For MIT Climate CoLab: End Global Warming & Climate Change Now Proposal (V 2.0)

The following is a screen capture of the original proposal at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Project Climate CoLab Contest Global Plan,

the proposal page titled

Title

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Give your proposal a title. It's the first thing most people will see, so you'll want to make it descriptive and engaging.

End Global Warming & Climate Change Now

Team name

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If you'd like to have your proposal appear under a team name, insert it here. Otherwise, the proposal will appear under the user name of its owner.

Note: If you enter a team name, it will replace the proposal owner's name in the Author field.

Proposal

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Pitch

140 characters

Insert a tweet-length (140 character) message that conveys the key idea behind your proposal.

Remove all CO₂ added to the air since the Industrial Revolution, in 1-10 years using a forest of synthetic trees

Summary

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Please provide brief summary of the proposal.

Each of Columbia University geophysicist Klaus Lackner's High Volume Shipping Container synthetic trees removes 90 Kilotons of CO₂ per year. Roughly 600-900 Gigatons of CO₂ have been added to the air since the Industrial Revolution (IR), thus needing 10 million trees to remove it all in 1 year, or 1 million in 10 years (Al Gore’s timetable) or 0.3 million in 30 years (John Doerr’s timetable). Note that in 2002-2003 China alone added 10 million cars to its roads. Since global ice is melting much faster than predicted, consider the need as urgent & go for the shortest time period doable. Of all global warming/CO₂ removal geo-engineering proposals, such as increasing cloud/ice reflectivity, stimulating oceanic plankton blooms or launching orbiting space sunshades, most all of which augur unanticipated & potentially disastrous run-away ecological responses, synthetic trees are the safest because they aren’t ecosystem invasive - serving as a distributed, planetary scale CO₂ scrubber, they simply mimic natural tree’s CO₂ removal ability & give humanity breathing room to develop & switch to Net 0 CO₂ tech. Even if all other reduction schemes fail, the trees will remove all post Industrial Revolution CO₂ to the present, can continue to run as a stopgap to remove future global annual contributions, & can be switched off when done.

What actions do you propose?

12000 characters

Describe physical actions to be adopted that will have a direct impact on climate change and/or social actions (such as new policies, changes in economic incentives, or evolution of behavioral norms) that will encourage adoption of those physical actions.

With global ice melting far faster than predicted, our plight seems relatively dire & the time to turn things around fairly short. The situation invokes an 11^th hour style scenario that we have often encountered throughout history, which seems to serve as a final trigger of sufficient force that invokes a "humanity’s finest hour" response, setting aside differences & rallying the troops into frequently heroic action. Fortunately, thanks to those who have gone before, learning from history we already have a well developed model for response to this most serious threat to the existence of civilization, as well as implementation of an effective Action Plan to win the struggle for survival: World War II, particularly President Roosevelt’s response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor with a declaration of war & military upgrade of his New Deal Program to the renamed “Dr. Win the War” initiative that launched the mobilization of America to convert all factories to the rapid production of war materials, notably among these being industrialist Henry J. Kaiser’s mass-production battleship production facilities at Kaiser Shipyards, belting out a ship in from 2 weeks to (a record of) 4 days.

The following steps to the “firing up” of the synthetic tree forest should be doable within 2 years:

1) Develop a “Dr. Win the War”(against Climate Change) program to implement the project

2) Propose the plan to all the countries of the Earth at the United Nations, as meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals, particularly “Goal 7: Ensure Environmental Sustainability”

3) Mass produce the trees as we mass produce cars at an auto factory – the tree is far simpler & cheaper than a car. Actually, it may not be required to mobilize an entire country’s factories but instead just a portion, dedicating just some assembly lines, for just a period of time, to produce the needed trees in the recommended timeframe. Further, if there are shutdown auto manufacturing facilities available, for example in the USA at Detroit, Michigan, then retrofit & repurpose the factory’s assembly lines for the project, thus offering the additional benefit of providing jobs for the laid-off autoworker community

4) Distribute mass production of trees according to each country’s global CO₂ contribution: ~ (rounded) US 17%, China 26%, India 7%, Russia 5%, Japan 4%, remaining (~190) countries 41%. Additionally, include plans for global distribution, installation & startup

5) Sequestration: Extracted CO₂ can variously be…

• Resold for industrial use including: drink carbonation; fresh meat/vegetable packing anti-bacterial/oxidation agent; greenhouse fertilization

• Broken down chemically, using solar powered electrolysis/solar thermal/visible light, into harmless O & CO, for resale (O for Oxygen tank & CO as a primary ingredient of green fuel Methanol)

• Sequestered using gear like Norway’s Statoilhydro Sleipner natural gas offshore CO₂ sequestration platform, & stored in areas like the Norwegian North Sea Sleipner West field sea floor porous rock layer, which Statoilhydro Project manager Tore A. Torp estimates is capable of holding 600 Gigatons of CO₂

• Possibly removed entirely from the earth by venting into space, through a NASA Space Elevator modified as a “pipeline“, with the elevator’s carbon nanotube belt fabricated as a rectangular or circular tube, utilized as a planetary CO₂ “exhaust pipe”. NASA/Marshall's Advanced Projects Office has compiled Space Elevator plans

A primary aim of this proposal is to supplant the many lines of attacking the CO₂ problem with an alternative approach. So many plans involve long lists of actions to be coordinated across many different agencies, while many others require profound changes to a country’s governmental, societal, technological & infrastructural dimensions, including requiring many turn-on-a-dime developments of new, un-time-tested technologies to be swapped in place of old; meanwhile powerful fundamentalist-like science & climate denial lobbyist groups approach majority power, while BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) continue their massive & full-scale development towards total Industrialization, with the remaining developing nations waiting in the wings to launch same, even as countries & multinational companies eagerly eye the vast profits to be made mining the remaining planetary ground & arctic fossil fuel reserves. This proposal does not require or rely upon the success of any CO₂ reduction scheme, nor does it deem likely that remaining fossil fuel will go undeveloped & that developing nations will curtail their development programs. This proposal’s alternative approach is that it recommends a single, relatively simple, direct & failsafe method of CO₂ removal regardless of source or quantity, thereby providing countries the time to make the changes to renewable/sustainable technologies & meet the UN IPCC goals without damaging their economies.

Where will these actions be taken?

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Describe the location where the actions will occur (for example, European Union, China, Rio de Janeiro, developing countries, etc.).

While research, development & production of artificial trees would occur primarily in industrial nations, the location of individual stands of trees comprising the global tree forest would be distributed according to each country’s global CO₂ contribution: ~ (rounded) US 17%, China 26%, India 7%, Russia 5%, Japan 4%, remaining (~190) countries 41%. Alternately, to simplify administration, the entire forest may be distributed across fewer sites, starting with the largest polluters & supplanted with several consortiums of smaller contributors, resulting in just 4 sites: US, China, BRICS or India/Russia/Japan consortium & a Remaining Countries consortium locatable in Europe, Africa or Latin America.

Who will take these actions?

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Describe the key actors from government, business, other organizations, and individuals, and their roles.

• Government will develop & manage the “Dr. Win the War” programs

• Industry will produce the artificial trees

• Academia will determine the optimum design & distribution of artificial tree stands comprising the global artificial tree forest. Additionally, academia will be tasked with expanding the scope of greenhouse gas removal to include the other even more damaging gasses contributing to the problem, particularly Methane from polar permafrost & potential ocean floor methane hydrate melt, by designing a variant of artificial tree that, instead of filtering out CO₂ instead filters Methane – already scientists at Lawrence Livermore have discovered & tested an effective methane-capturing porous adsorbent material called Zeolite SBN

What are the key benefits?

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Describe other desirable outcomes for the environment and society of the proposed actions.

The artificial tree forest will restore CO₂ to pre-Industrial Revolution levels in 1 to 10 years, & can be kept running to keeps things that way for the foreseeable future.The worst consequences of climate change – melting ice, rising seas, super storms, heat waves, drought & crop failure, along with their combined contribution to governmental overwhelming, societal collapse & resultant political instability – can be interrupted &, with sufficient commitment to repair & restoration, backed out, the closer to normal the sooner we start with the larger of forests.

What are the proposal’s costs?

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Project the economic costs and/or any other negative side effects of the proposed actions.

Professor Lackner estimates each High Volume Shipping Container synthetic tree costs about $20,000 to manufacture, the price of a low cost car. For the “10 million trees to remove it all in 1 year” plan, & noting as before that “in 2002-2003 China alone added 10 million cars to its roads”, the cost would be the value of China’s car production for that 1 year for low cost cars.

The total GLOBAL BILL for the 3 plans are:

1) 10 M / 1 Yr = 10 M x $ 20K = $ 200 B *

2) 1 M / 10 Yr = 1 M x $ 20K = $ 20 B *

3) 0.3 M / 30 Yr = 0.3M x $ 20K = $ 6 B *

* with, again, the totals divided among nations according to each country’s global CO₂ contribution, so for the “10 million trees plan”, of the $200B global total, the country payments are US (17%) = $34B (about 0.9% of the total US 2012 budget); China (26%) = $ 52B; India (7%) = $ 14B; Russia (5%) = $ 10B; Japan (4%) = $ 8B, remaining (~190) countries (41%) = $ 82B.

Evidently, beside these core costs would be supplemental expenses involved with tree production, setup & “running the forest”, as well as general administration & sequestration operations. Needed power, supplied by renewables, besides that available from solar & wind, can be provided 24x7 via hydropower by locating the forest by river. As an innovative way to fund & pay for the project, in addition to government funding, to get businesses to pay their fair share of contribution to the problem, create a companies pool to invest in & fund the core & supplemental costs of the project by utilizing the Carbon Offset model.

Time line

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Describe how the proposed actions will be phased in over the short term (5-15 years), medium term (15-50 years), and long term (50-100 years)

The term of the actions is determined by the size of the artificial tree forest chosen, the 3 footprints herein (“10 million trees to remove it all in 1 year, or 1 million in 10 years (Al Gore’s timetable) or 0.3 million in 30 years (John Doerr’s timetable”), with the recommendation that, because of the lateness of the hour, the urgency of the situation & particularly due to having blown past such tipping points as loss of the Western Antarctic Ice Shelf & exceeding the recommended safe level of atmospheric CO₂ 350 PPM (as advocated by former NASA & current Columbia University Earth Institute climate scientist Dr. James Hansen), now past 400 for over a year, that the situation is dire & so the most rapid short term plan is urged, phased in by mass producing the trees, installing the forest & switching on the system as soon as possible.

Related proposals

1000 characters

Please link to all the proposals from other Climate CoLab contests you would like your proposal to include, even if you mentioned them in other sections. You can use the proposal icon at the upper right of the toolbar to add these links. You can also intermix links with text that describes the different categories of sub-proposals and their relationships.

• Carbon Rights (http://goo.gl/1myz5U), where it reads "Based on research by Klaus Lackner..."

• Cycling Carbon (http://goo.gl/xTH3oD), where it reads "Klaus Lackner’s "artificial tree" system..."

How do these sub-proposals fit together?

2000 characters

Describe why all the sub-proposals are mutually compatible. For instance, identify any assumptions that must be true for them to all be possible at the same time.

[FROM: admin@climatecolab.org > “Please note that there is no "How do these sub-proposals fit together?” section in the workspace; I copied the content you had in there [the paragraph below] to the [bottom of the restored to 12,000 chars] “What actions do you propose?” section…Regards…Manuel Thurner]

Explanation of model inputs

2000 characters

Describe the key assumptions, arguments, and detailed models that justify why the combination of actions you propose will result in the model inputs you specify in the Model tab.

References

3000 characters

Include scientific papers, policy studies, journalists’ reports or any other source that provides support for points made in the proposal (you may cite the references in the proposal text).

SUPPORT

• Global Warming/Climates Change Consequences: “The Coming ‘Perfect Storm’ of Natural Disasters”

BACKGROUND

• Artificial Trees: Video, Articles (1 2 3 4)

•• How Professor Lackner got the idea OR “How An 8^th Grade Pre-Teen Girl’s Science Fair Project Saved The World”

••• National Geographic: Scrubbing the Skies

• ”X-Prize” (Lackner's artificial tree startup Kilimanjaro Energy a finalist in Virgin Earth Challenge’s $25-million Prize for CO₂ reduction tech): Virgin Earth Challenge Finalists Kilimanjaro Energy

• CO₂ added to Atmosphere since…: Industrial Revolution 2004 Annually

• “Ocean Overturn” (seafloor CO₂/methane release, as similarly occurs in lakes): BBC “Killer Lakes” (video)

• CO₂ Breakdown:

•• Student pioneers method for breaking down CO₂

•• Learning from nature: Scientists break down carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide using visible light

•• Why not split harmful carbon dioxide into harmless carbon and oxygen? (“apply concentrated sunlight to drive high-temperature thermal reactions that yield carbon monoxide, hydrogen and oxygen from CO₂ and water”)

•• Is it possible to breakdown CO and/or CO2 into carbon and oxygen?

•• How is Methanol Made? (“you need first to create synthesis gas, which has carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas as its main components"

• Methane Capture: Lawrence Livermore

• Space Elevator: Description Details Innovation

• Al Gore Rolling Stone articles: “Turning Point” “New Math” “Scorched Earth”

• USA Budget: 2013

• President Roosevelt: “Dr. Win the War”

CONTACT

Dr. Klaus Lackner, PhD, the Maurice Ewing and J. Lamar Worzel Professor of Geophysics, Earth and Environmental Engineering, The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, Columbia University, USA

& Director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University’s Earth Institute

& Kilimanjaro Energy, Inc. (Founder)

& Lead Author Participant on the 443 pg IPCC Report on Carbon Capture and Storage