The New Yorker: A Technological Solution to Global Warming?

The May 14, 2012, issue of The New Yorker is the "innovators" issue, with articles about the rise of drones in the United States, an artificial leaf that mimics the way plants convert solar energy, and a look at the promises and risks of geoengineering our way out of global warming. Plus, a beautiful cover by Bob Staake.

In “The Climate Fixers” (p. 96), Michael Specter looks at the possible benefits and risks of “geoengineering,” the attempt to ameliorate global warming by deliberately altering the climate of the earth. For years, “even to entertain the possibility of human intervention on such a scale . . . has been denounced as hubris,” Specter writes. “Predicting long-term climatic behavior by using computer models has proved diﬃcult, and the notion of ﬁddling with the planet’s climate based on the results generated by those models worries even scientists who are fully engaged in the research.”

But “at some point we are going to have to take the facts seriously,” David Keith, a professor of engineering and public policy at Harvard and a supporter of geoengineering, tells Specter. Specter looks at the two technological fixes for global warming: solar-radiation management, which focusses on reducing the impact of the sun by seeding clouds, spreading giant mirrors in the desert, or injecting sulfates into the stratosphere, an attempt to replicate the eﬀects of volcanic eruptions; and another, “less risky” approach, which involves removing carbon directly from the atmosphere and burying it in vast ocean storage beds or deep inside the earth.

Peter Eisenberger, the president of Global Enterprises, has developed a system that he believes will capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at low heat and potentially low cost. He tells Specter that he has “devised a system that introduces no additional threats into the environment. And the idea of interfering with benign nature is ridiculous. The Bambi view of nature is totally false. Nature is violent, amoral, and nihilistic. If you look at the history of this planet, you will see cycles of creation and destruction that would oﬀend our morality as human beings. But somehow, because it’s ‘nature,’ it’s supposed to be ﬁne.’’

But the risks of geoengineering are very real: if a program such as sulfur injection should fall apart, Specter writes, “the earth would be subjected to extremely rapid warming, with nothing to stop it. And while such an eﬀort would cool the globe, it might do so in ways that disrupt the behavior of the Asian and African monsoons, which provide the water that billions of people need to drink and to grow their food.”

Keith tells Specter that it is “hyperbolic to say this, but no less true: when you start to reﬂect light away from the planet, you can easily imagine a chain of events that would extinguish life on earth.” The odd thing is that “this is a democratizing technology,’’ the scientific entrepreneur Nathan Myhrvold tells Specter. “Rich, powerful countries might have invented much of it, but it will be there for anyone to use.” Countries such as the Maldives, which would be under threat of flooding if oceans were to rise, could say, “ ‘Fuck you all—we want to stay alive,’ ” Myhrvold tells Specter. “Would you blame them?” Deliberately modifying the earth’s atmosphere “would be a desperate gamble with signiﬁcant risks. Yet the more likely climate change is to cause devastation, the more attractive even the most perilous attempts to mitigate those changes will become,” Specter writes. “The best solution, nearly all scientists agree, would be the simplest: stop burning fossil fuels, which would reduce the amount of carbon we dump into the atmosphere.”

The New Yorker: The Climate Fixers -- Is there a technological solution to global warming?

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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http://twitter.com/digitalArtform Joseph Francis

I like the double ﬀ thing you have going on there.
t3kna2007

The people at the office can’t agree on how to set the thermostat on the second floor …
Teller

Think Monsanto then go for it!
Wreckrob8

Increasing the number of ‘facts’ at our disposal decreases the number of ‘facts’ still to be discovered, obviously. How could geoengineering be hubris?
- hypnosifl
  
  How does the first sentence connect to the second? Trying to increase the number of facts at our disposal is basic scientific research, not engineering. Geoengineering could be hubris if we are overconfident about our ability to control a very complex system like the climate and world ecosystems, whose behavior involves all sorts of complex feedback effects that aren’t fully understood and mapped out. If trying to geoengineer the climate led to terrible unanticipated side-effects, that would fit pretty well with the classical notion that life tends to punish those guilty of hubris (those who have overweening, unjustified confidence in themselves and their abilities, which drives them to bold and foolish action).
  - Wreckrob8
    
    Sorry, that obviously was meant sarcastically (hence the final position preceded by a pause as a clue and the word ‘ facts’ in inverted commas). The two sentences do connect. Knowledge is not a finite resource to be mined. What happens to the precautionary principle when the situation seems desperate?
http://www.disoriented.net/ angusm

Pro Tip: it’s better to limit your terraforming activities to planets that you’re not actually living on, as damaging screw-ups have a smaller impact when the ecosystem is not in current use.
- SomeGuyNamedMark
  
  Or if you do nothing to control population growth you are just treading water at best.
  - jgs
    
    Last I looked, population growth was still thought to look something like a logistic curve and was expected to flatten “on its own”. So a stopgap fix might be sufficient.
    - wysinwyg
      
      Heck, “flatten” might not even cover it:
      http://newamerica.net/publications/policy/the_population_implosion
      - SomeGuyNamedMark
        
        Some disagreement out there, especially taking sub Saharan Africa into account. Even if it does flatten it will be at the astronomical number of 9 billion and that is on medium estimates.
        
        http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-01/idrp-sat010808.php
        
        http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf
      - http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
        
        Mark, there’s not too much disagreement there, virtually everyone agrees it will flatten, at what number it does is another matter, but please enough with the Africa bashing. Africa is going through the exact same sort of growth China and India went through over the past hundred years, and exactly the same sort of growth Europe and the UK went through during the Industrial Revolution.
        
        Astronomical number of 9 billion? That’s 2 billion more than we’ve got at the moment. Considering how god damn inefficiently we use the Earth’s resources at the moment, we can cater for another 29%. We already have the technology to cater for 9billion we just need the political will.
  - http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
    
    You keep harping on with this each time it’s brought up, and every time you get the same responses. Population growth flattens out naturally. Population isn’t the problem, its how we chose to live.
    
    Come up with a new angle or at least find some decent evidence to back up your simply knee-jerk reactions, and please don’t link the the article about Africa’s population growth again, Africa isn’t and hasn’t ever been the problem with regards to climate change. Although Africa is likely to be one of the continents hit hardest by climate change….
- jgs
  
  Your pro tip comes a few thousand years late.
Guest

“Peter Eisenberger, the president of Global Enterprises, has developed a system that he believes will capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at low heat and potentially low cost.”

Yeah, beat PLANTS.
- onepieceman
  
  So you believe that, even in principle, we can’t outperform nature on a specific engineering challenge?
  Good luck hitching that next trans-atlantic flight on your tame albatross…
  - wysinwyg
    
    I believe that there are specific engineering challenges in which we cannot, even in principle, outperform nature (note, slightly different than what you’re saying). This is actually obvious. No one has been able to program a computer to do OCR with the success rate of a 6-year-old human child. No one’s been able to program a robot to perform with even a squirrel’s degree of fine-motor skills. It’s only been about a decade since a company made an artificial heart that doesn’t kill more people than it saves (and that’s a relatively simple challenge). And no one has made any solar energy devices that are even close to the efficiency of a plant (higher output, sure, but much lower efficiency).
    
    Edit: Chloroplasts operate at a molecular scale. We might, in principle, be able to do better than plants but we’d need to master nanotech first. Even then, I think it’s rather unlikely that there’s a solution that’s simultaneously simpler and more efficient than chloroplasts (or nature probably would have found it first).
    - onepieceman
      
      But these are statements about current technological achievement. What makes you think that progress in these fields will stop? I’m sorry about the facetious reference to trans-atlantic travel, but you have to admit that in the field of aeronautics, there are many measures (speed, carrying capacity, altitude etc) on which engineering has beaten nature, and that is by no means the only example. What’s so special about OCR that makes you think the same can’t be emulated there? It’s only a few decades since the first OCR devices were invented…
      - wysinwyg
        
        Read my edit, there’s particular reasons for thinking we can’t make a solar engine that’s more efficient and robust than a chloroplast.
        
        As far as OCR goes, the computers we’re programming to do OCR are much faster than neurons but much slower, less efficient, and much more error-prone than human beings at doing OCR. This is because the brain is not based on von Neumann architecture. The brain’s architecture is better at solving certain sorts of problems than computers are.
        
        That’s not to say we can’t reverse engineer those principles to perform OCR, but in those cases machines are going to be much more error-prone than human beings. Because human beings use a lifetime’s worth of learned context for error correction — and this context is learned emotionally through social reinforcement. I don’t think you can give a machine the kind of training that makes humans such fantastic linguists. Not to mention the fact that our computerized OCR systems are already vastly less energy efficient than “biological OCR systems” and most proposals for improving the error rate involve dramatically reducing energy efficiency.
        
        Evolution works at the molecular scale. To catch up, engineers will also have to work at a molecular scale. They also have about 3 billion years to catch up on. And the law of diminishing returns applies.
        
        Edit: You’re still ignoring the fundamental argument here: human beings simply cannot do better than a chloroplast. In the case of chloroplasts, it’s not enough to say that evolution only produces things that are “good enough” because that is not true in some cases. In particular, basic metabolic pathways are always being selected for efficiency and have been so for, like I said, 3 billion years.
        
        If you think it’s possible to create a solar engine that’s more efficient than a chloroplast than I would invite you to actually describe the molecule and how to create it at industrial scales. This doesn’t seem plausible to me considering how small, efficient, and robust chloroplasts already are. Proving 100% that it can’t be done would be proving a negative, so rather than demand that I do the impossible why don’t you make a plausible argument for your side?
        
        And there’s no real mystery why I picked the examples I did. Molecular “machines” like chloroplasts” are already hitting theoretical limits in terms of size, robustness, and efficiency. Brains are essentially the most complex organized bodies yet discovered anywhere in the universe, many orders of magnitude more efficient and effective than digital computers of similar computational capacity for basically anything but doing math really, really fast.
      - onepieceman
        
        What you say is correct, but you leap to a conclusion which isn’t justified by your facts.
        The biggest mistake is the “can’t beat nature’s head start” argument. Although it’s true that nature (or more specifically, evolution) has had a big head start, it also true that it has many significant constraints, the greatest of these being that the process is totally blind and has no foresight. Nature can’t “decide” to develop a better solar panel. If the one it’s developed is “good enough” in the ecological niche within which it has to reproduce, then that’s all that needs to happen. This is why you don’t get any supersonic birds, despite the billions of years nature has had to work on the problem. So there’s one example where humans have “caught up” with 3 billion years in less than 100 years. There are so many other examples of humans “catching up” that I really don’t see how you can stand this argument up, unless you find an area where the lack of foresight isn’t a great disadvantage. Maybe there is such a special area where it will be difficult to compete, but I really don’t understand why you pick the examples you do.
        
        Edit: The purpose of a plant is not to generate power, nor is it to sequester carbon, although it does both these things. The trouble is that it has to balance these things with its other objectives, such as reproduction, robustness against extremes of weather etc. I just don’t see how you can claim that basic metabolic pathways are always being selected for efficiency. Surely they’re being selected for survival, and if survival is a multi-faceted problem, then individual traits such as energy generation efficiency cannot be optimised compared to a scenario where these other problems are taken away.
    - Guest
      
      ”Even then, I think it’s rather unlikely that there’s a solution that’s simultaneously simpler and more efficient than chloroplasts (or nature probably would have found it first).”
      
      THIS
      - Jonathan Badger
        
        Not sure if I buy that. Natural selection is a search algorithm operating over the domain of all possible solutions and as such can easily get trapped in local optima. Chloroplasts aren’t necessarily the globally optimal solution, just good enough to work (and better than what we’ve managed to come up with to date ourselves, granted).
      - Guest
        
        @Jonathan – I prefer Sagan to Asimov.
    - http://hgomersall.wordpress.com/ heng
      
      What? Your claim about photosynthetic efficiency versus solar energy devices is simply false. Photo-voltaics have been out performing plants for about 30 years. The best devices are getting on for 40-odd percent efficiency (versus 8% for the best plants).
      - hypnosifl
        
        I think a direct comparison may have a slight apples-and-oranges aspect though, since you’re comparing the efficiency of converting sunlight into electrical energy with the efficiency of converting sunlight into stored energy in chemical bonds. This paper seems to say in fig. 3 that the theoretical maximum efficiency for the latter is about 30% (though without reading the full paper I’m not sure what assumptions they make–maybe they assume the chemicals storing the energy must be biomolecules, for example). This discussion was originally supposed to be about “efficiency” in capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere though, not necessarily in using the capture to generate/store energy. This article and this one say they already have experimentally demonstrated that certain types of plastics do this better than anything else tested, which I imagine would include plants (this article discusses a proposal for “artificial trees” which presumably would use similar chemicals, and notes “Lackner’s ‘trees’ are actually towers designed to hold out arrays of sorbent chemicals, which, he says, can capture a thousand times more CO2 than real trees of comparable size”…this article also has some further discussion)
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        Your first link is missing a URL.
      - hypnosifl
        
        Thanks. Too late for me to edit, but the first link was supposed to be to this paper, and the specific graph I was talking about is here.
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        You can’t edit it? Is there a time limit on edits? I have no idea how things work for all the little people sitting out there in the dark.
      - hypnosifl
        
        Yeah, there seems to be some time limit…my most recent post beginning with “Thanks”, which it says I posted 47 minutes ago, is still editable, but the post before that where I forgot the link, which it says I posted 1 hour ago, isn’t.
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        Well, now I know. Thanks.
  - Guest
    
    “So you believe that, even in principle, we can’t outperform nature on a specific engineering challenge? ”
    
    we can’t out-efficient it in an open system, no. Have you met physics?
    - hypnosifl
      
      Physics imposes some upper limits on “efficiency” in the sense of amount of sunlight converted to chemical energy, but what does that have to do with the claim that biology will have found the most efficient solution? In fact, according to the wikipedia article on photosynthetic efficiency, plants do significantly worse than the theoretical maximum efficiency allowed by physics:
      
      For actual sunlight, where only 45% of the light is photosynthetically active, the theoretical maximum efficiency of solar energy conversion is approximately 11%. In actuality, however, plants do not absorb all incoming sunlight (due to reflection, respiration requirements of photosynthesis and the need for optimal solar radiation levels) and do not convert all harvested energy into biomass, which results in an overall photosynthetic efficiency of 3 to 6% of total solar radiation.
      
      And even if plants use the most efficient conversion possible with organic molecules, why isn’t it possible there could be a more efficient conversion with types of molecules not available to carbon-based life? Also, it’s worth noting that a recently-evolved form of photosynthesis known as C4 is more efficient under certain conditions than the C3 photosynthesis used by most plants, yet C4 photosynthesis didn’t evolve until about 30 million years ago according to this wikipedia article (though perhaps that’s because CO2 levels were so much higher in the past and C4′s advantage over C3 decreases at higher CO2 levels), but even today only about 0.4% of plant species use it according to this page (which seems to suggest that in the time since C4 evolved, there are some environments where C3 plants are persisting in large numbers despite being suboptimal photosynthesizers).
      - hypnosifl
        
        For actual sunlight, where only 45% of the light is photosynthetically active, the theoretical maximum efficiency of solar energy conversion is approximately 11%.
        
        Although I should add that I think here they are talking about maximum efficiency in converting solar energy to biomass, whereas according to fig. 3 here, the efficiency of converting solar energy into stored chemical energy could be more like 30% (still less than the efficiency with which the best photovoltaics can convert solar energy to electrical energy, as someone else on this thread noted).
      - Guest
        
        You add up all the materials required to ‘achieve’ that efficiency, and where did it go?
      - hypnosifl
        
        Huh? Why should the material “go” anywhere, rather than remaining as the final molecules produced by the process? Perhaps some are waste products from the point of view of a plant and are excreted, I don’t know the details, but I don’t see why this would be relevant in any case. Can you make an argument rather than asking a confusing rhetorical question?
Sparrow

Actually, they want to outlaw plants, because they compete with their business model.
yri

In the RGB Mars books, they use a “soletta,” basically a giant solar focusing device in space, to increase the warmth of the planet as part of the terraforming effort. You could do the reverse with a giant solar shade positioned between us and the sun. In fact, I seem to recall they do that later on in the books, to help combat global warming on Earth.
- http://twitter.com/writebastard Ian Wood
  
  Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun!
keplers

‘The best solution, nearly all scientists agree, would be the simplest: stop burning fossil fuels, which would reduce the amount of carbon we dump into the atmosphere.’

best and simple, yet it’s not going to happen.
wysinwyg

Wind turbines turn atmospheric thermal energy — waste heat from the sun — directly into electricity. One of the “drawbacks” of wind energy is that if it were deployed at scale it would have to be factored into climate and weather models for exactly this reason.

But if we’re already talking about geoengineering it doesn’t seem to me that this is really a drawback. This is the solution to global warming. Just build enough turbines to suck the heat right out of the atmosphere. If we build too many it’s easier to undo than it would be to undo spilling billions of tons of sulfur into the sky.
- AnthonyC
  
  Wind energy draws on pressure differentials, not global average temperatures.
hypnosifl

It seems like carbon capture, if it actually worked efficiently, would be the one type of geoengineering with very little possibility for unanticipated consequences–wouldn’t capturing X tons of carbon per year be basically the same in effect on the atmosphere as cutting carbon emissions by X tons per year? Of course there’s the question of whether the technology will ever be good enough that building enough carbon capture devices to capture X tons per year would ever be cheaper than just cutting emissions by the same amount, but if such a technology did exist I’d think most environmentalists would be on board with it, unlike with other forms of geonengineering. Maybe I’m missing something though…
- Brainspore
  
  It seems like carbon capture, if it actually worked efficiently, would be the one type of geoengineering with very little possibility for unanticipated consequences…
  
  That’s what makes them “unanticipated.”
  - hypnosifl
    
    Well, you could equally well say that reducing carbon emissions could have unanticipated consequences. My point is that I don’t see why it’d be reasonable to think carbon capture is any more dangerous that reducing emissions.
    
    Also, while virtually any experiment could have unanticipated consequences, this would probably be a good place for that Rumsfeld quote about known unknowns vs. unknown unknowns…there are plenty of situations in science where scientists may “expect the unexpected” within certain bounds, without that meaning they just throw up their hands and say that absolutely anything is equally plausible (think of scientists dismissing the idea that the large hadron collider could destroy the Earth while still not knowing exactly what it would discover, for example).
- Ultan
  
  Well, what if your CO2 repository breaks open, and spills its contents all at once? So it’s not necessarily safe. How much energy does it take to concentrate the CO2, and what are the climate effects of that? Nobody is saying, so it’s not necessarily even workable. No, carbon capture is much, much riskier than albedo management.
  
  Managing cloud cover is much safer, easier and takes advantage of the effects we are already causing unintentionally. Just change the routes and altitudes of some jets slightly depending on weather conditions so that they are more likely to leave contrails only in the just before dawn and the early-to-mid part of the day. Perhaps relax fuel sulfur standards in flights flying in those hours so that there is more cloud nucleation. That could add a substantial fraction to the increases in cloud cover already caused by contrails during the day, when those clouds are reflecting light. Do the opposite during the other 1/3-2/3 of the time, depending on season, so that night cloud cover is reduced, allowing heat to radiate into space at night. See this article in the C.S. Monitor for more: “Airplane Contrails and their Effect on Temperatures”.
  
  (It’s a suggestive natural experiment that cloud cover in the US decreased substantially in the no-fly days after 9/11. This caused cooling at night and warming during the day, giving the widest daily temperature ranges in 30 years across the US – over 1C wider than usual. It’s at least hundreds to one against this just being a coincidence. )
  
  But the idea that global warming will suddenly kick into overdrive and kill everyone with a slight shift in the amount of cloud cover (as expressed in the article) is ludicrous. At worst, you just return to the slope of heating you had before.
  - hypnosifl
    
    Well, what if your CO2 repository breaks open, and spills its contents all at once?
    
    Don’t all carbon fixation proposals involve fixing the carbon atoms into the molecules that make up some solid or liquid substance, akin to what happens in photosynthesis? If it’s not in gas form then I’d think breaking open a repository wouldn’t release a bunch of gas back into the atmosphere, any more so than an oil spill (like an oil spill it might have other harmful environmental effects of course, just not climate effects). Also, I imagine there would be a huge number of local repositories, not one giant one.
    
    How much energy does it take to concentrate the CO2, and what are the climate effects of that? Nobody is saying, so it’s not necessarily even workable.
    
    Is nobody really saying, or have you just not looked into it? I would imagine advocates of the approach would give at least some kind of back-of-the-envelope estimate of costs in both money and energy. Presumably the energy source would be the same as whatever we use for the rest of the power grid, so again, if it was cost-effective it seems it should be no more dangerous than reducing CO2 emissions by increasingly using some other source of power like solar or nuclear (I don’t think either would have any major climate effects even though nuclear can sometimes obviously cause more localized environmental disasters).
    
    No, carbon capture is much, much riskier than albedo management.
    
    Would most climate experts agree?
    
    It’s a suggestive natural experiment that cloud cover in the US decreased substantially in the no-fly days after 9/11.
    
    Wouldn’t the decrease in albedo here be much smaller than the increase in albedo needed to combat global warming? If so, I don’t think you can assume climate effects scale in a linear way.
    
    But the idea that global warming will suddenly kick into overdrive and kill everyone with a slight shift in the amount of cloud cover (as expressed in the article) is ludicrous.
    
    Are you a professional climate scientist? If not, how can you have enough knowledge to make such a definitive judgment? this section of the wikipedia article links to some published sources discussing risks of albedo management, including this paper published in Environmental Research Letters which investigated the effects of a sudden decrease in albedo (after it had been artificially increased in a geoengineering scheme) using climate models. The results are given in the abstract: “Climate engineering resulted in much higher rates of warming, with the temperature change in the year following the removal of climate engineering ranging from 0.13 to 0.76 °C. High rates of temperature change were sustained for two decades following the removal of climate engineering; rates of change of 0.5 (0.3,0.1) °C/decade were exceeded over a 20 year period with 15% (75%, 100%) likelihood. Many ecosystems could be negatively affected by these rates of temperature change; our results suggest that climate engineering in the absence of deep emissions cuts could arguably constitute increased risk of dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system under the criteria laid out in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.”
Brainspore

I kind of liked the solution they settled on in “Futurama” with the big ice cube dropped into the ocean now and then.
- http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
  
  thus solving the problem once and for all!
  - Brainspore
    
    …ONCE AND FOR ALL!
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=113501 Eric Odell

There is no geoengineering strategy that solves the problem of ocean acidification.
GeorgeMokray

Wanna do something quick? Eliminate short term climate forcers like black carbon, tropospheric ozone, and methane, an ozone precursor. UNEP published a report with recommendations to do just that. Here’s a piece with links to the original report and exec summary; http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/06/1088365/-Short-Term-Climate-Forces-Black-Carbon-Methane-and-Tropospheric-Ozone

Almost all the geoengineering plans I’ve seen are highly mechanistic and not at all systemic. We need to think ecologically if we want to get out of this mess. Check out John Todd’s plan for a Carbon-Free Future, the first winner of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, and Alan Savory’s work with herding animals and grassland ecology in Africa, another Buckminster Fuller Challenge award winner. These give you some idea of how to begin to think about ecological engineering on a large scale. My own preferred project would be to expand shoreline buffer zones by planting mangroves everywhere possible as mangroves, I’ve read, absorb up to 30% more CO2 than other trees. Storm protection, reforestation, and enhanced CO2 absorption all at once.

Who has the right to blot out not only the sun but the stars at night? Who has the right to change the color of the sky? (Whitening the sky is one of the effects of injecting sulfates into the atmosphere, another geoengineering proposal. Just heard a lecture on that topic at MIT last week.)
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Whitening the sky is one of the effects of injecting sulfates into the atmosphere, another geoengineering proposal.
  
  Wasn’t that the plot of HIghlander XXVIII?
  
  And why aren’t we doing more reforestation? It’s not exactly controversial.
  - Snig
    
    That’s not how Secretary of Interior James Watt felt. He was afraid Jesus was going to come back soon and he’d be annoyed we hadn’t finished using up the nice forest his dad had provided for us.
  - http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
    
    Where’re the profits to be had?
    
    Perhaps if there is a global carbon price, the price is high enough and carbon sinks are factored in. Then we might see reforestation on a large scale. Even then, the system will be getting scammed left right and centre and I’m sure the same people getting rich reforesting, will be getting rich cutting down equivalent sized forests elsewhere.
hughillustration

Innovative cover illustration by the amazing Bob Staake! http://www.bobstaake.com/