This week,
as reported by Andy Revkin, entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson
said something heroically, world-historically stupid: “If we could
come up with a geoengineering answer to this problem, then
Copenhagen wouldn’t be necessary. We could carry on flying our
planes and driving our cars.” Sir Richard was talking about removing
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. He’s not alone. The authors of
the upcoming book SuperFreakonomics also think that
geoengineering is a cheap, easy way to avoid the work of fashioning
a more sustainable society. (See
Joe Romm for much, much more on the errors in that book.)
If you cannot see this graphic, please see
this one.
Lesson: the problems humanity faces are systemic and
interrelated. The idea that sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere will
save us is akin to the hope that a math equation can be solved by
erasing one of the numbers.