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I'm suspect you won't like my answer. First person account of a meeting participant as discussed personally with me.
BTW, I spent much of my career in the patent business, and worked for the man who coined the term "patent troll;" he ultimately went to the dark side - he joined Nathan at Intellectual Ventures.
You seem to have had an interesting life! Thanks for the inside information. (And I actually liked your answer, even though I'm still skeptical of Nathan's anecdote. )
I say clean up the mess we have now. Remove the giant plastic eddy in the oceans and skim rivers of plastic and mass clean the coast lines from floating debris.Find a way to convert methane into a useful renewable energy source. Plant more trees and lawns and crops. Set up giant air filters projects around air polluted cities that destroy the filtered out pollution.
Learn how to use artificial photosynthesis to produce oxygen and release it into the atmosphere. Develop massive air filter plants around the country. Develope a way to restore ocean PH, either with bio engineering of water conditioners like bacteria and pollution eating alga or ionization. Clean up the mess we started and continue reconditioning Earth while we reduce use of fossil fuels instead of shutting down plants, mines, oil and gas operations.
Ocean Cleanup ships are an invention of boom gathering plastic and garbage and the debris is dealt with onboard. They are in use now but they needs more capital to produce more ships.
https://youtu.be/O1EAeNdTFHU
I forgot the simple approach of leading by example. I could do videos, interviews, public demonstrations, etc. of doing daily chores with less or no electricity. I could wash my dishes, cook with a solar oven or crock pot, bike to work, etc. In DC, biking to work would be awful in a business suit. Just breathing in a suit in DC could be awful without air conditioning. I could put a practical cycling and work fashion page in a government newsletter. Any hypocrisy would be an iceberg in my ship's hull.
Clearly no one is actually going to meaningfully reduce carbon emissions, so we have to put a control lever on incoming solar energy.
Contract with SpaceX and Blue Origin to begin construction of a constellation of 5000-10,000 sun shading satellites to be positioned either in the sun-earth lagrangian point, or in the empty space in MEO between current Starlink and GPS satellite orbits.
The technology exists today, since Starlink already has an operational constellation of over 1000 commsats that automatically maintain station keeping.
It will be more expensive to send a large constellation of satellites to a higher orbit, but is entirely do-able with today's technology and launch vehicles, as Starlink has proven.
There are a lot of details and safety switches in the program (ability to deorbit or turn the solar shades edge-on, should unexpected problems arise (too much cooling, unexpected changes in weather patterns), but I'm writing from a phone.
Of course the real problem will be the conspiracy nuts and luddites who are trapped in their political spin cycle of trying to legislate how people live their lives, rather than actually solving problems. Still, existing space treaties and laws do not prevent such a geoengineering solution. So while the world wrings it's hands in angst, the USA can begin launching the technology that will save it, just like we did with Moderna and Pfizer vaccines to covid-the only vaccines that actually work correctly.
Or at least start working on it . .............
So you have the power now. What are the solutions?
Just ignore it.
We are on the verge of a huge population decrease and even a population crisis.
The problem will take care of itself if it is man-caused. And if we didn't cause it there is nothing we can do.
I say clean up the mess we have now. Remove the giant plastic eddy in the oceans and skim rivers of plastic and mass clean the coast lines from floating debris.Find a way to convert methane into a useful renewable energy source. Plant more trees and lawns and crops. Set up giant air filters projects around air polluted cities that destroy the filtered out pollution.
Learn how to use artificial photosynthesis to produce oxygen and release it into the atmosphere. Develop massive air filter plants around the country. Develope a way to restore ocean PH, either with bio engineering of water conditioners like bacteria and pollution eating alga or ionization. Clean up the mess we started and continue reconditioning Earth while we reduce use of fossil fuels instead of shutting down plants, mines, oil and gas operations.
Ocean Cleanup ships are an invention of boom gathering plastic and garbage and the debris is dealt with onboard. They are in use now but they needs more capital to produce more ships.
https://youtu.be/O1EAeNdTFHU
Jeff Bezos $68.6B
Elon Musk $139.1B
Bernard Arnault & family $80.8B
Bill Gates $26.2B
I read somewhere that grass has massive carbon retention. Grass is about the best thing we can plant. Trees are good, too. North America has been reforesting for several decades now and we're really not the problem.
Brazil is the problem. The Amazon rain forests and jungles are one of a kind, contributing massively to global carbon intake and oxygen production (though, the biggest producer of oxygen is algae in the oceans). Not only that, but the Amazon has massive biodiversity, more species of bugs and other critters than anywhere else in the world. There are species there that we haven't even discovered or catalogued yet. Can't let them destroy it.
Cleaning up the plastic crud from the oceans, and stopping 3rd World countries from flushing their plastic waste into the ocean (they are the main source; the U.S. and Europe don't put much plastic into the water) sounds like a good plan. Also restrict fishing and whaling. Let the oceans heal, and they'll produce more O2 and help to lower CO2 in the atmosphere.
Some scientists believe it's already too late; vast areas of permafrost in Siberia are starting to melt, releasing long-trapped methane into the atmosphere. That's a bad thing. Also, the acidity of the oceans is rising, which also releases methane trapped in minerals in the ocean floor. I'm not sure what we can do about this.
Someone mentioned the notion of blocking out the sun; Bill Gates is pushing this. It's a novel idea, but would it work? Remember that solar energy also powers plants, which take up carbon and emit O2. Might it turn out to be a horrible mistake, a climactic catastrophe?
The Earth is coming out of an Ice Age, one of many over the eons. Right at this time, we don't want it to warm up too much, but it's definitely been warming up long term for the past few thousand years and this is really nothing new.
Clearly no one is actually going to meaningfully reduce carbon emissions, so we have to put a control lever on incoming solar energy.
Contract with SpaceX and Blue Origin to begin construction of a constellation of 5000-10,000 sun shading satellites to be positioned either in the sun-earth lagrangian point, or in the empty space in MEO between current Starlink and GPS satellite orbits.
The technology exists today, since Starlink already has an operational constellation of over 1000 commsats that automatically maintain station keeping.
It will be more expensive to send a large constellation of satellites to a higher orbit, but is entirely do-able with today's technology and launch vehicles, as Starlink has proven.
There are a lot of details and safety switches in the program (ability to deorbit or turn the solar shades edge-on, should unexpected problems arise (too much cooling, unexpected changes in weather patterns), but I'm writing from a phone.
Of course the real problem will be the conspiracy nuts and luddites who are trapped in their political spin cycle of trying to legislate how people live their lives, rather than actually solving problems. Still, existing space treaties and laws do not prevent such a geoengineering solution. So while the world wrings it's hands in angst, the USA can begin launching the technology that will save it, just like we did with Moderna and Pfizer vaccines to covid-the only vaccines that actually work correctly.
It should be noted that the mRNA process used by Pfizer was developed in a lab in Germany by 2 scientists who are immigrants to Germany of Turkish origin. Pfizer is a multi-national company and it partnered with BioNTech, a German company. Messenger RNA was first theorized by French biochemists, one of whom won a Nobel Prize in the 1970s. It was perfected by Americans at CalTech and others.
The scientific community is networked globally and they tend not to be all jingoistic nationalists. Most scientists I've met do what they do for the good of mankind. The Cold War is over.
Sure, which is why the secret of making nuclear weapons was released, but not the secret for manufacturing MRNA vaccines for a pandemic that is killing thousands every day.
Different people measure the good of all mankind differently. Nuclear war was a ELE. Covid is not. Climate change has the potential to be.
The big difference is that there is no secret recipe to geoengineering. Anyone with the infrastructure can launch sun shades. The USA just happens to have the infrastructure to do it. The money spent on alternative fuels and carbon credit/capture could probably find the entire solar shading constellation.
I'm not saying that is the way to go. We certainly shouldn't put all our eggs in a single geoengineering basket. It might not work, but we will never know unless we try.
To be clear: we should launch a few spacecraft into the lagrangian point and see if we can attenuate (and de-attenuate) the solar radiation flux at the Earth's surface.
I'm saying that is not the ONLY thing we should do. Minimizing consumption of nonrenewables and production of CO2 remains important. It's just not going to solve our current problem by itself.
1) Mandate all weather monitoring sites meet the NOAA siting requirements. Ninety percent do not meet their own criteria. This would dispel and help correct the so called trend lines being used for political / corporate purposes.
2) Encourage a new economic business model which dissuades velocity (planned obsolescence). I.e. build less 'stuff' that lasts longer. This would greatly help the environmental issues and cut down on commercial energy use.
3) Mandate ALL countries abide by the USA EPA standards. And that violators at corporate levels be prosecuted to fullest extent of law and their 'wealth' be used for any remediation efforts as well as distributed (when proved) to those harmed and impacted by any environmental hazards they have created.
There is an inherent disconnect between economic business models and "Environmental" goals. They are not compatible which is a fundamental problem.
The Romans could build things to last but we plan for disposable construction. I know not everything can be built to last, but I hope you get the underlying disconnect. In the corporate business world's striving for growth metrics as more units, velocity, and greater marginal unit profit, they have accelerated environmental problems. They simply shift them to countries with lax environmental laws or are paid off. Hence, number 3 above.
Stop the disingenuous efforts by corporate owned politicians to use any crisis (real or imagined) to monitor the population i.e. electrical usage, the so called "Internet of things" and all the other BS they like to promote which does little to help the environment, but is designed to (as usual) privatize/maximize the profits (new regulations to preferred corporate suppliers) and socialize the costs to you the individual.
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