Windfall

by McKenzie Funk

The second category of geoengineering advocate, free marketeers who often ignored scientists’ careful distinction between research and deployment, I also found around Washington, D.C. “The underlying struggle between environmentalists and property rightists is really what’s going on,” one told me. He was a lawyer at a small Virginia think tank that sometimes veered into outright skepticism and would later sue for access to the prominent climatologist Michael Mann’s e-mails, hoping to reveal climate science as a taxpayer-funded scam. “What we’re fighting over is engineering the culture—that’s mitigation—versus engineering the environment. That’s geoengineering.” Newt Gingrich, before his 2012 presidential run, echoed the sentiment. “Instead of imposing an estimated $1 trillion cost on the economy,” he wrote in a letter to supporters as he tried to sink a climate bill in the Senate, “geoengineering holds forth the promise of addressing global warming concerns for just a few billion dollars a year. Instead of penalizing ordinary Americans, we would have an option to address global warming by rewarding scientific innovation. Our message should be: Bring on the American Ingenuity. Stop the green pig.”

  Gingrich was a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the éminence grise of conservative thought, home over the years to everyone from Milton Friedman to Dick Cheney. Outsiders still accuse it of climate-change denial. It has received funding from ExxonMobil, lobbied against the Kyoto Protocol, and offered scientists $10,000 for papers undermining the IPCC. But climate change was real, the co-director of AEI’s geoengineering program told me in 2009. Now there were two questions: Do you want to do something? How much are you willing to pay? “There’s a gap here,” he said. “I don’t see the American people likely to bear significant costs. The only answer is geoengineering.” The other director had been hired after working most of a decade on market-based ways to cut carbon emissions. “I did as good a job as possible, and it fell flat,” he said. “I became convinced that every economically rational plan will fall flat. Okay, so what follows? We’re going to do a lot of adaptation. But what also follows is that adaptation is limited. So we’re going to need grand-scale adaptation—geoengineering.” I was again witnessing the subtle shift in conservative thought: To fight over climate science was becoming less tenable. To fight over what to do about it was not.

  In Washington State, Seattle had not only Intellectual Ventures but the University of Washington, reason for big names in the emerging field of geoengineering to visit for lectures and seminars, and it also had Bill Gates: a funding source. Through Nathan Myhrvold, Gates had met Lowell Wood, and through Wood, Ken Caldeira. Beginning in 2006, independent of his foundation but in keeping with its focus on techno-fixes, Gates received ad hoc tutoring sessions from Caldeira and another prominent geoengineering researcher. Beginning in 2007, after the pair lamented that there was little money for even the most basic geoengineering research, he provided some. His informal support eventually took on a formal name—the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research, or FICER—and to date it has given out $5.1 million for assorted meetings and research projects.

  Gates money paid for a turning point in recent geoengineering history. A series of private dinners at the margins of the 2008 American Geophysical Union conference, attended by Caldeira, Wood, one of the AEI co-directors, and more than a dozen senior scientists, was “the moment when the conversation moved from ‘Can we do it?’ and ‘Should we do it?’ to the much more focused ‘How do we do it?’” writes the journalist Jeff Goodell in his book about geoengineering, How to Cool the Planet.

  That year, Caldeira and other top scientists also tackled the “how?” question at a workshop convened by the Novim Group, a new nonprofit modeled on the work of the JASONs, the informal club of scientific elites that has solved classified problems for various branches of the U.S. government—DARPA, the navy, the CIA—since 1960. Many of the people in the room actually were JASONs, and the study group was led by the JASONs’ onetime head, the physicist Steve Koonin, then the chief scientist of BP, soon to be the undersecretary of energy for science under President Obama. “Imagine the president calls you up and says there’s a climate emergency,” Koonin told the group. “How quickly can you respond? What do you do?” These JASONs, whose club was named after the Jason of Greek mythology, were again being asked to save the world. In a phone call in 2009, Novim’s executive director mentioned that he had “just been invited to a meeting of high-net-worth individuals next week who are interested in investing in the area of geoengineering.” He didn’t want to share any names. “But you’d recognize some of them,” he said. I later noticed that a Novim study on the global temperature record received $100,000 from Bill Gates’s FICER—perhaps a coincidence, perhaps not.

  In time, Gates would also give $150,000 to a University of Leeds professor who would analyze the clouds, $300,000 to a Bay Area inventor and entrepreneur who would lab test the feasibility of seawater sprayers for Latham and Salter’s automated cloud ships, and $100,000 to the first systematic study comparing various ways sulfur and other aerosols could be launched into the stratosphere. Written by the drone manufacturer Aurora Flight Sciences, it investigated delivery methods including rockets, dirigibles, Gulfstream jets, suspended pipes, and the Mark 7, a sixteen-inch naval gun used on American battleships. Among the cheapest options was the Boeing 747, but the jetliner’s top altitude may not be quite high enough for SRM. It could require a new model of airplane. Soon, there was another Seattle name in various geoengineering panels and reports: Boeing. The company was represented by its chief scientist and the vice president of its Illinois- and California-based Phantom Works, a defense and space unit that seeks, among other things, “to address potential new markets.”

  • • •

  MYHRVOLD’S OFFICE WAS in a beige building in an office park about half a mile from Casey Tegreene’s office-park office, about three miles from the Intellectual Ventures lab. If unglamorous, it was at least spacious. To reach it, one walked past a reception desk, past a beautiful photograph he took of a calving Patagonian glacier, past his collection of nearly a hundred vintage typewriters, and past what appeared to be the skeleton of an allosaurus. (As a hobby, Myhrvold hunts dinosaur bones with the famed paleontologist Jack Horner; his money and drive have helped expand the world supply of T. rex specimens by 50 percent.) Inside the office itself was a cast of a prehistoric fish head about the size of a Smart car, along with a photograph of Myhrvold on a fly-fishing trip to Oregon’s Umpqua River. It captured him grinning maniacally while pointing at a six-inch rainbow trout he’d just caught—surely the smallest fish in the river that day. When I walked in, he was sitting at a wooden desk, surrounded by three computer screens, cradling a Coke Zero. His shirt was half tucked in, and he was wearing socks with his Teva sandals.

  Myhrvold was just beginning to talk publicly about his company’s geoengineering inventions. “The reason this stuff works is interesting,” he began. “The sun radiates an average 340 watts per square meter on Earth. What’s called radiative forcing—which is the amount of extra heat trapped by CO2—is today 2-something watts per square meter, and if it doubles, it’ll be about 3.7 watts per square meter. That’s roughly 1 percent of the energy from the sun! So a very crude way to think about this is that global warming is the accumulation of that 1 percent, like a penny on every dollar.” A crude way to think about SRM, he suggested, was that we were returning that penny: “If you make the light 1 percent dimmer, you’re there!”

  The choice of sulfur aerosols as a dimming agent was somewhat arbitrary: While nanoparticles or tiny mirrors might also do the job, sulfur seemed safer because it was precisely what volcanoes spewed, and because it was already very present in nature. “It’s natural and it’s been around for literally billions of years, so to some extent what you see is what you get,” he said. Pinatubo and other volcanoes had provided proof of the basic concept, so the main issue, in IV’s view, was how to get aerosols high into the atmosphere in
absence of an eruption. “We wanted something that we thought was more practical than the schemes we’d seen before,” Myhrvold continued. “Is there a clever and cheap way to deliver the stuff to the stratosphere?”

  When Lowell Wood retired from Lawrence Livermore in 2006 and moved north to work with Myhrvold, existing ideas for delivery—artillery, jet fuel doped with sulfur, and so on—had “a certain Rube Goldberg quality,” Myhrvold said. “Now, some would say that me saying ‘Rube Goldbergish’ is sort of like the pot calling the kettle black, but anyway . . . imagine thousands of cannons pointing straight up, firing every day, all day. It’s kind of a crazy scenario. And it’s expensive—billions of dollars a year. Now, billions of dollars is still really, really cheap compared to many of the other things that people would compare it to. Suppose global warming happens without us making much of an intervention, how much are crops going to be ruined, how much will the economy be hurt? And we’ll have to do things to try to cope. One example is that cities on the seafront—say, the Italians in Venice—will have to build seawalls or move. That’s really, really expensive.” In a series of invention sessions, IV came up with two new methods to do SRM. “Well, then we got on a roll and came up with other methods using other kinds of geoengineering,” Myhrvold said, “but just for radiation management, we came up with what we believe are the most practical systems that anyone’s proposed to date.”

  The first method was to pump the sulfur up into the stratosphere through a hose supported by a series of balloons: the “string of pearls.” “I came up with the name,” Myhrvold said. “The second method, which is actually the first, but we think of it as the second because the other one is better, is to make twenty-five-kilometer-tall inflatable smokestacks to take coal plant emissions and deposit them in the stratosphere.” When emitted at a lower altitude, sulfur dioxide, a major by-product of coal burning, causes acid rain; because of it, coal plants in the United States have been highly regulated by the Clean Air Act since the 1970s. The idea would seem to make expensive sulfur scrubbers obsolete. “Lowell Wood came up with the inflatable smokestack,” Myhrvold said, “which he started explaining to us as a ‘toroidal balloon.’ At first we didn’t understand. Technically, it is a torus—a doughnut—but because one axis is stretched twenty-five kilometers, thinking of it as a doughnut is just weird. Your head has to be on the wrong way—but Lowell’s is! He’s a very creative thinker.” Hot air rises, the smokestack could be insulated, and all the math seemed to work out. But there were many uncertainties with the method. “For instance, nobody has ever made an inflatable smokestack twenty-five kilometers high,” Myhrvold said. The inventors moved on.

  “It was like, why don’t we just run a hose up there and pump it?” Myhrvold said. “But it’s difficult because of the hydraulic head, so it was like, screw that, let’s just have a whole lot of pumps. If you have pumps every hundred meters, it’s really simple.” Two of Myhrvold’s employees had recently won $900,000 at NASA’s Space Elevator Games. “Their laser-powered robot climbed a 900-meter-long cable suspended from a hovering helicopter in less than 7.5 minutes,” read the press release.

  “If you’re doing a space elevator,” he said, “you know totally the following thing: The longer the rope, the stronger it has to be. Any rope, if you make it long enough, will break from its own weight.” While it might be technically possible to use a single pump and a single blimp for SRM, the string-of-pearls approach seemed far superior. “You can support it all the way along,” he said, “then the structural problems of a very long hose go away.” And unlike the twenty-five-kilometer smokestack, all of the components existed already, though the spray mechanisms would need to be improved.

  After the original, toroids-and-pearls discussion, IV’s team—usually Wood, Myhrvold, Caldeira, Tegreene, and various others—refined their ideas in half a dozen more invention sessions. When they finally went public, releasing an eighteen-page research paper filled with futuristic images, they would dub their invention the Stratospheric Shield, or StratoShield for short. They proposed that early efforts could focus on the Arctic, where temperatures were shooting up fastest and thinning ice was leaving a planetary bald spot—the yarmulke method, as it was known in geoengineering circles. In order to reverse worldwide warming from a doubling of CO2, climate modeling suggested that 2 to 5 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide would need to be pumped into the stratosphere every year. But a rough estimate for just the Arctic was 200,000 tons. IV envisioned several 100,000-ton-a-year, 7-ton-a-minute pumping stations scattered across the region, operating only in the spring—because during winter the Arctic was already dark. Hoses would deliver liquid sulfur dioxide to an altitude of approximately twenty miles, where a series of atomizers would spray out a mist of hundred-nanometer aerosol particles. Average temperatures would drop five degrees Fahrenheit, the paper said, and sea ice would go back to its preindustrial extent. The rough price tag per pumping station: $24 million, including transportation and assembly, plus $10 million in annual operating costs. That is, when compared even with a single flood barrier for New York City or seawall for Seattle, effectively free.

  I pointed out that the invention would do little for ocean acidification, and Myhrvold readily agreed. “Yeah, but I think we have a solution for that, too,” he said. “First of all, ocean acidification, that whole phenomenon, was first put into the literature by Ken Caldeira, who works here. But before I get into that, I should tell you about our hurricane suppressor.” At an early geoengineering meeting at Stanford put on by Caldeira and Wood, Myhrvold explained, Stephen Salter had shown up, and soon he was recruited to work with IV on projects including his cloud-whitening concept (for which he, not IV, had the patent). “But he had another brilliant idea,” Myhrvold said, “so we started improving it, and now we have this very cool way to reduce the strength of hurricanes.”

  The Salter Sink, like other hurricane-suppression schemes, including that of the New Mexico company Atmocean, was designed around the fact that hurricanes derive their energy from the heat of the ocean. Higher surface temperatures, as was the case before Sandy, and you get bigger storms. Lower surface temperatures, smaller storms. “This would be a useful thing even without global warming,” Myhrvold said. “But it’s very likely that these storms will be stronger due to global warming.” IV’s idea was to pump warm surface water down to the colder depths, thus cooling off the top layer—a mechanized churning of the sea. The sinks themselves were large, floating rings, up to three hundred feet across and made of used tires, with attached tubes—which they called “drains”—stretching hundreds of feet down. Deploy seven hundred Salter Sinks in the path of a category 4 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, IV’s research suggested, and the storm would effectively disappear.

  In one invention session, Wood had the epiphany that the same churning process could be applied to ocean acidification: The acid concentrations that mattered were those at the top of the water column, where the majority of sea life resides. “So we think it is possible to tackle ocean acidification,” Myhrvold said. “If we put a bunch of these Salter Sinks in, then we’ll turn the surface over, and if we turn the surface over, we effectively dilute any acidification that may occur. This approach is not 100 percent proven yet, but Ken and some collaborators have some modeling going on.”

  In late 2009, not long before the Copenhagen climate conference, IV released a paper on hurricane suppression. It contained the company line on geoengineering: This research was for the good of the world, not for the good of IV’s investors. “As with its other geoengineering inventions such as the Stratospheric Shield,” it stated, “Intellectual Ventures does not advocate immediate construction or deployment of Salter Sinks. Indeed, IV sees no immediate business model to support development of this technology. Our hope in publicizing the invention is to suggest that practical defenses against at least some catastrophic storms may be possible.”

  I later saw the patent applications for hurricane
suppression, which bore Myhrvold’s name, along with those of Gates, Salter, Latham, Wood, Caldeira, Tegreene, and various others. The business model might not have been “immediate,” but it existed all the same: In addition to describing the mechanics of the Salter Sink, the documents described how a theoretical hurricane-suppression company could sell individual insurance policies. In one patent-pending scenario, the “ecological alteration equipment” would be moved into position on demand—provided there was “at least one payment from . . . at least one interested party.” In another, the hurricane-suppression company would drum up potential clients by “alerting at least one interested party as to the potential for storm damage . . . providing information to at least one interested party of the cost and likelihood of reducing damage . . . and receiving at least one payment.” IV was attempting to patent a new insurance policy for the global-warming age—Firebreak’s basic business model, only applied to hurricanes, not wildfires.

  • • •

  MYHRVOLD AND IV’S geoengineering ideas were first introduced to the world in the pages of SuperFreakonomics. The authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s take on climate science and support for geoengineering as an alternative to emissions cuts seemed to suggest they had spoken to few scientists but those at IV, and criticism of the book was intense. Myhrvold, too, was drawn in, and he felt burned.

  “Some climate activists take the position that we should forestall any debate about a broad set of solutions,” Myhrvold said at our last meeting. “They have the one solution—which is to cut back and go renewable and so forth. They hate the idea of geoengineering to death. They have an ideology of conservation, of living lightly, that is in some cases very antitechnology. And if you have that ideology, then global warming is finally the justification to convince people of what you want.” He believed he understood why geoengineering upset them. “They say, if there’s an easy way out, people will take it,” he said. “Now, my reply is: It’s not like you guys have made any progress whatsoever. Zero. Zip. Nada. Some tax dollars have been wasted in Germany and the United States subsidizing noneconomic things. The idea of Germany as a solar energy hub is just ludicrous—and it’s very likely that those German solar installations cause net harm to global warming, very likely. I haven’t done all the calculations, but it takes a lot of energy to make solar plants, and if it’s cloudy all day, you don’t get much benefit back out.” (The IPCC, on the other hand, had begun some calculations, and photovoltaic energy produces roughly twenty times fewer life-cycle greenhouse emissions than natural gas, forty times fewer than coal.)