Geoengineering: Hacking Planet Earth | Thomas Kostigen

Today we’ll be speaking with Thomas M. Kostigen. Thomas is a New York Times bestselling author and journalist and has written for such publications as National Geographic, Discover, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times. As a journalist, Kostigen has traveled across the world to report on everything from war zones to extreme weather.  I could go on listing Thomas’s many accomplishments but I’ll let them speak for themselves. Today we’ll be focusing primarily on his new book, Hacking Planet Earth: How Geoengineering Can Help Us Reimagine the Future. We’ll talk with him about things that frankly seem more fitting for a sc- fi novel than a climate change podcast, things like zapping clouds with lasers to make it rain and using nanoparticles to reflect the sun’s rays back into space.

Thomas
Hacking Planet Earth really goes into my definition of geoengineering, which is how we can take better control of not only the climate but what the climate accelerates and is connected to. And that’s pretty much everything in our lives. So our food systems, mobility systems, how we conduct urban planning and how we are going to even socialize and interact in the future. And given today’s circumstances, the unfortunate circumstances With COVID-19, we’re getting a little taste of what invisible threats, just like climate change, can do to our everyday life. So within the pages of Hacking Planet Earth, I get into all sorts of technologies that can affect with a big “E” the climate today, not 10 years from now, or 20 years from now or 30 years from now but today. And these technologies range from different types of devices that can deflect the sun to taking carbon out of the atmosphere, to better enhancing our soil for agriculture, to all sorts of things that we have on the innovation front and mad, mad geniuses have gotten behind, we just need to bring to scale. And so the book is really a marriage or a call for a marriage between the investment and business community and the science community. Clearly the government and political forces that traditionally would be our societal benefactors and protect us from things like climate change or other public health issues such as COVID aren’t there for us. So we need to take matters into our own hands and start to do what nature can no longer do for herself. And that is to manipulate the climate for the better for all of us.

David
When I first heard about geoengineering, I thought it sounded horrible and crazy. And the big ideas that I remember hearing about right off the bat were, things like trying to change the orbit of the earth, push the earth a little further away from the sun, and you do talk about that in your book. But, you also kind of go into the downsides of a lot of these solutions or like, what are the unknowns or the risks? Can we maybe talk about that negative perception of geoengineering. You mentioned in your book that that’s pretty widespread in the environmental community?

Thomas
Absolutely. And there’s a couple different ways that geoengineering gets a bad rap, and I do talk about far reaching and theoretical solutions such as space shades, reflective materials that could be shot into outer space or manufactured on the moon to deflect the sun’s rays before they even make it to planet Earth. And I also talk about some other controversial approaches like ocean fertilization and engineering the oceans, and even manipulating the weather. All of these things have been historically looked at as a way for the military industrial complex to take control of our lives and push us in a certain direction and really just be a different type of world than we live in and controlled by very few. The technologies get wrapped into a lot of conspiracy theories. So I mention them only to bring them out front so they don’t come in later and I talk as you probably read in the pages of the book more so about practical applications that are based in rigorous science, that we can now model in computer forms with algorithms and with advances in technologies where we can look at certain scenarios in a virtual world and see how they might play out in the real world. As we know, artificial intelligence has created leaps and bounds of new possibilities in this area so that we can see the world much like we see it and have these scenarios play out so we know what the ramifications are going to be. I originally looked at this exactly from the prism you had described, which was the negative forces here. And I had originally titled the book FrankenPlanet, just for those reasons, because if you look at it much like genetic modification of food, you know what’s the flip side of that, you know, the unknown and I talk about the unknown a lot because it institutes a fear mindset without giving science it’s proper due. No one is talking about doing things at such a mass scale and recklessly that we would totally destroy the planet. It’s quite the opposite. So I do address those scenarios and a lot of those things just to give perspective as to what’s possible today and what’s possible, you know, or even theoretical out there. And also look at what has been traditionally the driving force behind environmental change, which has been looking at mitigation methods and prevention methods. You know, we all look at or have been told to, you know, turn off the lights when we leave the room, lessen our reliance on fossil fuels, you know, trying to lower the carbon footprint and environmental footprint across the board. And I totally encourage that. But those methodologies and those strategies can’t come quick enough and they haven’t worked. And we have to look at the amount of carbon emissions that have been rising over the past few years even. So we have to look at more acute and more effective technologies that will be able to change things at scale more rapidly. And I liken it to the smartphone, because, you know, that is a device and a technology that we didn’t have even a decade or so ago, but it has changed all of our lives in innumerable ways and made our lives much more efficient in many ways. And if you look at that and that’s a private sector type of technology that is meeting market demands, we need to put in those same forces for the climate. So it’s not just prevention methodologies. It’s also solutions based methodologies. And that’s what the book talks about solutions much more so than mitigation.

Keaton
One of the most talked about forms of geoengineering is called solar engineering.

Thomas
Solar engineering is really about how can we better reflect the sun, so not as much of its energy comes here, stays here and gets trapped here so that obviously global temperatures rise. You know, we’re trying to prevent that. So solar engineering, there’s a number of different ways to do it. We mentioned the far out radical, you know, approach of the space parasol you know, that would be launching nano reflective materials into outer space so that they would then cluster and reflect the sun’s energy before it comes to Earth. So that’s the far out. But if you come back down, let’s call it into earth, or onto Earth and look at stratospheric aerosol injections. And that is literally seeding the clouds with reflective materials so that in the stratosphere, the sun’s energy will be reflected and what’s below, that would be us, can live in cooler environments. And there’s also marine cloud brightening, which uses a different type of aerosol. So just ocean spray. Spraying ocean water up into the atmosphere so that those particles will rise into marine clouds and marine clouds sit much lower in the sky than clouds over land. And those particles would then get trapped in marine clouds and therefore reflect the sun better and cool the oceans below. And they’re experimenting with this over the Great Barrier Reef, the largest living organism on the planet, in order to cool that and try and heal the Great Barrier Reef. So the scientists that I’ve spoken to who are working on this project say that gives them the most amount of hope right there. And the way they do it is with these auto-piloted ships. Look at them as like drones for the ocean, and they traverse in different areas and they spray the ocean water up and it does reflect the sun’s energy and keeps the ocean waters cool. 

 So my favorite solar engineering technology is cool roofs and cool roads and now increasingly cool alleys. And I like it because it’s almost an analog approach because it’s very, very simple. And we’ve seen this technology be embraced in many equatorial countries throughout millennia. And it’s simply to use lighter materials for surfaces. So if you go to the Caribbean, for example, you’ll see buildings are, you know, whiter shades or lighter shades, I should say,

 Keaton
What Thomas is talking about is formally known as the albedo effect. And if you’ve ever worn a black t-shirt on a summer day or gotten into a hot black car you know what i’m talking about. Darker colors reflect fewer wavelengths of light and therefore absorb more of that energy. 

Thomas
When you start to resurface dark roofs and dark roads and black tops and basketball courts and parking lots, and you put in a very simple way just lighter surface paint on them. Then it cools those surfaces. 

Keaton
A black surface like asphalt or a dark roof can reach more than 150ºF on a hot summer day whereas a white roof in the same heat can be up to 50 degrees cooler.

Thomas
But cool roofs and reflective roads aren’t just about lighter coloring” Obviously, the materials that are being now developed for those surface coatings are much more sophisticated. They can comprise nano materials that really will report back the reflectivity of the surface. 

In 2017 a team of University of Colorado Boulder Engineers developed something they call a “Randomized glass-polymer metamaterial” which is every bit as science-fiction-y as it sounds. This film, which is only slightly thicker than your average aluminum foil, when applied to a surface not only has the ability to cool the object underneath by reflecting incoming solar energy back into space , but also simultaneously allows the surface to shed its own heat in the form of infrared thermal radiation. And with those, you can really just get a lot of cooling. And if it’s a cool roof, for example, you’ll cool the building below. Therefore, you don’t need to use as much electricity for air conditioning or heat or for air conditioning in the summertime. you can have an entire neighborhood that will be cooled just by making the surface roads lighter. With this technology indoor temperatures can be reduced enough so that a building might not even need air conditioning at all.

In Chicago, which has, I found this really interesting when I was doing my research, the most amount of alleys in the world is in Chicago, and they’re now embarking on making those alleys green or using lighter surfaces so that, you know we don’t have as much holding our trapping of the sun’s energy in those darker surface is what we’re talking about is creating a different type of albedo effect. 

So that’s really an interesting one there on the solar engineering side. When it comes to carbon engineering; artificial trees, uh, one of my favorites there, and and essentially, what these do is take carbon out of the atmosphere at an exponential rate that a normal tree might. 

A lot of people are talking about the need to plant more trees to absorb carbon dioxide but it takes decades for trees to grow from seedlings into large carbon sinks. In Hacking Planet Earth Kostigen tells the story of Klaus Lackner, a scientist who has created an artificial tree that can absorb carbon dioxide much faster than a real tree. A forest of Lackner’s artificial trees could put a real dent in climate change. Unfortunately, there’s only one of them, standing alone in the desert near Mesa, Arizona. It looks like a football goal post with an accordion-like membrane stretched between the uprights. The membrane captures carbon dioxide from the air as the wind blows across it. Then it folds up into a tank where it’s rinsed with water. When it’s wet the membrane releases the captured carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide is pumped into a tank and the process starts all over again. 

We’re seeing all sorts of different devices be developed in that space as well. Um, and so those are a few of my favorites right there in terms of solar and carbon engineering. And then, of course, there’s the laser modification of weather. But we can get into that discussion on a segue to some of those as well. 

David
So did you get to go meet some of the inventors that are behind some of these things?

Thomas
David, I went all around the world to research this book, and it was a fascinating journey for me to meet with a lot of these innovators because they truly are doing great work. And they really are passionate about what they do. I went to me with Jean Pierre Wolff, who’s developed this technology that allows you to use a laser to shoot into a cloud that can create more of a likelihood of precipitation or less, and also can deflect lightning bolts. So really interesting technology just using the lasers in of themselves, combined with weather modification. So I went into his basement laboratory in Geneva and he was able to create a cloud before my eyes, which was a fascinating thing to see because you know, to do that is taking over where Mother Nature is increasingly leaving us off. And so now we can start to see if we can start to create clouds. What else could we start to create? And I also went to the Sahara Desert. I went to the jungles and I went to the Arctic to investigate some of the technologies that are being used there to prevent glacial melt. So, really, all around the world speak with these inventors, entrepreneurs, scientists about what they’re working on now and how we can bring them to mass scale for the benefit of us all.

David

You know, one of my favorite stories in the book and one of my favorite solutions is the idea of fertilizing the oceans with iron to increase the phytoplankton. And I thought that guy that you highlighted in that section of the book also sounds like a pretty interesting character and maybe was kind of the poster child for the environmental community not really approving of these solutions 

Thomas
There are a lot of characters. And I think when you know people are experimenting in different ways than aren’t backed by rigorous science, that’s a dangerous zone. And so because iron dusting could be done by pretty much anybody with a boat and access to a particular type of material that they can dump off that boat to create what’s called ocean fertilization or iron dusting, depending upon how you define it.  Ah, the idea is to use that material to increase marine life now, and certainly, you know, that is just scientifically actually proven, But it can spin out of control and create what we often see is, you know, um, blooms of, ah, of algae that can be harmful to marine life at the same time. 

Keaton
Thomas is talking about a self-professed environmental researcher and eco-entrepreneur named Russ George. He bought 100 tons of iron dust, loaded it onto a fishing boat and spread it across an ocean dead zone off the coast of British Columbia just like spreading fertilizer on your lawn. It seems like it worked. The ocean came alive and the salmon catch the following year was more than 4 times the predicted amount.

But the marine science community was not too happy with George and his project. In 2013 according to George, a twelve-man Canadian government SWAT team in full body armor with weapons burst into the laboratory in downtown Vancouver and held me at gunpoint on the floor for twelve hours while they ransacked the lab and destroyed our ability to process the data,”

 George believes there is a vast conspiracy against iron during. The scientific community points to the possibility that iron dusting could result in dangerous types of algae and red tides. It could change how clouds are formed or contribute to ozone depletion. You’ll have to read Kostigen’s book for the whole story.

Thomas
And that’s why you know, I point out people like that who, you know, may have success without scientific background to do the proper, you know, empirical evidence, peer reviewed studies that are needed so that we know we’re going on the right path. Um, and that’s that’s another thing you the book is really based in promotes rigorous science and promotes, ah, scientists who practice and in a really, you know, accepted manner. But yeah, there are some wacky stories out there. People are going out there and trying stuff and, you know, you look at that and you go well, but, you know, come we make that to draw you. No word from our vocabulary sustainable and in what circumstances? It’s sustainable. And you know how much material to use and where and when and what are the conditions you can imagine other variables that go into that. So, um, you know there’s a lot going on out there, Um, but like in any field, we have to do it with some type of oversight. And I think that’s something that I’m really pushing for now, which is, you know, a geoengineering oversight committee. There is one in the U. N. Some states have laws and rules about geoengineering. And, you know, we need to promote that and embrace those oversight committees. And, um, look at what it’s like to govern in a world where these technologies, if they’re being utilized in laboratories, are for sure gonna make their way out into the real world. So we need to be ready for that as well.

David
Yeah. There’s definitely plenty of reason to be cautious. If you look at all the different ways that we’ve tried to manipulate our environment in the past, even well intentioned things like damming rivers or channelizing rivers. A lot of times, those things have some pretty big unforeseen, um, problems that they create. So thank you, right. We do. Yeah. Oversight. 

Thomas
Well, I mean, if you really start to think about it, really get back to the basics here. Geoengineering starts with agriculture and how we manipulate land for our own food. You know that sometimes things they’re not supposed to grow in places where we’re growing things. You know, animals aren’t supposed to stay in one location as we force them to, So it starts with our food supply. And as you accurately pointed out, same thing with rivers and dams and irrigation. And so you start to go from there and say, Oh, yeah, I didn’t think about it that way. And before you know what you’re into, You know, fish farms, that air unit blocked off from the rest of the ocean. There’s now more farmed fish than there are wild fish in the ocean. It’s really interesting, you know, look at what we’re doing to the planet, what we’ve done to the planet and what we can do on the planet and because we’ve manipulated it so much, you know, concrete and cement. Er, you know, the two most consumed materials besides water on planet Earth. Which means we’re right there next to Mother Nature producing things, which is a phenomenal thing to get our brain around. What can we do to make things better now that we’ve manipulated the planet to put an artificial amount of carbon in the atmosphere that’s changing life as we know it. And that’s really what the book is about.

David
Yeah, let’s talk about when you were in school. I think you majored in writing or journalism. Did you imagine that you were gonna focus so much on environmental writing?

Thomas
No, I didn’t. You know, I’m as you pointed out, I would say it’s a journalism school in graduate school and then I was covering politics down in Washington, D.C. for a different wire service is with the New York running from magazines and, uh, had the, um you know, it is writing about general news all the way to political news too. You know what was going on culturally and had always done a lot of different types of writing as well, and I had written a couple of plays that were produced off Broadway, and, um, that led me to do some television writing as well migrated into some documentary war, and that brought me to Africa and was out doing a documentary or working on a documentary. I should say that someone else is producing. Um, And I was doing a stand up and, um, in Ethiopia, revisiting that we are the world camps if we remember those  and there was a really moment there that put me on the path of wanting to doom or for the planet four people and give people the tools that they could control the environment, what they did in their everyday life. And that manifested into the green book, Um, which came out just on the heels of an inconvenient Truth and provided hundreds of solutions that people could adopt in their everyday life to make the world a better place. And that really kind of pushed me onto this journey where I am today, you know, 10 books in or something like that. 

David
And the Green Book was you had a lot of celebrities involved in that project, or I did ah, every celebrity, I kind of have their own chapter that was related to something they cared about. Or how did that work?

Thomas
Yeah, I mean, each chapter opened up with a different you know influencer, we might call them today or celebrities talking about some of this everyday life, too, you know, be a little bit more environmentally friendly. And so it was a very personal statement about what they did and how they went about approaching this. And that opens a lot of people’s eyes when they see people that they look up to are more familiar with or have that stardom, um, around them. And, um, that often gets people in the past because it attracts attention and so using, you know, celebrity in that sense. And we had, you know, the biggest celebrities in the world and sports figures etcetera talk a little bit about what they do to be more environmentally friendly, because the issue back then was just coming into the mass consciousness. And, uh, that certainly helped, you know, bring attention to the green book and some of the issues that were written about in that book as well. Just a few of the celebrities featured in the Green book talking about what they do to make a difference are Ellen DeGeneres, Robert Redford, Will Ferrell, Jennifer Aniston, Tim McGraw, Tyra Banks, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Owen Wilson, and Justin Timberlake. 

David
I think that it’s kind of interesting that, you know, you started out Ah, your first environmental book was the green book, which was like tips for things that you can do to make a difference. Take responsibility. Um, and I think that kind of the environmental movement has sort of evolved away from that. And you’ve evolved away from that in your writing. And now more and more people in the environmental movement talk about how we need to hold governments accountable and whole corporations accountable and and sort of put our personal effort into applying political pressure on those people. But you’ve gone in this slightly different direction. Um, because it seems like you’re not comfortable. Ah, waiting for governments to do their part either.

Thomas
Yeah, it hasn’t worked. and you know, the political forces Sure, we should keep trying to, you know, implore them to make different changes. But we also need to look at something that can make quicker changes and I believe the private sector and the scientific community has a bit more of a nimble opportunity here to change things more rapidly. Them what we keep looking at, you know, governments to do for us. And the reason that I’m on this path right now is because, you know, the clock is starting to run out on us. We have less than a decade to reduce carbon emissions by 45-50% depending upon the numbers. Before we have climate change and global temperature rise that we won’t be able to do anything about. And when we start to have the heat waves of Saharan intensity and we start to have sea level rise currying, causing 1005 100 year floods, you know, every month or more than that, and we start to have all sorts of these different types of threats that we’ve heard about these effects that we’ve heard about with extreme weather come to fruition, we need to do something about that more quickly. And I think we’re seeing that play out with the public health crisis today that, you know, we’ve heard about pandemics in the past, and now we’re starting to see what actually happens when one hits. And so we have time to do something about it on the climate side. And I hope that, you know, some of the solutions in the book will go a long way toward preventing a lot of those negative effects of climate change to come to fruition. Because we can do something about it now.

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