Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Sure, Go For It. Let's Re-Freeze the Arctic.


There's an ambitious proposal being floated to restore the Arctic Ocean sea ice. It entails deploying 10-million pumps powered by wind turbines. The pumps would draw sea water and spray it over the existing ice to build it up layer by layer.

The cost would be somewhere between $500 to $700-billion, USD. Yeah, that's upwards of half a trillion dollars.

Only it's an idea that's going nowhere. Even if it could be shown to work without creating problematic side effects, that's an awful lot of money for cash strapped, "everyday low taxes" governments to cough up. What's Libya's share or Spain's or Ukraine's?

A second huge problem is that there's no point putting that kind of investment into restoring the Arctic sea ice unless you simultaneously transition off fossil energy. The influential fossil energy giants aren't interested in anything that might write off their $27-trillion worth of proven energy reserves. Does this sound like something that would be supported by the current occupant of 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue?

The third big problem is that this idea won't stop climate change. It might help reduce the rate of onset but that's about it. It buys time, sort of. It also does nothing to address either overpopulation or overconsumption, the other two existential threats to human civilization.

2 comments:

Toby said...

That's another proposed cheat. As you said, cheats might give us a temporary reprieve but only once. There is a lot of noise in some circles about cheats but Nature laughs last.

Anonymous said...

Anyong... Take that money and build wind and solar energy.