Geoengineering isn’t that far off, but Pina2bo is still a terrible idea.
Professor Ben Horton, Director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore, talks through Neal Stephenson’s 2021 climate change epic “Termination Shock”, and why you shouldn’t shoot sulphur into the atmosphere
The world appears to be at an inflexion point. According to think tank Climate Analytics, there is a 70% chance that global emissions may start to fall this year if clean technology growth trends continue, and some progress is made to cut non-CO2 emissions.
That being said. Clean tech growth is currently being impaired by the US-China trade war, with European and American leaders accusing China of dumping excessively cheap electric vehicles, solar panels and batteries into its markets and killing off local competition.
So maybe it’s too early to celebrate.
Now imagine if there was a crazy billionaire in Texas looking at climate change from the sidelines. Granted, he made his money from the oil industry. But he’s now grown a conscience, and he’s frustrated at the lack of political will to push forth with climate action.
He then takes matters into his own hands and builds a mechanical volcano to shoot sulphur into the atmosphere. This has the effect of reflecting sunlight back into the stratosphere, cooling down the planet. Sulphur, incidentally, is a byproduct of refining high-sulphur crude oil.
He calls the sulphur cannon Pina2bo, after Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines which last erupted in 1991, causing global temperatures to drop by about 0.5°C.
That’s one of the plotlines in Neal Stephenson’s latest climate change epic, Termination Shock, published in 2021. Better known for coining the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, Stephenson’s attempt at addressing climate change follows a familiar narrative deployed by other science-fiction novels including Altered Carbon and The Expanse.
Basically, in a not-so-distant dystopian future when Earth is wrecked by climate disasters, what would people with shitloads of power and money do?
In Termination Shock, Stephenson’s version of a Texas cowboy decides to, half altruistically, execute a geoengineering solution. The answer to “why half?” is in the Q&A below.
In Altered Carbon, the billionaires simply build skyscrapers above the clouds and download their consciousness into new bodies whenever their old ones expire. If you’re curious, yes, there’s a USB drive involved and it’s called a “cortical stack”.
In The Expanse, they solve the resource problem by pushing the working class into asteroids to mine precious minerals.
As they say, desperate times call for desperate measures. Unless there’s a dramatic uptick in global cooperation between the US, Europe, and China to collectively solve climate change, it’s unlikely that emissions will fall to the level required to keep global warming under 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels, by 2030.
With that in mind, would the idea of a crazy billionaire attempting to play god be a terrible idea?
To answer that question, I managed to convince Professor Ben Horton, Director at the Earth Observatory of Singapore and Professor at the NTU Asian School of the Environment, to weigh in.
He’s got lots to say about Termination Shock and thinks that Pina2bo is a terrible idea. In short, if you had shitloads of money, you should be donating it to a think tank to decide what to do with it.
Termination Shock isn’t the breeziest read, and it’s 702 pages long. But here’s an excerpt from the section about Pina2bo, which you should definitely read before continuing to the podcast highlights below.
This conversation features Horton, Horton’s recovering knee, his cocker spaniel Atlas, the occasional hay fever-induced sneeze, and my two parrots in the background. Listen to the full recording on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Han: What are your thoughts about geoengineering?
Horton: My first thought is it’s a crying shame to the eight billion people on planet Earth that we discuss geoengineering. Because climate change is quite an easily solved problem if we didn’t have a very small percentage of the population determining the fate of every other human on this earth and billions of plants and animals.
Right now, it’s cheaper for 70% of the 8 billion people to derive their energy from renewable sources and therefore solve the climate problem.
It’s one of these aspects about climate change that frustrates me because I’ve been studying climate science for 25 years. I know that unless we change our path on the amount of carbon dioxide that we put into the atmosphere, the world will be so dramatically different within 10 to 20 years.
That’s the reality. We’re starting the sixth extinction. That means the loss of 80% of life on this planet. Sea levels will be much higher, it will get much drier, there will be large wildfires, there will be food shortages, there will be water shortages, and there’ll be a decrease in land availability.
They’re facts.
Han: Let me summarise the kind of dire situation that we’re in. So there’s a small group of people with oil assets that do not want to let go of their wealth. And this in large part is the reason why we’re not moving forward in terms of getting more renewable energy into the grid.
Because once we solve that, everything else just falls in place. Would that be accurate?
Horton: It’s not just oil executives and shareholders, it’s people with vested interests in the production of carbon dioxide. So that primarily it’s from the petroleum industry, but it’s from land use change, manufacturing, and so on.
There are low-carbon alternatives and in many cases, they are more cost effective. Certainly if you include the true value of the detrimental effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We simply are not paying an appropriate tax for the damage that we do to the environment for every tonne of carbon.
We’re in an amazing position in 2024 because we can predict where the climate will go with an increase in carbon dioxide. We can say what the temperatures will be and we’ve got a broad understanding of tipping points and impacts on the climate system. We also have a roadmap to success, and having a sustainable society where the lives of people matter and our children can have the uppermost opportunities of having health, happiness and prosperity.
But we don’t do it.
The climate community used to be all about mitigation, rather than adaptation. Then we realised that we’re too slow, so we’re moved to adaptation. Then 10 years or so ago, it was no, no, no to geoengineering.
But now we’re in 2024. We burnt more carbon dioxide in 2023 than we ever have done before, and recorded the warmest day ever on 6 July. That was broken two days later on 8 July. June, July, and August were the warmest three months ever on record and 2023 was the warmest year ever recorded compared to the 1850s.
If you compare it with geological evidence, there’s a high probability that 2023 was the warmest year in 125,000 years.
We’re going nowhere fast on climate. So now we must, unfortunately, have serious discussions about geoengineering, because ultimately, if given a choice between the health and prosperity of my kids and not, I will look at every single solution available.
You have to be pragmatic about this problem.
I would love the people who have vested interest in polluting our atmosphere to be held to account. But that is unlikely, despite the efforts of many people to try and change this, and there’s a huge social movement behind this.
We know the history of human society. Power in the few — it takes a long time for that power to wane. We can think about climate change being the ultimate colonialism. It is the pollution from Western democracies that is impacting the rest of the world.
Han: Coming back to Termination Shock. The entire premise of the book was that climate mitigation measures are too slow. So one guy decided to take measures into his own hands by building a giant volcano. Given the current situation when people are seriously considering geoengineering, and if there was a billionaire insane enough to do something about it, would it be a terrible idea?
Horton: It’s a horrific idea.
Han: Have you read the book by the way?
Horton: No, I’ve not read the book. I deal with existential crises every day of my life because I’m a climate scientist. The last thing I want to do in my own time is read about it.
Han: I guess that’ll be adding on to the trauma.
Horton: Just last week I was looking at the projection of sea level rise for Singapore in the remainder of this century. I saw the projections for how much of Singapore will be inundated and flooded, and many of these areas are residential. That’s horrendous to look at.
Han: Could you give us a number? How much of Singapore is going to be flooded?
Horton: Let’s just talk about it like this. About a third of Singapore is only one metre above the highest tides. And the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have enough water within them to raise global sea level by 70 metre.
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. You know what happens.
Han: Singapore is going to be Atlantis.
Horton: Singapore is a country of all the developed nations that I’ve ever worked in, that is the most susceptible to climate change because it’s got nowhere to run.
You’ve got a high population density and it’s incredibly hot. I mean, yesterday was 36°C and with the humidity it feels more like 50 degrees°C. I only take my dog outside early in the morning and in the evening because he doesn’t have the ability to cool down.
And that’s what Singapore will get like, where it isn’t safe for you, me, any of your loved ones to be outside during the day because it’s too hot. So Singapore has an existential crisis.
So the last thing I want to do is sit down in the evening and either watch an episode on Netflix about existential crises. I love Dune, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, because they’re a different type of reality.
Han: Okay, so Singapore is going to sink for sure. We have an existential crisis. Imagine if you were the one writing a science fiction book about this, what would you do about it?
Horton: Since you brought this up. Pina2bo is a terrible idea. Because this person made his wealth from the petroleum industry. What he should be doing is saying, I’m no longer going to pump any petroleum. I’m going to remove all my wealth from petroleum and put it into renewable energy.
That’s the better option. The worst option is someone who has no knowledge of what putting sulphur in the atmosphere can do detrimentally, conduct a geoengineering exercise.
Sulphur dioxide, when mixed with water vapour in the atmosphere, becomes sulphuric acid. You don’t want that raining down on you.
And most importantly, you’ve got to continue to do this forever.
The basic idea of Pina2bo does work because there are geological examples of that. If you go back to the 1860s, the most powerful eruption ever in the last thousand years occurred in Tambora, an island in Indonesia. After it erupted it cooled the earth so much that it snowed in the summer in the Northern Hemisphere.
But the Tonga eruption in 2023 didn’t cool the climate because that eruption didn’t eject sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere; it ejected water vapour. And water vapour acts like a greenhouse gas warming up planet Earth.
Mount St. Helens in the 1980s didn’t cool the climate at all.
So for Pina2bo to work, it has to be a certain type of eruption. It has to be in the tropics to begin with, because then the sulphur dioxide gets into the upper atmosphere and is distributed around planet Earth. Something that happens in the temperate world doesn’t influence global climate.
Then you need enough velocity to get the sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere so it doesn’t interact with water vapour. When it’s up there, incoming solar radiation is then reflected by the sulphur dioxide back out into space. It’s like putting little mirrors in the upper atmosphere.
Another similar geoengineering solution that’s been thought of is how can you shield the earth?
We’ve got zero knowledge of how geoengineering exercises like those affect weather systems. When you start to change the external parts of the weather system, you get dramatic changes. That’s why we see these huge wildfires, droughts, record rainfall, landslides and flooding. Because the system is unstable.
With geoengineering, you’re going to destabilise the system even more. That’s why I do believe we need to study geoengineering, but it needs to be properly funded by organisations where the data will be transparent.
It’s very important that you can’t have vested interests. You can’t have the petroleum industry or an individual funding base greenwash or geo-wash the results to make it look favourable to their technology.
That’s why you’d have to work with the US National Science Foundation or the European Union Horizons Project or the National Research Foundation or Ministry of Education here in Singapore.
So the data is transparent, freely available, and you can see what the impacts are on the climate system.
It also begs the question: who should be paying?
Climate change is a Western hemisphere problem. We’ve caused these problems. When we think about carbon dioxide, it stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. The climate that we experienced in 2023 is not the result of the pollution of the biggest polluters in 2023 or 2022. It’s a result of the polluters from the 1880s.
And who are the dominant ones of those? The United States, European Union, the UK.
If I met him, I would first tell him to donate his wealth to a university where we can do this properly under peer review with proper scientific studies.
Han: To summarise the opposition against geoengineering. Number one, it has to be done in perpetuity and therefore it creates a dependency on the company or the organisation that is doing this geoengineering. That’s not good because that’s dependency and that leaves room for basically someone to game the system.
Secondly, you don’t know about the externalities that are caused by any alteration to the climate.
Thirdly, there’s potential for geo-washing. Companies, instead of decarbonizing, they could fund a geo-engineering project and just wash their hands off.
Horton: The problem with geoengineering is that it requires international collaboration. The world right now is as far away from international collaboration at any time since World War II.
We have everything available. You have the United Nations, it has the Security Council and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, for which I’ve served on the last two and I’ll be serving on the next assessment report.
And then you have universities. It’s not just the engineering aspects you need to think about. It’s the impacts on the health sector, biodiversity, and the financial sector. You need to be able to monitor it, you need innovative ways for the huge volumes of data, you need artificial intelligence (AI), and then the social sciences have to be integrated fully into that.
Unfortunately, even though I’m vehemently against geoengineering, I want my kids to be healthy, happy and have opportunities. So we need to explore this. But we need to do this properly. And having a series of entrepreneurs thinking that they should be leading this doesn’t work.
There needs to be much greater partnerships between the private sector and the universities because that would facilitate this.
Han: There have been many geoengineering projects that are already being piloted in the real world. In Singapore, we have that $20 million facility by PUB to extract carbon from the ocean and put it somewhere else.
The world has also been talking about marine cloud brightening, and there’s another one about spraying the ocean with micro bubbles or sea foam to make the surface more reflective.
I could go on all day. There’s so many ideas out there. Which one or which ones do you think are the most promising?
Horton: We don’t know because the research hasn’t been done.
Han: Are all of them equally unknown or are some a bit more mature than others?
Horton: You know, that’s a non-starter of a question because the potential impacts of it going wrong are horrendous. So I wouldn’t put my money on any one of them, but you’ve got to study it.
Carbon capture is quite an interesting one. We know in practice that if you can extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, cool it down and compress it at high enough pressure, it forms a liquid and you can pump it back up under the ground where the petroleum came from and it will be capped.
Our big problem is trying to develop that at scale. That’s what we term profitable.
We’ve got into this problem of climate change because of the economic models that prioritise profit but don’t take into account planetary boundaries.
So when we’re thinking of carbon capture and storage, we’re thinking of it in terms of profit. And it’s not investable because it’s not profitable. That’s because we don’t put a proper tax on carbon.
There should be new economic models that actually fully understand the impact on the environment and that if you had to live within planetary boundaries, what is the way to maintain economic growth at a standard that improves people’s livability.
Han: If you were the billionaire in the book, how would you invest your money to solve the climate problem? What would you do if you were Elon Musk?
If I was a billionaire, I would want to use that as a force of good and not increase my wealth.
I’d give most of my money away. If I had a long lost relative who donated my fortune to me after she died, I’d want to use that money to work in climate science.
I’d work with Karenne Tun from NParks and Koh Lian Pin from NUS Nature Based Climate Solutions. I’d use my money to basically find out which areas of Southeast Asia I could spend my money on to preserve coastal wetlands and peatlands to store carbon.
And I’d keep enough money for myself so I could buy a yacht, a really fast car and a nice place to live. I’d put all my kids through college.
The thing about climate change that drives me nuts is that I like to have a nice life. I’m not going to give everything up and hug a tree. I travel by air — you have to if you’re in Singapore. There’s no two ways about that. And I have my family elsewhere, and my daughter’s in college, so I want to see her.
I like nice things in life. But I’m aware of climate change, and I try to cut down my carbon usage all the time — use carbon offsets, only buy goods from companies that have good sustainability practices. I buy things that last and I get a bit of a kick out of repairing things rather than buying new.
I feel as though because of my education now on climate change, that I’m a better person now than I was. And that’s what climate is about.
Han: Any last words?
Horton: You started this podcast about doom and gloom on climate. I always say no, it’s not. It’s just reality. It’s one reality of the future and I’m giving you the facts. Facts don’t lie.
An ice sheet doesn’t have a conscience. Doesn’t matter how much we pray — that ice sheet is still going to melt. It obeys the laws of physics, not any one God.
Do you perceive it as doom and gloom? I don’t. I perceive it as this is what’s happening, it’s a major warning for you, and you’ve got pathways for your future. Which one do you choose? Because you have a choice.
It’s up to you if you want to perceive these facts as doom and give up, or if you perceive that as a challenge to solve.
