Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (36 page)

The first method was to pump the sulfur up into the stratosphere through a hose supported by a series of balloons: the “string of pearls.” “I came up with the name,” Myhrvold said. “The second method, which is actually the first, but we think of it as the second because the other one is better, is to make twenty-five-kilometer-tall inflatable smokestacks to take coal plant emissions and deposit them in the stratosphere.” When emitted at a lower altitude, sulfur dioxide, a major by-product of coal burning, causes acid rain; because of it, coal plants in the United States have been highly regulated by the Clean Air Act since the 1970s. The idea would seem to make expensive sulfur scrubbers obsolete. “Lowell Wood came up with the inflatable smokestack,” Myhrvold said, “which he started explaining to us as a ‘toroidal balloon.’ At first we didn’t understand. Technically, it is a torus—a doughnut—but because one axis is stretched twenty-five kilometers, thinking of it as a doughnut is just weird. Your head has to be on the wrong way—but Lowell’s is! He’s a very creative thinker.” Hot air rises, the smokestack could be insulated, and all the math seemed to work out. But there were many uncertainties with the method. “For instance, nobody has ever made an inflatable smokestack twenty-five kilometers high,” Myhrvold said. The inventors moved on.

“It was like, why don’t we just run a hose up there and pump it?” Myhrvold said. “But it’s difficult because of the hydraulic head, so it was like, screw that, let’s just have a whole lot of pumps. If you have pumps every hundred meters, it’s really simple.” Two of Myhrvold’s employees had recently won $900,000 at NASA’s Space Elevator Games. “Their laser-powered robot climbed a 900-meter-long cable suspended from a hovering helicopter in less than 7.5 minutes,” read the press release.

“If you’re doing a space elevator,” he said, “you know totally the following thing: The longer the rope, the stronger it has to be. Any rope, if you make it long enough, will break from its own weight.” While it might be technically possible to use a single pump and a single blimp for SRM, the string-of-pearls approach seemed far superior. “You can support it all the way along,” he said, “then the structural problems of a very long hose go away.” And unlike the twenty-five-kilometer smokestack, all of the components existed already, though the spray mechanisms would need to be improved.

After the original, toroids-and-pearls discussion, IV’s team—usually Wood, Myhrvold, Caldeira, Tegreene, and various others—refined their ideas in half a dozen more invention sessions. When they finally went public, releasing an eighteen-page research paper filled with futuristic images, they would dub their invention the Stratospheric Shield, or StratoShield for short. They proposed that early efforts could focus on the Arctic, where temperatures were shooting up fastest and thinning ice was leaving a planetary bald spot—the yarmulke method, as it was known in geoengineering circles. In order to reverse worldwide warming from a doubling of CO
₂
, climate modeling suggested that 2 to 5 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide would need to be pumped into the stratosphere every year. But a rough estimate for just the Arctic was 200,000 tons. IV envisioned several 100,000-ton-a-year, 7-ton-a-minute pumping stations scattered across the region, operating only in the spring—because during winter the Arctic was already dark. Hoses would deliver liquid sulfur dioxide to an altitude of approximately twenty miles, where a series of atomizers would spray out a mist of hundred-nanometer aerosol particles. Average temperatures would drop five degrees Fahrenheit, the paper said, and sea ice would go back to its preindustrial extent. The rough price tag per pumping station: $24 million, including transportation and assembly, plus $10 million in annual operating costs. That is, when compared even with a single flood barrier for New York City or seawall for Seattle, effectively free.

I pointed out that the invention would do little for ocean acidification, and Myhrvold readily agreed. “Yeah, but I think we have a solution for that, too,” he said. “First of all, ocean acidification, that whole phenomenon, was first put into the literature by Ken Caldeira, who works here. But before I get into that, I should tell you about our hurricane suppressor.” At an early geoengineering meeting at Stanford put on by Caldeira and Wood, Myhrvold explained, Stephen Salter had shown up, and soon he was recruited to work with IV on projects including his cloud-whitening concept (for which he, not IV, had the patent). “But he had another brilliant idea,” Myhrvold said, “so we started improving it, and now we have this very cool way to reduce the strength of hurricanes.”

The Salter Sink, like other hurricane-suppression schemes, including that of the New Mexico company Atmocean, was designed around the fact that hurricanes derive their energy from the heat of the ocean. Higher surface temperatures, as was the case before Sandy, and you get bigger storms. Lower surface temperatures, smaller storms. “This would be a useful thing even without global warming,” Myhrvold said. “But it’s very likely that these storms will be stronger due to global warming.” IV’s idea was to pump warm surface water down to the colder depths, thus cooling off the top layer—a mechanized churning of the sea. The sinks themselves were large, floating rings, up to three hundred feet across and made of used tires, with attached tubes—which they called “drains”—stretching hundreds of feet down. Deploy seven hundred Salter Sinks in the path of a category 4 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, IV’s research suggested, and the storm would effectively disappear.

In one invention session, Wood had the epiphany that the same churning process could be applied to ocean acidification: The acid concentrations that mattered were those at the top of the water column, where the majority of sea life resides. “So we think it is possible to tackle ocean acidification,” Myhrvold said. “If we put a bunch of these Salter Sinks in, then we’ll turn the surface over, and if we turn the surface over, we effectively dilute any acidification that may occur. This approach is not 100 percent proven yet, but Ken and some collaborators have some modeling going on.”

In late 2009, not long before the Copenhagen climate conference, IV released a paper on hurricane suppression. It contained the company line on geoengineering: This research was for the good of the world, not for the good of IV’s investors. “As with its other geoengineering inventions such as the Stratospheric Shield,” it stated, “Intellectual Ventures does not advocate immediate construction or deployment of Salter Sinks. Indeed, IV sees no immediate business model to support development of this technology. Our hope in publicizing the invention is to suggest that practical defenses against at least some catastrophic storms may be possible.”

I later saw the patent applications for hurricane suppression, which bore Myhrvold’s name, along with those of Gates, Salter, Latham, Wood, Caldeira, Tegreene, and various others. The business model might not have been “immediate,” but it existed all the same: In addition to describing the mechanics of the Salter Sink, the documents described how a theoretical hurricane-suppression company could sell individual insurance policies. In one patent-pending scenario, the “ecological alteration equipment” would be moved into position on demand—provided there was “at least one payment from . . . at least one interested party.” In another, the hurricane-suppression company would drum up potential clients by “alerting at least one interested party as to the potential for storm damage . . . providing information to at least one interested party of the cost and likelihood of reducing damage . . . and receiving at least one payment.” IV was attempting to patent a new insurance policy for the global-warming age—Firebreak’s basic business model, only applied to hurricanes, not wildfires.

 • • • 

MYHRVOLD AND IV’S
geoengineering ideas were first introduced to the world in the pages of
SuperFreakonomics
. The authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s take on climate science and support for geoengineering as an alternative to emissions cuts seemed to suggest they had spoken to few scientists but those at IV, and criticism of the book was intense. Myhrvold, too, was drawn in, and he felt burned.

“Some climate activists take the position that we should forestall any debate about a broad set of solutions,” Myhrvold said at our last meeting. “They have
the
one solution—which is to cut back and go renewable and so forth. They hate the idea of geoengineering to death. They have an ideology of conservation, of living lightly, that is in some cases very antitechnology. And if you have that ideology, then global warming is finally the justification to convince people of what you want.” He believed he understood why geoengineering upset them. “They say, if there’s an easy way out, people will take it,” he said. “Now, my reply is: It’s not like you guys have made any progress whatsoever. Zero. Zip. Nada. Some tax dollars have been wasted in Germany and the United States subsidizing noneconomic things. The idea of Germany as a solar energy hub is just ludicrous—and it’s very likely that those German solar installations cause net harm to global warming, very likely. I haven’t done all the calculations, but it takes a lot of energy to make solar plants, and if it’s cloudy all day, you don’t get much benefit back out.” (The IPCC, on the other hand, had begun some calculations, and photovoltaic energy produces roughly twenty times fewer life-cycle greenhouse emissions than natural gas, forty times fewer than coal.)

For a moment, Myhrvold seemed to channel the American Enterprise Institute, questioning whether money spent cutting emissions was being put to the best use. The emissions-only approach was “particularly rude to the poor people on Earth,” he said. “We’re a wealthy country, so we could afford to do a bunch of stuff. Poor people can’t—or they won’t. In Asia, in China, they want their industrial development, and I don’t know how you can stop them.” In Africa, the logic was starker. “Those people live right on the edge,” he explained. “Now there are people who say: ‘Ah, climate change will hit them worse.’ True. But if you’re starving to death already, or you’re dying of malaria or a bunch of other diseases that could be alleviated with tiny amounts of money compared with what the rich world might spend on climate change, there’s an interesting moral issue: How much should we spend?”

He offered what he said was a “deeply politically incorrect” analogy for climate politics. “This is very much like what happened when some religious groups found HIV/AIDS,” he said. “It was like, ‘Look, we’ve wanted people to not be gay, to not have homosexual sex for a long time. Here is a heaven-sent opportunity—God’s punishment against gay people or drug users or the promiscuous.’” Some environmentalists’ ideological response to geoengineering proposals, he said, was “very much like the pope’s position on HIV. The pope said that condoms are not the answer. Well, with all due respect to his infallibility in matters of faith, empirically, he’s just flat out wrong. Preaching abstinence as a remedy for HIV is ineffective. The fact is abstinence doesn’t work. We all do things that we know are in our own long-term worst interest.”

If people “won’t stop having unsafe sex” and “won’t stop eating ourselves to death,” he wondered, how could they tackle climate emissions? “I’m afraid that preaching abstinence with energy is like preaching abstinence with Krispy Kremes or abstinence with sex,” he continued. “It’s a message that says, ‘Yes, forty years from now or a hundred years from now, in 2100, things will be really bad—that’s why you shouldn’t use your energy today.’ If people won’t get that if they have unprotected sex today and it’ll kill you in a few years, why should this other message get across any better? It’s morally bankrupt for the pope to say abstinence only for people to fight HIV—it kills people to say that—and I think that’s a worse sin than fucking.

“I don’t think the world is ready to do anything about climate change,” he said. “I could be wrong, but I say that right now you can sort the world’s countries into two categories: Countries that say climate change is a top priority yet have done absolutely nothing. And countries that say, fuck it, we’re not doing anything. So what have we done? Nothing! Zero! Europe has a little bit of carbon trading, but nobody will tell you it’s done anything—it’s all been window-dressing bullshit. Now, you tell me, where’s the optimism?” He took a swig of his Coke Zero. “We got interested in geoengineering,” he said, “because once all is said and done, more is said than done.”

Without prompting, Myhrvold answered the question I had after the meeting with Tegreene: If IV was researching geoengineering for the good of the world, why the patents? “It’s a little bit of a crazy area,” he began, “because we invent for, uh, money. We’re a company; we’re a for-profit organization. And it’s very hard to see how you actually make money from any of these schemes. Someone could go do it in some other country, and it’s unclear we could go ask them for anything for our patent. It’s not like this is something you sell a million copies of. We decided to actually file patents in part because we file patents—it’s what we do—and in part because we thought this may give us a seat at the table in deciding whether and when the technology is used.” It sounded perfectly reasonable. I still didn’t know whether to believe him.

In time, IV would suffer another media controversy. A report by the radio program
This American Life
exposed how a company that made a point of telling journalists that it didn’t file lawsuits apparently saw to it that its patents were used to file lawsuits. It sold them to affiliated companies, the program reported, on the condition that it get a large share of any profits they might earn—and it was the shell companies that sued. The reporters visited an IV-affiliated shell company, Oasis Research, in twenty-four-thousand-person Marshall, Texas, finding an empty office in a two-story building filled with other empty offices also involved in patent lawsuits, and slowly the back-end arrangement was uncovered. The report was incriminating but perhaps liberating, too. By 2011, IV was filing patent-infringement suits openly, under its own name, trying to shake money from no lesser targets than Motorola, Symantec, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard.