Page 269 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

filters were not specified, making Lackner’s proposal at present untenable. oh, by
the way—each of the large Lackner towers would cost at least $20 million.
Lackner’s dream of carbon sequestration found support from his Colum-
bia University colleague Wallace Broecker and science writer Robert Kunzig
in their book, Fixing Climate (2008). Their overall thesis is that carbon diox-
ide capture and storage represents the equivalent of sewage treatment, which
modern societies deem a necessity. They quoted Harrison Brown, the Caltech
geochemist, eugenicist, futurist, and role model for the current presidential sci-
ence adviser, John Holdren. In 1954 Brown imagined feeding a hungry world
by increasing the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere to stimulate
plant growth:

We have seen that plants grow more rapidly in an atmosphere that is rich in car-
bon dioxide. . . . If, in some manner, the carbon-dioxide content of the atmosphere
could be increased threefold, world food production might be doubled. one can
visualize, on a world scale, huge carbon-dioxide generators pouring the gas into the
atmosphere. . . . In order to double the amount in the atmosphere, at least 500 bil-
lion tons of coal would have to be burned—an amount six times greater than that
which has been consumed during all of human history. In the absence of coal . . .
74
the carbon dioxide could be produced by heating limestone.
Recall that Nils Ekholm and Svante Arrhenius had suggested in the first decade
of the twentieth century that, facing the return of an ice age, atmospheric carbon
dioxide might be increased artificially by opening up and burning shallow coal
seams—a process that would also fertilize plants. Broecker and Kunzig end their
book with just such a fantasy:

our children and grandchildren, having stabilized the Co level at 500 or 600
2
ppm [parts per million], may decide, consulting their history books, that it was
more agreeable at 280 ppm. No doubt our more distant descendents will choose
if they can to avert the next ice age; perhaps, seeing an abrupt climate change on
the horizon, they will prevent it by adjusting the carbon dioxide level in the green-
house. By then they will no longer be burning fossil fuels, so they would have to
deploy some kind of carbon dioxide generator, shades of Harrison Brown, to oper-
ate in tandem with the carbon dioxide scrubbers. (232)

Lackner reportedly agreed, adding that capturing, storing, and releasing carbon
dioxide may one day be possible. Can you imagine a world in which Lackner’s carbon
dioxide scrubbers and the Ekholm–Arrhenius/Brown carbon dioxide generators

252 | tHe Climate enGineerS