Can we smart-tech our way out of the climate crisis?

Be honest, you think the answer is yes. And who could blame you?

Every other day, we quietly thrill as we read about a new method that will help, at least a bit. We quickly leap from there to the almost-happy thought: Oh, they’ll figure this out.

The way they figured out where to get more electricity; how to make more shoes; how to keep the banks running as the debt piled up.

Well, we’re in a different kind of debt now, and there’s something of a subprime crisis brewing.

A study publicised this month found that Earth’s trees and land absorbed almost no carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2023.

The planet’s natural carbon sinks are showing evidence of deteriorating, the team of scientists from China, England, Germany and France stated, in their preliminary findings, which were presented at the International Carbon Dioxide Conference in Brazil.

This could be the result of factors such as La Nina, droughts and wildfires. But, as things stand, studies are also showing that rising temperatures in the oceans and on land are affecting plankton and microbes, for instance, in ways that raise the amounts of carbon released from soil, and reduce the amounts absorbed into ocean waters.

It is perhaps worth noting here that all plans — by countries and companies — to reduce emissions and achieve Net Zero hinge on the continued carbon-capture activity of Earth itself.

(Net Zero is the global plan to reduce emissions and boost carbon absorption to the point where all greenhouse gases released by human activity are reabsorbed elsewhere, in an attempt to slow, stall and then stop global warming.)

Even with the natural sinks working efficiently, of course, there was an urgent need to suck carbon out of the atmosphere in order to meet these goals. To achieve Net Zero by 2050, an estimated 5 to 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide would need to be removed from the atmosphere annually.

Hence the smart tech.

The most ambitious category of this climate-mitigation technology seeks to manipulate Earth’s natural systems in ways that offset the impacts of human activity. And so, it is called geoengineering.

Such measures include spraying reflective aerosols into the stratosphere, to help increase the earth’s albedo effect (its ability to reflect light); boosting the growth of phytoplankton in the oceans, and raising the alkalinity levels of seawater, so that both can absorb more CO2; “re-icing” the Arctic by pumping water from beneath the ice onto its surface, so that it can freeze and thicken the sea ice; and sucking carbon dioxide out of the air with giant fans.

So far, these methods do appear to work, at least in theory or on experimental scale.

They are further proof of the inventiveness of humans, and proof that sometimes, the wildest ideas are the very ones we need.

But… there are broadly three kinds of hurdles with the geoengineering methods currently being tried out: 1. Their need for power; 2. Their unintended consequences; and 3. Us.

Let’s take them one at a time.

Power

Direct air capture is a good example of the trade-offs here. In this inventive solution, giant fans suck carbon out of the air and push it deep into the ground, where it can remain sequestered for tens of thousands of years. This is already being done in Iceland. (See the story alongside for more on this.)

But it requires so much power that the world’s largest such company, the Swiss Climeworks, is using heat from geothermal vents to generate the electricity needed.

Most companies (there are currently more than 100 planning plants around the world) are nowhere near a geothermal vent. They plan to use more traditional sources. Which generate carbon.

“This technology only makes sense if we transition our way out of fossil-fuel-based power and have an excess of carbon-free electricity,” says Chris Field, director of Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment.

Unintended consequences

Attempts to boost phytoplankton growth, and increase alkalinity levels, in ocean waters have begun on an experimental basis.

In one such trial, large amounts of iron were dumped into parts of the Southern Ocean. The iron did spark the growth of some more phytoplankton (though not as much as expected). But the additional phytoplankton was then eaten by zooplankton. It is unclear what the consequences of the iron and the potentially altered food chain could be in the long-term.

Researchers say it will take a lot more experimentation at larger scales to fully understand the impacts. Such studies would have to account for ocean circulation and the possibility that the effects could occur well beyond the areas of activity, says Brad Ack, CEO of Ocean Visions, a US-based organisation that is facilitating research and development in this space.

“For geoengineering to achieve its desired effect, it would need to be implemented on a vast scale, bringing with it significant environmental, political, and social repercussions,” says Lili Fuhr, director of the Fossil Economy Program at the Center for International Environmental Law, a US-based NGO. “It is inherently unpredictable and would introduce significant new risks to the delicate ecosystems that sustain life on Earth, which are crucial allies in the fight against climate change.”

Us

Efforts to boost carbon capture will be vital. “The fact is, there is no path to Net Zero without large amounts of active carbon removal,” as Ack puts it.

But even in the early phases of such efforts, the goalposts are already shifting — from climate mitigation, to revenue.

Take direct air capture. The biggest of these plants is currently being built on a revenue model that involves selling the ability to capture carbon, in the form of carbon credits, to corporate clients.

The carbon captured by the plant, then, isn’t actually reducing the amount of CO2 in the air. It’s just trying to even out fresh CO2 being generated elsewhere.

So far, buyers of these carbon credits include major airlines such as Lufthansa and Swiss, and the Boston Consulting Group.

The goal of “scale it back” is once again altered.

“You’re essentially taking away incentives to lower emissions, and chancing it on untested technology. Taking the attention away from lowered carbon emissions, just as we are getting going, is not good. I think green technologies are really going to accelerate, and that is all the more reason to not take our eye off the larger goal,” says Mridula Ramesh, founder of the Sundaram Climate Institute and author of The Climate Solution: India’s Climate-Change Crisis and What We Can Do About It. “We should be working to improve our natural ecosystems so that they can return to their former robustness.”

Back to the initial question…

Can we smart-tech our way out of this?

The answer isn’t no. In fact, it wouldn’t even be the first time. Seemingly crazy ideas (fire, pickling, penicillin) are a big part of how we beat the odds to survive and thrive. Seemingly crazy ideas can have deep value.

But they cannot do the job alone.

“The main cause of global overheating is fossil fuels, and the only actual way out of this emergency is to end our dependency on fossil fuels,” says Peter Kalmus, climate scientist at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory, speaking on his own behalf. “Geoengineering approaches cannot become a rationalisation for continuing to burn fossil fuels. Because these approaches cannot, by themselves, solve global overheating.”

What can you do?

It is, ultimately, good news that we as a species are moving towards new solutions and taking bold leaps. But there is more that you can do than hope. This pivotal phase of experimentation and deployment will be shaped, at least in part, by the gathering mass movements around climate. To add your voice to the crowd:

1. Ask the hard questions. We’re all learning as this evolves in real time. It takes effort to tell fact from science-fiction; true tangle from conspiracy. Put in the time, so your next steps can be more meaningful.

2. Break the cycle. Don’t buy unless you must. Don’t dispose if you can help it. Do the little things. Not just because every bit makes a difference. But because a vital step is to, individually and collectively, admit our role and attempt to minimise it.

3. Vote. Don’t let “green issues” be the thing your politicians mention in passing, at the end of a speech. It takes many voices to push an item forward in the agenda. Be one of those voices. Get involved. And start to evaluate politicians based on their plan for our near-future.

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FOUR BIG NEW APPROACHES

Blade runners

In May, an industrial plant on the Hellisheioi lava plateau in Iceland, fitted with an array of gigantic fans and vents, was switched on.

Called Mammoth and powered by a nearby geothermal plant, this structure is built to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the air. Giant fans direct atmospheric air through a series of chemical filters that trap CO2 molecules. Once trapped, the gas is purified, dissolved in water and pressurised.

Carbfix, a partner company, then transports the liquid to two injection wells on site. The CO2 solution is injected about 350 metres underground, where it can seep into cracks and pores in the volcanic rock, and essentially be locked away for millennia.

Mammoth, owned by the Swiss company Climeworks, is the largest functioning direct air capture plant in the world, with a net capacity to process 36,000 tonnes of CO2 a year. (The second-largest, Climeworks’s Orca, has a net capacity of 4,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.)

(An estimated 5 to 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide would need to be removed from the atmosphere annually, to achieve Net Zero by 2050.)

There are about 100 other such companies setting up operations around the world.

What’s interesting is that many of them have a revenue model that doesn’t, in any real sense, reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the world.

The revenue model instead uses carbon capture technology to generate carbon credits, which it then sells to polluting industries.

In 2023, for instance, Climeworks signed a 15-year agreement with the Boston Consulting Group to sell 80,000 tonnes of carbon credits. Airlines such as Lufthansa and Swiss have signed on too.

Elsewhere, in July, Microsoft signed on to buy 5 lakh tonnes of carbon credits from US-based 1PointFive over a period of six years (the largest such purchase to date).

The technology itself is concerning because of how power-intensive it is.

Immense amounts of energy are required for the process, says Chris Field, director of Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment. “So this technology only makes sense if we transition our way out of fossil-fuel-based power and have an excess of carbon-free electricity.”

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An ocean of ifs

“The ocean is already playing a critical carbon cycling function. But it’s happening at a timescale that cannot keep pace with the enormous carbon pollution that we’ve put into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution,” says Brad Ack, CEO of Ocean Visions, a US-based organisation that is working on new ocean-focused climate-mitigation technologies.

“So now the question of whether that carbon pump can be enhanced or accelerated is being explored across a wide range of different approaches.”

The most popular of those approaches are ocean iron fertilisation (where iron is infused into the water, to boost the growth of phytoplankton, which absorb CO2 during photosynthesis) and ocean alkalinity enhancement (where waters are made more alkaline, so that atmospheric carbon can react with it to form carbonates and bicarbonates that can eventually sink to the ocean floor).

Ocean alkalinity enhancement may have the additional benefit of lowering ocean acidification levels too, Ack says.

What other temporary or long-term effects could it have?

Ack and others agree that there are still uncertainties about what could happen if the composition of ocean waters is altered in this manner.

It is also not entirely clear whether, despite such ramifications, these interventions would capture enough carbon to alter global levels even a little.

In 2009, for instance, a controversial experiment conducted by research institutes affiliated to the governments of India and Germany dumped six tonnes of dissolved iron in a 300-sq-km patch of the Southern Ocean. It sparked the expected phytoplankton bloom, though it was smaller than expected. This phytoplankton was then largely consumed by zooplankton. The CO2 removal was negligible.

“Answering questions about impact on marine ecosystems requires us to do on-site experiments on at least a small scale,” says Ack. Models would also need to account for ocean circulation taking the introduced elements far further than intended.

“There are several ongoing and planned field trials, laboratory experiments and modelling research projects underway,” Ack says. “We are trying to understand how to minimise potential negative impacts, and weigh those against the impact of not doing anything at all.”

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The glitter effect: A bit of sunblock?

Scientists are now asking, what if we just blocked out the sun a bit.

“There’s an imbalance in the amount of energy entering the earth and leaving it, because the energy has been trapped under layers of carbon dioxide,” says Daniele Visioni, a climate scientist with the department of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University. “One way to right this imbalance is to stop putting more CO2 into the atmosphere. Which we are not yet doing. So, in the meantime, the question is: Can we intervene in the amount of energy entering Earth through solar radiation?”

The most feasible means of doing this involves injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, to reflect some of the solar radiation back into space.

“We know this could work because it has happened naturally in the recent past,” says Visioni.

In 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted and injected about 15 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide (SO2) into the stratosphere, where it reacted with moisture and turned into tiny sulphuric acid aerosol particles.

These particles remained suspended for over two years, spreading across the globe, and dropped average global temperatures by about 0.5 degrees Celsius in that period.

In a 2006 paper in the journal Climatic Change, Paul Crutzen (winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry and coiner of the word Anthropocene) first proposed that injecting sulphur into the stratosphere could effectively cool the earth.

The UK-based Simons Foundation recently committed $50 million to solar geoengineering research in this field over the next five years.

Early research has shown, however, that continuous injections of aerosols could deplete the ozone and alter weather patterns.

“We know that the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia caused harvests to fail globally,” says Mridula Ramesh, founder of the Sundaram Climate Institute and author of The Climate Solution: India’s Climate Change Crisis and What We Can Do About It.

Sulphur compounds can also affect the human respiratory system, and cause acid rain.

“The compounds would eventually fall back to Earth. There’s no avoiding that, so that is a concern,” says Visioni. “But we have to look at what we could achieve this way.”

For now, the risks remain minimal simply because we have no way of enacting such a plan. There isn’t a high-altitude fleet in existence yet that could carry and release into the stratosphere the 1 million tonnes of aerosols that would be required for measurable cooling.

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Confronting cold truths

It isn’t easy, making more Arctic ice.

For two weeks, in January, a team of scientists used snowmobiles to drag a hydrogen-powered water pump out onto a frozen ocean off the coast of Nunavut, Canada.

In temperatures of -30 to -40 degree Celsius, they drilled a hole through the ice and then pumped water from the sea to the surface, so it could freeze into more ice. They did this for two to four hours every day, then lugged the equipment back to their base.

“If we left it out there, the pump would freeze and break,” says Andrea Ceccolini. He is co-chief executive officer of the British tech start-up Real Ice, which is testing a method to thicken ice in the Arctic, which is shrinking at the rate of 12.2% per decade.

Real Ice is using a method commonly used in Nordic countries to build ice roads atop water bodies, by compacting snow and pouring water on top. “The idea is to create extra thickness, and also remove the insulation caused by the top snow layer, which will encourage more ice to grow naturally from below,” Ceccolini says.

At the end of their two weeks in January, they had their initial results. Across a football field-sized test site (about 4,100 sq m), a layer of ice about 25 cm thick had formed on top of the existing ice. When they returned in May, they found that the test site had grown an additional 25 cm from the bottom. The ice here was now 50 cm thicker than at a control site nearby.

In November, they plan to return, to test their method on a much larger scale, covering an area of up to 1 sq km. “By starting in the beginning of winter, we gain a couple of months to accelerate the ice production in the cold months that follow,” Ceccolini says.

The future of this technology could include completely automated underwater drones that would use heat to drill a hole from below, pump water to the top, retract periodically, return to base, refuel and repeat. “If you want an automated solution, you can’t do it from the top of the ice because the pumping equipment would find it hard to survive,” Ceccolini says.

The thickened ice would potentially contribute to the albedo effect, reflecting heat away from the surface of the earth. It would also help support species in the region that depend on ice for survival.

But the operation would need to be repeated every year.

And the company is looking to eventually sell cooling credits, similar to carbon credits, as part of its revenue model.

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