathering: bring basalt rock to the surface, crush it and spread it on cropland where it will absorb CO2 (158-159)
• Olivine in oceans: a green-coloured mineral found in volcanic rock; crush it and dissolve it in oceans to make them absorb more CO2 (and will help offset acidification) (159)
• plant a trillion trees: effectiveness of forest-CO2-sequestration is still debatable; what do you do with tree rot? —cut down mature trees and bury them in trenches!” so the release of CO2 would be forestalled” (159)
• Reforestation combined with underground injection, so “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage”: technique called BECCS (pronounced “becks”); for example: plant trees (or other crops) to pull CO2, then burn them to create electricity, and then capture that CO2 and force it underground (160)
• Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Lofter (SAIL) (starting from page 166): David Keith, prof of applied physics at Harvard; use airplanes to spread aerosols in the stratosphere (around 60,000′); this could make the sky appear white (book’s title) and/or perhaps create amazing sunsets; in a list of concerns about this idea, climate scientist Alan Robock has that it could also change rainfall patterns, create “conflict between countries” and… number 28: “do humans have the right to do this?” (181)
• Keeping the poles from freezing: “it’s been proposed that sea-level rise could be slowed by propping up the Arctic ice shelves or by blocking the mouth of one of Greenland’s largest outlet glaciers, the Jakobshavn ice stream” with a “three-hundred-foot-tall, three-mile-long concrete-topped embankment” (199)

The way Lackner [see CO2 beads above] sees things, the key to avoiding “deep trouble” is thinking differently. “We need to change the paradigm,” he told me. Carbon dioxide, in his view, should be regarded much the same way we look at sewage. We don’t expect people to stop producing waste. “Rewarding people for going to the bathroom less would be nonsensical,” Lackner has observed. “At the same time, we don’t shit on the sidewalk. One of the reasons we’ve had such trouble addressing the carbon problem, he contends, is the issue has acquired an ethical charge. To the extent that emissions are seen as bad, emitters become guilty. (153)

“I think what the IPCC really is saying is, ‘We tried lots and lots of scenarios,'” Klaus Lackner told me. “‘And, of all the scenarios, which stayed safe, virtually every one needed some magic touch of negative emissions. If we didn’t do that, we ran into a brick wall.” (155-56)

Of the cutting down mature trees idea: As strange as these ideas may sound, the, too, take their inspiration from nature. In the Carboniferous period, vast quantities of plant material got flooded and buried. The eventual result was coal, which had it been left in the ground, would have held on to its carbon more or less forever. (159)

I suggested humans didn’t have a very good track record when it came to the sort of intervention he was studying [Keith — see SAIL above]. […] Keith suggested I was revealing my own biases: “To people who say most of our technological fixes go wrong, I say, ‘Okay, did agriculture go wrong?’ It’s certainly true that agriculture had all sorts of very unexpected outcomes. People think of all the bad examples of environmental modification,” he went on. “They forget all the ones that are more or less working.” (178-79)

Conclusion (200-01):

This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. In the course of reporting it, I spoke to engineers and genetic engineers, biologists and microbiologists, atmospheric scientists and atmospheric entrepreneurs. Without exception, they were enthusiastic about their work. But, as a rule, this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt. The electric fish barriers, the concrete crevasse, the fake cavern, the synthetic clouds—these were presented to me less in a spirit of techno-optimism than what might be called techno-fatalism. They weren’t improvements on the originals; they were the best that anyone could come up with, given the circumstances.

It’s in this context that interventions like assisted evolution and gene drives and digging millions of trenches to bury billions of trees have to be assessed. Geoengineering may be “entirely crazy and quite disconcerting,” but if it could slow the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or take some of “the pain and suffering away,” or help to prevent no-longer-fully-natural ecosystems from collapsing, doesn’t have to be considered?

Andy Parker is the project director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, which works to expand the “global conversation” around geoengineering. His preferred drug analogy for the technology is chemotherapy. No one in his right mind would undergo chemotherapy were better options available. “We live in a world,” he has said, “where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.”

Suppose that the world—or just a small group of assertive nations—launched a fleet of SAILs. And suppose that even as the SAILs are flying and lofting more and more tons of particles, global emissions continue to rise. The result would not be a return to the climate of per-industrial days or to that of the Pliocene or even that of the Eocene, where crocodiles basked on Arctic shores. It would be an unprecedented climate for an unprecedented world, where silver carp glisten under a white sky.