Above are the legion of world leaders at COP26 in Glasgow that continue to fiddle as segments of the planet alternately burn as others are drowning.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its April 2022 report on mitigating climate change: “The deployment of carbon dioxide removals to counterbalance hard-to-abate residual emissions is unavoidable if net zero emissions are to be achieved.”
The problem is Carbon Capture Doesn’t Work. It will however funnel billions of dollars into the pockets of the world’s most profitable companies. Who in turn are the world’s biggest polluters and who have known for 30 years the technology requires massive expenditures, would only mitigate a small fraction of their carbon output and comes with “large net costs to society.”
It is however the ultimate political placebo.
Progressives love it because it gives them a climate fig leaf. While the political right, which is also captured by the fossil fuel industry, ladles massive subsidies into its coffers.
Technically it is called crony capitalism, but it puts socialism to shame.
Of nearly $1 billion in carbon-capture tax credits sought by US petroleum companies through 2019, $893 million didn’t meet EPA rules and the IRS ultimately filed claims against $531 million of it.
Teddy Roosevelt's Republican Party of progressive environmental policies and anti-trust are sadly ancient history. But this leaves an enormous political void for the regime that can provide the cheapest energy, that mitigates every consequence of global warming and reduces the atmospheric CO2 level.
At least in democracies.
Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute, has noted, “Political reality must be grounded in physical reality or it’s completely useless.”
But today’s political reality is climate science is an afterthought trotted out for a few months in the course of each election cycle.
IPCC reports tend toward caution and downplay the extremes, but the extremes are becoming the norm and a total climate breakdown is inevitable if we don’t change course.
Wired reports tech “companies are racing to cool down their servers as energy prices and temperatures soar. And the worst is yet to come.”
“Liquid cooling technology offers a more practical solution,” they claim. But thermal energy plants have experienced this problem for years. Summer heatwaves in 2003, 2006, 2015, and 2018 forced shutdowns or curtailment of the output of some nuclear plants and escalating global warming can only exacerbate the waste heat problem for every branch of industry.
Water cooling isn’t currently widely used in the tech industry.
As Sophia Flucker, director at UK data center consulting firm Operational Intelligence says, “At the moment, these are two very separate worlds. There’s definitely some apprehension about making such a big change in how we do things.”
Which is odd considering this sector has for decades used heat pipes to cool it vitals by passively shifting heat with the latent heat of evaporation and condensation of a working fluid.
The thermal conductivity of water, which is how liquid cooling technology works, is 0.598 watts,/meter·K at 20 °C. Whereas heat pipes, which have huge heat flux capacity, move heat at sonic speed.
And heat moved to a depth of 1000 meters then diffuses back to the surface at a rate of about 1 centimeter/day.
The only heat transfer faster than the speed of sound is electromagnetic radiation that travels at the speed of light. Which is what MEER proposes to cool the planet with 15-20 trillion square meters of surface reflectors.
Thermodynamic Geoengineering trumps this with 825 million square meters of ocean surface that cools the surface, displaces about 0.8 W/m2 of average global surface heat from the surface of the ocean to deep water, produces 2.3 times the output of fossil fuels, removes about 4.3 gigatonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, at an annual cost less than the $2.3 trillion for world oil consumption in 2019. Or it can be financed 100% by the extraction of .3% of the magnesium dissolved in the ocean.
Just as 9/11 was a failure to “connect the dots” and Queen Elizabeth questioned: “Why did no one foresee the timing, extent and severity of the Global Financial Crisis?”, our apprehension about making a big change in how we do things is likely to be our undoing.
Einstein had a word for this, it is “insanity’.
Since fear has not moved the climate dial one iota, it's time to try greed. Unless of course, we simply go with the science.
Either can give our grandchildren the prosperous and secure future they deserve.