What if We Skip Wrecking the World Economy and Jump to Fixing the Atmosphere?

What if we could stop temperature rise and roll back world temperatures as needed?
What if we could fix the atmosphere without wrecking the economy but just added a profitable business?

Do we have to completely change energy, transportation and the economy BEFORE the effects of climate change are very large and clear? Do we ALL have to destroy our lives, jobs and possessions just in case? can we create a world industry to fix the atmosphere?

Geoengineering Safety Net

Geoengineering means that there is a safety net over any climate cliff.

We can create artificial volcano effects to reflect heat. Recent studies price this out at $5-8 billion per year.

This technological insurance option backstops the worst case scenarios. Geoengineering can pause and roll back temperature to any level we want.

National Scale and City Scale Weather Modification Exists

China is controlling rain on a national scale. They are taking rain from Vietnam, India and other places. Thousands of $8000 machines across Tibet.

Pollution reducing towers 500 meters tall

China has built a 100 meter tall (40 story) tower to help purify the air. It sucks in air into a large greenhouse at the bottom. The system works and helps clean the air.

China will build hundreds of full-sized towers that will reach 500 meters (1,640 feet) high with a diameter of 200 meters (656 feet). These towers will clean the air for a small-sized city.

Pulling CO2 Out of the Air and Leaving the Rest of the Economy Alone

Can we pull 60 billion tons of CO2 per year out of the air and leave the rest of the economy alone?

Current proposals to climate change involve everyone changing everything about how they move, live and work. The entire $100 trillion world economy should be changed top to bottom.

An alternative is to add a new form of agriculture. We can add ocean agriculture and leave the rest of the world economy to change or not change.

40% of all the world’s land is used to grow food and we can use 9% of the world’s ocean can be used to grow Kelp. Kelp grows 30 times faster than trees and plants.

An area about 4-5 times larger than Australia could be built into ocean agriculture. The rest of the ocean can be left alone and the rest of the world economy could be left alone. This would be about the size of existing world land agriculture.

The kelp growth would also reduce acid levels in the ocean.

The long climate charts show emissions going deeply negative out in 2100. This means all of the projections assume that we will start to take tens of billions of tons of CO2 out of the air.

For some reason, the climate scientists want to wreck the economy first and then take the ten of billions of tons of CO2 out of the air for every year after 2070.

We should just start scaling up the removal of CO2 out of the air sooner. We can then leave the rest of the economy to profit. We skip right to the part where remove CO2 from the air.

The seaweed industry is about 25 million tons per year. We need to make this 1000 to 2000 times bigger.
It would also mean fish for everyone to eat. There would be 500 pounds of fish per person per year as a byproduct of the atmosphere fix.

We can stretch lines from drone robots, boats and oil rig sized platforms in the deep ocean and grow kelp 10-30 meters from the surface.

Land agriculture is a $2.5 trillion per year business. Ocean agriculture will be a $3-6 trillion per year business.

We can choose the best options for our lives, possessions, and businesses without a climate gun to our heads.

SOURCES- SCMP, Environmental Research Letters- Stratospheric aerosol injection tactics and costs in the first 15 years of deployment, Global Climate Project, Process Safety and Environmental Protection – Negative Carbon Via Ocean Afforestation.

Written by Brian Wang. Nextbigfuture.com

6 thoughts on “What if We Skip Wrecking the World Economy and Jump to Fixing the Atmosphere?”

  1. kinda skeptical on the whole kelp farming thing. it’d be great, but really 4.5 times the size of australia? I did a little math and if the average weight of 1 cm^2 of the kelp farm platform came out to 2 grams, then we’d be talking 700 billion metric tons of support!

    In comparison, the world produces ~3 billion metric tons of cement per YEAR.

  2. The small matter of 4 or 5 times bigger that Australia. That is bigger than Africa, and not quite as big as Asia. Placed accordingly you could walk through a kelp forest from Tokyo to San Francisco ;-). That sounds more ambitious than Elon. I wonder what that would do to ocean currents?

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