Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (35 page)

The official line at IV was that they were not pursuing geoengineering for profit. “Intellectual Ventures invents new technology as its main business, but we do not expect or intend that our climate technology inventions will make money,” read an FAQ posted after its interest in geoengineering became publicly known. That morning in Tegreene’s office, before the flicker attacked the window again, he described what happened to inventors’ ideas once they left the free-form sessions in the conference room. “After a session, we do a process we call triage,” he said. “We have a whole computer system to categorize the ideas. We have a series of four conference calls every week, with patent attorneys, business-development people, and support staff. We’ll say, ‘Okay, we’re looking at geoengineering ideas. Here’s idea number one. Is it better than the first idea already in the stack? No. Is it better than the second? No. Is it better than the third?’ Okay, then we’ll move it to number three in the stack, and then three moves down to four, four to five, and so on. We rank them.”

What did “better” mean? “You’re mapping a bunch of different factors,” Tegreene said. “Whether or not it’s gonna get good patent protection. Whether it’s in a licensing-friendly industry. Does it have some commercial implications? Is there some broader concept that could be patented based upon it? Will it cost a lot in terms of technical support to file it? So it’s a combination.” Filing a patent is expensive, usually very time-consuming. IV’s inventors spewed out thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of ideas a year, and most never made it to the top of the stack. Triage meant that usually only the most commercializable ideas got through. “If an idea is one of the top few in a certain area,” Tegreene said, “then we start patent applications on it.” Knowing all the steps involved, I still found myself wondering why they had gone to the trouble of filing for geoengineering patents.

 • • • 

ADVOCATES OF GEOENGINEERING,
or at least of geoengineering research, tend to fall into three categories: scientists deeply afraid of runaway climate change; free-market advocates deeply afraid of mandated carbon cuts; and the capitalists or philanthrocapitalists who sustain them both. To find all three, I had only to visit two Washingtons—Washington, D.C., and Washington State.

In both Washingtons, flitting between conferences and meetings and panels and labs, were the scientists, notably Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University, a celebrated climate modeler who had coined the term “ocean acidification.” On the opposite side of the political spectrum from Edward Teller and Lowell Wood, he was dead set against geoengineering when the cold warriors proposed their Pinatubo option. Then he ran some numbers. More aware than almost anyone of what climate change would do to the world, he soon became a frequent visitor to Capitol Hill and a key IV inventor, though profit was apparently not his motive. In the case of a related climate patent, he promised to “donate 100% of my share of the proceeds to non-profit charities and NGOs.”

Official acceptance of geoengineering was growing in step with global carbon emissions. After Barack Obama was elected came the first top-level scientific panels, starting with the Royal Society in the U.K. and the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. Then came geoengineering hearings in the U.K. House of Commons and the U.S. House of Representatives, closed-door sessions led by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency), studies by the Government Accountability Office and Congressional Research Service, policy statements by the American Meteorological Society and Britain’s Met Office, a design competition by Britain’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers, an ethics conference at Asilomar, a report by the Rand Corporation, a side event at the 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen, funding from the U.K. government for limited field research, a neologism-spawning endorsement (“climate remediation”) from the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, and a place in the 2014 IPCC report. Across the papers and panels and symposia, the majority opinion was not that geoengineering should be deployed—just cautiously studied.

The most promising scheme was still the Pinatubo option, part of a set of ideas now known as solar radiation management, or SRM—another term coined by Caldeira. It was Benjamin Franklin who apparently first linked volcanoes to global climate. In 1783, when Franklin was stationed in Paris, a chain of Icelandic volcanoes had erupted for eight straight months, and temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere plummeted. “There existed a constant fog over all Europe, and great part of North America,” Franklin wrote. “Hence the surface was early frozen. Hence the first snows remained on it unmelted. Hence the air was more chilled.” Another promising SRM scheme came from the British professors John Latham and Stephen Salter, who later worked with Intellectual Ventures: unmanned, wind-powered yachts that would sail the high seas, seeding marine clouds with a spray of saltwater droplets, thereby raising their reflectivity, or albedo. A greater portion of the sunlight hitting the tops of these clouds would bounce back, and the planet would cool.

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 CO
₂
—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.”