1/6 I am thrilled to announce that I have moved to @UChicago to lead a new initiative on Climate Systems Engineering. See news story. This thread addresses some obvious questions.
2/6 Q1-Why does this matter? The UChicago initiative is distinct in that it started with a wide-ranging faculty consultative process that led to a strategic choice by university leadership to pursue research in this area.
3/6 Efforts at other institutions have been driven bottom-up by a faculty member who advocated for research on this topic, often against resistance. The launch of the UChicago initiative thus serves as yet another mark of how work on solar geoengineering is maturing.
4/6 Q2-What is Climate Systems Engineering? It's the intersection of Climate Systems Science and Systems Engineering. Participants will decide the mix of topics as the initiative matures.
5/6 Initial foci include solar geoengineering; aspects of carbon removal such as ocean alkalinity that, like SRM, demand a broad understanding of earth system science; and local interventions to reduce glacial melting.
6/6 Q3-What about Harvard? I am very proud of what we built. A diverse group of faculty across the university are now keen on SRM research. Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program has $$$. My hope & expectation is that it thrives as part of the Salata Insitute.
Motivated by silly commercial stuff that bubbled up this year, this thread provides a few reasons why commercializing solar geoengineering is a terrible idea.
Bouquets, brickbats, or additional arguments most welcome.
3/ Reason 1: SRM's defining challenge is trust. There is no reasonable doubt that commercial-off-the-shelf tech could be adapted to cool the planet at a tiny cost using strat aerosols. Science suggests benefits could be far larger than risks.
2/ Why were we wrong? Solar & wind got cheap (👏) fast and CCS cost were high.
But Harvey & House look only backward. Yet if you issued bids to procure large volumes of low-carbon cement today CCS would be the cheapest way to supply it. Similar for steel and some chemicals.
3/ Harvey & House don't examine intermittency and deep decarb. NG with CCS (looking at you NetPower) may play a role as electricity decarbonization proceeds and the challenge of intermittency get larger. Or maybe nukes or batteries win. But more options are good.
2/ Nerdy thread follows -- tune in tomorrow for a more political thread about opposition to research and regret about not geoengineering.
3/ "The value of information about solar geoengineering and the two-sided cost of bias" in Climate Policy paper with Tony @TonyHardingEco and Maria Belaia.
3/4: Joe Aldy's al's Policy Forum, "Social science research to inform solar geoengineering"
DOI: 10.1126/science.abj6517, @josephaldy and many other authors