[geo] Recommended : What a “post-truth” media ecology means for climate engineering research – Holly Jean Buck

[Andrew Lockley]

http://ceassessment.org/what-a-post-truth-media-ecology-
means-for-climate-engineering-research-holly-jean-buck/


FCEA The Forum for Climate Engineering
Assessment: Unpacking the social and political implications of climate
engineering
What a “post-truth” media ecology means for climate engineering research –
Holly Jean Buck




*First time here?  Read our "what is climate engineering
" page.*

In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary named “post-truth” its word of the
year, marking a turning point in the decades-long transformation of the
media ecosystem we live in.  It is a transformation which, I’ll argue
below, has serious implications for climate engineering research and
governance.

But, you might say: climate engineering researchers have been dealing with
antipathy for years, most notably from the community of people who believe
that a hostile actor is spraying chemicals from aircraft, forming
“chemtrails” in the sky.  What’s so new?

I’ve been thinking about this since I did aninterview

with
Dane Wigington of Geoengineering Watch.  Dane is one of the most
influential figures in chemtrail circles.  He can also claim much broader
impact.  Information-seekers who type in “geoengineering” will
find*geoengineeringwatch.org
* on the front page of Google results.
 Ordering of search resultsdoes influence people
.
These results reflect two facets of our new media ecology: (1) in this
media ecosystem, a small number of people can claim a large part of the
discursive sphere, and (2) news is narrowcast rather than broadcast, with
polarization growing from repeated exposure to similar sources.

Three things make the potential political role of “chemtrailers” today
quite different than in the pre-Trump era:

   1.  *The Move from Chemtrails towards an Anti-Geoengineering movement:*

Sites like Geoengineering Watch are read by people concerned with
chemtrails (a phenomenon with no clear motivation).  They now use the
language of SRM science, and, consequently, now have a clear motivation
behind their worries.  On the Geoengineering Watch site, the rationale for
the alleged geoengineering is, actually, the real motivation behind
research on SRM – that global warming is out of control.  This makes it all
the more credible for information-seekers who happen upon these sites.
People are making lines in the sky for mind control or to poison us?
Wacky.  People are creating a sunshade to hide the truth of global
warming?  It at least has a plausible rationale.

While retaining the character of its chemtrail antecedents, this concern
over control of the skies has morphed into an emergent movement against
geoengineering. This thesis deserves more elaboration than a blog post, and
it would be interesting to hear from social movement scholars on the issue
— but it seems to meet some of the basic criteria: dense networks,
conflictual relations with opponents, training on how to attract supporters
or win influence, the use of both protest and legal strategies to challenge
power-holders.  The movement encompasses groups like Geoengineering
Awareness Group Canada , or the yearly Global
March Against Geoengineering. These groups represent something quite
different from of the position of environmental groups taking
anti-geoengineering positions like the ETC group, who ground their critique
in a broader conversation about which climate solutions are workable and
just.

There is something to be gained from treating this as a movement, springing
from the concerns of other movements.  The discussions on Geoengineering
Watch illustrate how this new anti-geoengineering platform, grounded on the
premise of existing and ongoing climate manipulation, relates to broader
hostilities towards experts and concerns about class inequality (“They look
themselves in the mirror and see themselves as the upper well-educated
“scientists”, far above all below them” … “The Zillionnaires who are richer
than imaginable want the entire world to operate on an algorithm”). We can
expect these underlying tensions around inequality to grow under the
current administration, thus potentially attracting new people to an
anti-geoengineering movement.  It’s possible that forming an opinion on
geoengineering becomes not an impersonal assessment of a technology, but an
identity position.

   1.  *The Purveyors of Fake News are Getting Smarter*

We have now seen plenty of case studies evidencing (1) how fake news
spreads, and (2) how this can affect political life. Consider that radio
host Alex Jones of th

RE: [geo] Allam cycle gas power plant producing pure CO2 & electricity at cost of regular gas power plants

[markcapron]

Matthias,Supercritical CO2 working fluid looks real.  Lots of research for use in connection with solar thermal and nuclear heat.  The Texas project mentioned in Forbes is the nearest commercial-scale test appearing in the news for the past couple years.  Note that combustion of methane produces a blended supercritical fluid of water and CO2.  Blended supercritical fluids have mole-proportional blended critical temperatures and pressures.  Because of the much higher density of supercritical fluids (near 200 kg/m3) the turbine can be much smaller than a steam turbine.Mark E. Capron, PEVentura, Californiawww.PODenergy.org


 Original Message 
Subject: [geo] Allam cycle gas power plant producing pure CO2 &
electricity at cost of regular gas power plants
From: Matthias Honegger 
Date: Tue, February 21, 2017 8:15 am
To: geoengineering 

Dear colleaguesI wonder what people here think of the Allam cycle gas power plant (see the Forbes article below). Would it make engineering and economic sense to use it on the basis of biogas and to store the CO2 so that it constitutes a negative emissions technology – how could it fare compared to BECCS based on conventional thermal power plant design?Best, MatthiasRevolutionary Power Plant Captures All Its Carbon Emissions, At No Extra CostGreen Gas: the Allam Cycle technology promises a future of emissions-free fossil fuels. Christopher Helman – Tthis story appears in the February Special 2017 issue of ForbesGROWING UP IN ENGLAND after World War II, "all the youngsters like me were obsessed with aircraft," says Rodney Allam. "I had a picture on my wall of Chuck Yeager when he broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1, the earliest turbine-driven aircraft." Those high-powered machines were inspirational. Allam became a chemical engineer and went to work at the U.K. division of Air Products & Chemicals, based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. There in the 1970s, he became obsessed with an idea: how to capture the carbon-dioxide emissions from the U.K.'s giant coal-burning power plants? He already knew where to put the CO2. BP and Royal Dutch Shell would jump at the chance to inject it into their vast oilfields in the North Sea. Injecting the gas (which acts as a solvent to free up stubborn crude oil) has long been a common practice in West Texas fields, where oil companies tap naturally occurring reservoirs of CO2. But there were none of those in England.Allam explored various bolt-on methods to grab the CO2 from a giant 2,400-megawatt coal plant in Scotland. But none came close to viability. For a simple reason: They were too expensive. He became obsessed with making carbon capture affordable: first for the technical challenge and then out of an impetus to slow CO2 induced global warming. "I tried like hell," he says, "but I gave it up in the early 1990s--couldn't make it work."But now he has. In December, Allam, 76, flew from his home in the U.K. to meet Forbes at a construction site in Texas near the Houston Ship Channel, the heart of the nation's largest petrochemical complex. When completed early this year, at a cost of about $150 million, these 5 acres of steel and concrete, pipes, tanks and high-voltage lines will become the proving ground for a technology called the Allam Cycle. It's a novel electric-generation system that burns natural gas and captures all the produced carbon dioxide. The best part is that it makes electricity at the same low cost as other modern gas-fired turbines--about 6 cents per kilowatt-hour.Environmentalists are hopeful. "It's not just a bridge, it's a destination," says John Thompson, who directs the carbon-capture program at the Clean Air Task Force. Renewable energy sources haven't scaled fast enough to replace fossil fuels, and zero-carbon nuclear is too expensive. "We're going to have to use fossil fuels in the future whether we like it or not," Allam says. "The challenge will be in using fossil fuels to produce electricity without emitting CO2 into the atmosphere."Allam left Air Products in 2005 after 44 years. In 2009, he got a call from 8 Rivers, a venture capital incubator in Durham, North Carolina. Bill Brown, 8 Rivers' cofounder, saw piles of federal Recovery Act money available for research on carbon capture and sequestration. It wasn't hard to rev Allam up again. Soon he was sending handwritten brain dumps to the cadre of young engineers at 8 Rivers. Within six months, Allam completed the design. 8 Rivers worked with engineering powerhouses Fluor and Babcock & Wilcox to refine and verify the tech. Brown, formerly of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, presented it to whoever would listen. "Nobody believed us," Brown says. "They thought I was selling snake oil." They had reason to doubt. Bolt-on systems for carbon capture exist, but they reduce efficiency. And they're expensive; Southern Co. is $4 billion overbudget so far on its "clean coal" plant in Mississippi. "C

[geo] 2 publications: Anticipatory foresight methods in (solar) climate engineering research

[Sean Low]

Dear colleagues,

A pair of recent articles for your perusal, on the use of scenarios and
foresight methods for exploring perspectives and anticipating issues on the
means, ends and governance of (solar) geoengineering.

*1) "Engineering imaginaries: Anticipatory foresight for SRM governance"
(Science of the Total Environment):*
 A
write-up of a scenarios project hosted by the IASS, inviting scholars
involved in discussions on the governance of SRM to develop a set of
alternative futures set in 2030, each containing different imaginary but
plausible challenges surrounding SRM development. The scenarios then
provided the context for the suggestion of governance mechanisms and
institutions with the capacity to respond to those challenges, and for the
evaluation of the advantages and drawbacks of different options against a
range of futures. The project website also contains a streamlined summary

.

*2) "The Futures of Climate Engineering" (AGU Earth's Future): *
This piece
contains much of the underpinning theory of the article above. It examines
the need to interrogate the role of the conceptions of the future, as
embedded in academic papers, policy documents, climate models, in shaping
scientific and policy agendas in climate engineering. Potentially valuable
branches of work to come might be the anticipatory use of the future: the
design of experimental spaces for exploring the future of an engineered
climate in service of responsible research and innovation, and the
integration of this work within the unfolding context of the Paris
Agreement.

For further context, I also wish to highlight some previous exercises using
the foresight toolkit in the field:

   1. *Banerjee, B.; *Collins, G.; Low, S. and Blackstock, J.J. (2013).
   Scenario Planning for Solar Radiation Management: Scenario Workshop Report
   (New Haven September 9-10, 2011).
   

   2. *Bellamy, R.* & Healey, P. (2014).  A Report on the Climate
   Geoengineering Governance Project Scenarios Workshop (London , 13 October
   2014).
   

   3. *Boettcher, M.;* Gabriel, J. and Harnisch, S. (2015). Scenarios on
   Stratospheric Albedo Modification in 2013: SPP 1689 Scenario Workshop
   Report (Hamburg 22-24 March, 2015).
   

   4. *Milkoreit, M.;* Low, S.; Escarraman, R.V.; and Blackstock, J.J.
   (2011). 'The Global Governance of Geoengineering: Using Red Teaming to
   explore future Agendas, Coalitions and International Institutions', in:
   CEADS Papers Volume 1: Red Teaming.
   
   5. *Matzner, N;* Herrenbrück, R (2016): 'Simulating a Climate
   Engineering Crisis. Climate Politics Simulated by Students in Model United
   Nations.' Simulation & Gaming.
   


Best wishes,

Sean
-- 
*Sean Low *

*Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam*+49 311 288 22-368
*sean@iass-potsdam.de *

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