future clean tech

Stephen Dubner just won’t give up. He and his co-author, Steven Levitt, advocate geoengineering – shooting “huge quantities of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere” in their new, trendily counter-intuitive book, Superfreakonomics. Today in Greeninc he’s published yet another column railing against the ubiquitous critics of geoengineering.

Most of which I want to say about this has been adequately covered in the latest New Yorker article that demolishes Dubner and Levitt and their “fix” for our environmental woes. The Guardian’s piece is also great, and David Roberts at Grist writes that “the problems humanity faces are systemic and interrelated. The idea that sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere will save us is akin to the hope that a math equation can be solved by erasing one of the numbers.” I couldn’t put it better.

Levitt and Dubner (and Richard Branson) disingenuously, I think, argue for a technocratic “fix” for a huge systemic problem. It is exceptionally arrogant; it presumes that we can continue with business as usual if humans just do what they usually do and concrete over the problem. This arrogance is typified by Branson’s breathtaking comment last month, as reported by Dot Earth:

“If we could come up with a geoengineering answer to this problem, then Copenhagen wouldn’t be necessary,” he said. “We could carry on flying our planes and driving our cars.”

It won’t work, and it presents tremendous risks: it multiplies the risks of our already precarious experiment with our planet’s climate by the risks of a massive new one, the results of which we can’t begin to predict. As Al Gore has written in Our Choice, ““We are already involved in a massive, unplanned planetary experiment. We should not begin yet another planetary experiment in the hope that it will somehow magically cancel out the effects of the one we already have.”

Australia’s left-leaning New Matilda yesterday published a piece asking, Is Geothermal The Baseload Alternative? It reminds me that I want to get around to publishing my own calculations of price per megawatt for various energy sources in both Australia and the US. Geothermal could be crucial to the energy mix over the next few years but there are too many figures floating around out there. So more on that soon.

The author, David Hollier, provides a neat summary of how geothermal works:

To harvest geothermal energy, you need to drill four to five kilometres below the surface, where the rock temperatures are 200 degrees or more, hot enough for the liquid they heat to drive turbines. The first challenge is to get wells down into this layer to check that the rocks are hot enough. If they are, you can pump water into the rock at a pressure high enough to fracture the rock, and to allow the water to move through the fractures, forming a reservoir. Then other wells are drilled, and the hot water is pumped back up to surface where it drives the turbines.

Once the system is up and running, this hot water can be constantly recycled. There are no other inputs into the process. Unlike wind and solar, it does not rely on specific weather conditions. And apart from the wells, there is no “mine” as such: minimal demands are made of the land. Geothermal is a renewable energy source that taps the ceaseless heat production at the earth’s core as it radiates towards the surface.

He raises an issue that I’ve mentioned a few times recently here:

So if all this is true, why have we heard so little about geothermal? If it’s a solution to the clean energy crisis, why hasn’t industry development been accelerated before now? Is it a victim of coal industry resistance — or a PR failure? Or might it have something to do with the fact that there are now more lobbyists than credible climate change scientists doing the rounds in Canberra?

Too bloody right. As Al Gore has noted many times, the lack of political will is the chief obstacle to action on global warming:

A couple of minor points. First, geothermal is not totally GHG-neutral. There are some emissions, primarily associated with the construction of the plant. Also, I take issue with David’s point here: “Solar and wind. Wind, tidal and solar. We all know that these can’t yet deliver baseload.” This is not true and I’ve written about it before.