01.08.2024

Delusions of techno-fix

Instead of dealing with the root causes of the climate crisis, there is a frantic search for technological solutions. However, argues Jack Conrad, there is a real danger of making what is already bad, badder still

Given the abject failure to deliver on government pledges made in Paris 2015 at Cop 21 - and the good chance that average global temperatures will exceed the 1.5oC limit for the “entire five-year 2024-2028 period”¹ - there has been a renewed turn to techno-solutions, when it comes to the climate crisis. Much is perfectly reasonable and, with this or that caveat, unobjectionable: solar panels, wind farms, heat pumps, home insulation and Ulez charges. Other techno-solutions are, though, unmistakably pseudo-solutions.

Top of the list here must be electric vehicles: capitalism’s poster child in the fight to counter global warming. All sorts of government incentives have been put in place to promote the EV industry and get people to buy, buy, buy. The sales pitch is that EVs are good for the environment. Owners can look you straight in the eye and say, ‘I’m helping to save the planet, I’ve brought an EV.’ Doubtless that helps explain why Tesla briefly racked up a stock exchange valuation of $1 trillion, making it worth more than “the other top nine leading carmakers combined”² - that even though Tesla’s profits were not exactly impressive and EVs accounted for less than 8% of US sales in 2023.³

EVs have the great virtue of allowing urban sprawl, road building and the whole car economy going unquestioned, all the while promising to deliver ‘green transport’. And it is undoubtedly true that EVs directly emit no tailgate greenhouse gases - obviously not the case with conventional internal combustion and hybrid vehicles.

However, EVs do not grow on trees. By definition, electricity has to be generated and this results in an altogether less virtuous picture. If it is generated exclusively by hydro, wind, solar or nuclear power, EVs perform far more efficiently when it comes to greenhouse emissions than conventional vehicles, perhaps by a factor of three. If, on the other hand, it is fossil fuels - ie, coal, gas and oil - that constitute the primary energy source, performance is decidedly less impressive. With coal power there is hardly any difference between the emissions of an EV and the best hybrids (over the lifetime of use). Suffice to say, things are not straightforward. There is always an energy mix, when it comes to power generation. In terms of advanced capitalist countries, Norway and France are at the cleaner end, the UK around about the middle, and Germany, Netherlands and the US at the dirty end.⁴

Then there are the batteries. They rely, of course, on mining metals such as cobalt, lithium, graphite, etc. Most cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, often dug in unregulated artisanal mines. Conditions are awful, child labour is common and pay rates can amount to as little as 30p per hour. Pollution levels are extraordinarily high and are linked to birth defects and all manner of illnesses.⁵ DRC cobalt principally goes to China and from there to the world in the form of EV batteries and industrial metals and chemicals.

Lithium mining is mainly concentrated in Australia, Chile and China. It too can hardly be considered eco-friendly either. Huge amounts of fresh water are required - approximately 500,000 litres to obtain just one ton of lithium. Processing and production are energy-intensive too: for every ton of lithium, an average of 15 tons of CO2 are emitted.⁶ Considering these and other such factors, it is estimated that it takes four years, in the UK, before an EV catches up with a conventional vehicle in terms of greenhouse emissions.⁷

There is also the fact that EV batteries are “tough to recycle”.⁸ Tesla, BMW and Nissan batteries are not standardised: they come in various sizes and contain differently-shaped battery cells, joined together by welds and other connections that must be broken down. “This complexity makes the process more expensive and dangerous.”⁹

Nor should we forget the vehicles themselves. The steel, plastics, glass, computer chips, tyres, etc - all involve an environmental cost. Surely, then, when everything is taken into account, the much vaunted transition to EVs is more a giant selling opportunity than any kind of a genuine solution to the climate crisis. And, predictably, not least due to relentless marketing, car numbers of all types continue to inexorably rise (1.475 billion of them in 2024, up from a billion in 2011¹⁰). And oh, what heaven it is to be behind the wheel. Average speed of traffic in London nowadays is 8 mph. Average speed of horse-drawn carriages in Victorian London was … 8 mph.¹¹ So it goes.

Nuclear solution

After years of disenchantment there has been a renewed spurt of enthusiasm for the nuclear industry too. Naturally, this is excused using rhetoric about delivering clean, cheap and secure energy. Nuclear power therefore finds some unexpected advocates, such as George Monbiot, Jared Diamond, James Lovelock, Michael Moore and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who wants to “leave the door open”¹²). Sir Keir’s Labour government is, of course, fully committed to nuclear power and pledges to build a “fleet” of mini-reactors (not be operational before 2030¹³). It promises to make Britain a “clean energy superpower”.¹⁴

However, the old problems remain. Constructing nuclear power stations produces a hell of a lot of greenhouse gas emissions (mainly due to the millions of tons of concrete and the hundreds of thousands of tons of steel). They also take a hell of a long time before being put into operation - it may be 20 years and more from start to finish. There is an exorbitant price tag too. Eg, first proposed in 2007, construction of Hinkley Point C in Somerset began back in 2016 and the estimated completion date is now 2031. All at a cost of between £35-46 billion.¹⁵

Even with the most advanced nuclear reactors, the electricity generated remains hugely expensive - four or five times as much as wind and solar.¹⁶ On top of that there is the disposal of the waste and decommissioning - a hidden cost. In the case of plutonium-239 - half-life of 24,000 years - what makes it particularly hazardous is not its radioactivity, but its carcinogenic properties. If leaked into the water table and drunk, or blown into the air and breathed in as dust, it can slowly kill millions.

Spent uranium, though it has a relatively short half-life, kills quickly because it releases lots of radiation. For example, even 10 years after removal from a reactor, a typical fuel assembly “still exceeds 10,000 rem/hour - far greater than the fatal whole-body dose for humans of about 500 rem received all at once.”¹⁷ High-level waste is therefore deposited in deep, geologically stable, underground sites or left to cool in large storage pools (which in the US are meant to be impervious to natural disaster and terrorist attack). However, despite rigorous inspection regimes, tight operating systems and numerous fail-safe mechanisms, there have been plenty of accidents - most notably Kyshtym, Windscale/Sellafield, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Then there is Zaporizhzhia - a disaster just waiting to happen.

Nor are fusion reactors all they are cracked up to be. True, there have been many breakthrough announcements. But apocryphally the ‘promised land’ of cheap, safe, pollution-free energy is ‘20 years away’ and, as I have argued, probably always will be.¹⁸ Even if the tremendous technological problems can be solved, they remain massively expensive even by the usually massively expensive standards of the nuclear industry. Construction of the ITER complex in France began in 2013 and it is thought that it will cost between $45 billion and $65 billion by the time it is finally completed in 2025.¹⁹ Despite the hype there are many safety risks too. All in all, as Dr Daniel Jassby - for 25 years principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab - concluded in a well-known 2017 article, fusion power “is something to be shunned”.²⁰

So why do various governments relentlessly pursue nuclear power? Maintaining nuclear weapon status, or having the option of going for nuclear weapons status, provides the most likely explanation - see the arguments of Phil Johnstone and Andy Stirling (both of Sussex University).²¹ Nuclear power requires a talent pool of physicists, engineers and technicians, along with a chain of companies capable of supplying the necessary components. The nuclear weapons industry rests on that talent pool and supply chain. Peaceful nuclear power is, therefore, an oxymoron. Those radicals who have thrown in their lot with nuclear power have thrown in their lot with the military-industrial complex. So it goes.

Other solutions

There are plenty of other pseudo-solutions. Take the case of hydrogen. It has real potential as a source of clean, concentrated and easily stored energy, which can be used to avoid the intermittency problem associated with solar and wind (though batteries could do that). But hydrogen suffers from the same problem as EVs: production requires power, which can, of course, be clean or dirty.

So hydrogen comes in many colours. Green hydrogen is made by the electrolysis of water using power generated from renewable sources. However, big oil - eg, Shell, BP, Chevron and ExxonMobil - is proposing, for its own narrow reasons, other, intermediary hydrogens: blue, grey and brown, which rely on oil, natural gas or coal. In other words, burn fossil fuels to save the planet (read: save the fossil fuel industry).²²

Nor is biofuel the panacea it was once promised to be. Governments encourage transnationals to grow monocrops on a huge scale - not to feed people, but to generate power. The ever growing number of cars providing a ready market. Though generating costs are not as high as nuclear power, they are still high. Meanwhile, small-scale agriculturalists are dispossessed and precious land and water resources wasted.

Carbon trading was once considered a sure way to combine ecological sustainability with the dynamism of capitalism. The idea was to offset the carbon cost of manufacturing clothes, taking airflights or keeping the office lights on, etc, with planting forests somewhere, anywhere. Since 1997 and the Kyoto protocol, an elaborate international market has come into existence, which allows investors and companies to trade carbon credits and carbon offsets. In 2023 the size of the market was estimated to be worth $479 billion (and expected to grow by 39% by 2030).

Of course, it is really all about corporate greenwashing. Especially when it comes to ordinary consumers, that matters. People want to feel that they are ‘doing the right thing’ when they buy and companies also want to be seen ‘doing the right thing’. Predictably it has, though, made not the slightest difference, when it comes to the continued growth of CO2 emissions.

More than that - there is considerable evidence that many of the forest planting schemes touted by the carbon offset industry are bogus. A recent research study, led by Barbara Haya of Berkeley University, covering almost 300 offset projects, found a dismal record of systematic overclaiming on benefits (in plain language - fraud).²³ “‘Offsetting’ is a misnomer - you can’t ‘offset’ your emissions,” concludes Haya. “We need alternative ways of supporting climate mitigation, because the current offset market is deeply not working.”²⁴

Government reafforestation and afforestation schemes designed to meet the Paris and other such targets are hardly any different. Either transnationals are subsidised to plant masses of trees by buying up vast tracts of land and establishing industrialised, single-species forestry. Native trees and plants are uprooted and animal species decimated. All in the name of reducing greenhouse emissions. That or there are hasty, ill-conceived and poorly managed non-commercial projects, which all too often fail to grow any forests at all. Instead of letting nature slowly take its own course, ‘wrong trees in the wrong place’ is an all too frequent diagnosis of what typically happens.

Another solution is carbon capture and storage. Not trees, but pipes, filters and machines, in other words CCS technology. Elon Musk has offered his much publicised $100 million XPRISE to spur on CCS development.²⁵ But the real heavy lifting has come from the fossil fuel industry.

The supposed idea is to reduce CO2 levels by sucking it in from the atmosphere mechanically or capturing it before release from fossil fuel burning power stations, steel plants, cement kilns, etc - and storing it in geologically suitable underwater or land sites (which will not leak, of course). However, even on face value, there are definite downsides. The estimated cost of extracting carbon ranges from $15 to $120 per ton.²⁶ In addition there is the cost of transport and storage. Note, however, the IPPC reported in 2020 that to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5°C, between 100 billion and one trillion tons of CO2 needs to be removed from the atmosphere.²⁷ In other words, if CCS was going to do that job, it could cost well over a $120 trillion (global GDP in 2022 was put at some $100 trillion²⁸).

Not only is CCS expensive: it has “a long history of failing”. That for all its claims to be a proven, ready and up-to-go technology. Yes, carbon can be removed from the atmosphere - that much is easy. However, even without the transport and storage, CCS is an “energy-intensive” technology.²⁹ Sadly CCS sucks carbon from the atmosphere only to pump it back out again. Doubtless, if perfected, carbon capture and utilisation has the potential to clean up vital industries, such as cement and steel (CO2 can be captured and put to use). But as a general solution to global warming CCS is a complete non-starter - yet another excuse for prolonging the life of fossil fuel capitalism and delaying the measures necessary to reach net-zero carbon.

Surely, that is why oil majors have invested so heavily in painting themselves as leaders in developing CCS technology. According to the marketing bunk, “carbon capture technologies are critical for lowering global CO2 emissions”. However, in actual fact, the oil majors have not engaged in any serious drive to perfect CCS technology as a solution to global warming - a chimera. Instead, the emphasis has been on enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Sequestrated CO2 is injected into a production well to push out yet more oil - a process which results in 40% of the CO2 being released into the atmosphere (and, of course, more CO2 is released when the oil is finally burnt).

Since 2008, in the US, the oil companies have received a 45Q tax credit of $10 for every metric ton of CO2, if it is used for EOR. A figure, now, thanks to Joe Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ legislation, that has been hiked to $65 per metric ton. So, according to Amy Westervelt, CCS is not only a “fake climate solution”: it has been a way to swindle “taxpayers out of billions”.³⁰

So it goes.

Engineering

Then there are the geoengineering and climate engineering ‘solutions’. Seeding the oceans with iron filings, growing huge algae beds, shooting millions of tons of reflective sulphur dioxide particulates miles up into the upper atmosphere in an attempt to mask solar radiation by mimicking the cooling effect of volcanoes - the latter suggested back in 2006 by Dutch Nobel prize winner Paul Crutzen.³¹

By the way, the climate impact of major volcanic eruptions is nowadays accepted scientific fact. Eg, after perhaps a thousand years of dormancy, Indonesia’s Mount Tambora started to rumble and then exploded in April 1815. Huge amounts of ash and aerosols plumed up into the atmosphere and darkened the sun - 1816 was famously the ‘year without summer’. Global average temperatures are thought to have dropped by 3oC (there were dreadful crop failures in Europe and North America and all manner of disruptive social consequences).³²

While Crutzen deployed the term, ‘geoengineering’, he never actually advocated such a course. Presumably he knew better. Despite that, his work has spawned a veritable swarm of research institutes, global networks, conferences, computer simulations, feasibility studies and government consultations. And amongst those who want to urgently move from theory to practice with Crutzen’s thought-experiment are Bill Gates, George Soros, Dustin Moskovitz and a whole slew of other billionaires and well-endowed foundations. So there is more than plenty of money sloshing around to buy up climate publications, researchers and university departments, and establish an army of well-funded advocacy groups.

By reflecting solar radiation back into outer space, the claim is that temperatures on earth could be reduced by a few fractions of a degree and give capitalism enough time to come to the rescue with the green technologies needed to wean the system off fossil fuels. Probably the likes of Gates and Soros are motivated in part by a genuine desire to prevent civilisational collapse. But, surely, they also see a good business opportunity, when it presents itself. Green technologies such as alternative energy, EVs and CCS/EOR all promise good profit returns

There are other such proposed sunlight reflection methods (SRMs) on the table too. Eg, deploy a giant, 2,000-kilometre-diameter eye patch in space - estimated cost around $5 trillion (plus). Then there is building massive cloud-generating machines; whitening low-level clouds by spraying them with seawater; etc.

Elizabeth Kolbert, a Pulitzer prize-winning author, pinpoints the faulty logic of the would-be geoengineers: “If control is the problem, then, by the logic of the Anthropocene, still more control must be the solution.”³³ In effect, the modern geoengineers want to treat greenhouse gas emissions in the same way as the Victorian engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, dealt with London’s sewage crisis following the notorious 1858 ‘great stink’ - so bad was the smell emanating from the Thames that there was talk of suspending parliament and moving to Oxford or St Albans. Not insignificantly, Bill Gates proudly says in his recent book: “I think more like an engineer than a political scientist, and I don’t have a solution to the politics of climate change.”³⁴

However, the climate system is hugely more complex than the river Thames: everything is connected to everything else. Physics, biology, chemistry, humanity and political economy form an interconnected and interacting whole. So, in all probability, if one (or a number) of these pseudo-solutions was implemented, it would, surely, let loose a Pandora’s box of demons. For example, there is the danger of “slowing or reversing” the recovery of the ozone layer and reducing global rainfall and turning it more acidic (editors, Scientific American³⁵). And, once the SRM programme of upper atmosphere seeding is finally terminated, there exists the “potentially dangerous” consequence of a temperature spike, which would be “two to four times larger” than would otherwise have been the case.³⁶

Such dangers are known knowns. But, inevitably, there are the unknowns. Not inconceivably, geoengineering could trigger a climate crisis far worse that the climate crisis remorselessly reported on each year by the IPCC. Geoengineering would, certainly, if it initially goes well, breed political complacency. Saved from the immediate prospect of climate catastrophe, big business carries on as before, emitting more greenhouse gases, as it furiously pursues its overriding objective: M-C-M'.

Rival national interests represent another obvious barrier. What would China do if the US unilaterally placed a giant solar eye patch above its territory in near space? There would, surely, have to be an agreement between all the rival major powers - not impossible, but unlikely. Surveying the sorry results of past efforts to ‘solve nature’s problems’, Michael and Joyce Huesmann argue, not unreasonably, that humans cannot “substantially modify natural world systems without creating unanticipated and undesirable consequences”.³⁷

So it goes.

Accelerationists

With all that in mind, there are far too many on the ‘left’ who advocate techno-fixes. This approach can be seen in recent times with accelerationists such as Nick Land, Mark Fisher, Paul Mason, Nick Srnicek and Aaron Bastani. Technology is held out as the means of overcoming climate change, third-world poverty, etc, etc. Technology is even credited with a fabulous ability to deliver “fully automated luxury communism”. Instead of organising the working class into a party - so passé - we have the relentless forward march of technology. That, not the working class, undermines capitalism and duly holds out the promise of human freedom. Through supercomputers, through embracing automation, through whizz-bang space rockets, through mining asteroids, through following the “leadingedge” political vanguard of Alexis Tsipras and Pablo Iglesias, we are promised a 10-hour working week, more equality and all manner of tawdry luxury commodities - yes, taken from an article that is over five years old.³⁸

The whole, almost instantly dated, utterly banal, ‘left’ accelerationist programme clearly owes rather more to Eduard Bernstein, HG Wells and Isaac Asimov than Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Orthodox(ish)

Not that orthodox(ish) Marxism can be entirely excused. Here is what Leon Trotsky - still near the pinnacle of political power in 1924 - wrote about refashioning nature:

The present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of meadows, of steppes, of forests and of seashores cannot be considered final. Man has already made changes in the map of nature that are not few nor insignificant. But they are mere pupils’ practice in comparison with what is coming. Faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology, which takes nothing ‘on faith’, is actually able to cut down mountains and move them. Up to now this was done for industrial purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an immeasurably larger scale, according to a general industrial and artistic plan. Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the Earth - if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste. We have not the slightest fear that this taste will be bad.³⁹

And the approach to nature Trotsky preached, Joseph Stalin and his successors put into practice - not in order to realise some global artistic grand design: rather, more prosaically, to provide the state (and in due course, its citizens) with more and more use-values. However, this could not be achieved with genuine socialist planning, which relies on the active participation, the positive control, of the associated producers. The bureaucratic elite pursued the interests of the state (along with its own narrow self-interest).

True, between 1928 and 1973 there were impressive economic growth rates - largely for real. True, between 1953 and 1973 living standards rose substantially - largely for real. But what people experienced in terms of everyday life was shortages, poor quality, being lied to and the necessity of lying in return. A vicious circle that was bound to eventually close.

Under such inherently irrational circumstances, the top leadership blamed foreign experts, old Bolsheviks, former kulaks, first-generation Stalinite cadre, lazy workers, hidebound managers, etc, for the litany of failures … and all that went hand-in-hand with the desperate attempt to find and implement all manner of gigantic techno-fixes. Surely an object lesson, when it comes to climate change. Leave aside the radioactive waste littered over Kazakhstan, the open-cast mining, the oil spills and the ruinous industrial practices which caused choking air pollution, poisoned rivers and killed lakes.

Let us focus on agriculture. We will see why Marx argued that what is needed for rational agriculture is either the “small farmer living by his own labour or the control of associated producers.”⁴⁰ Expropriating the peasants through forced collectivization in the late-1920s and early-1930s caused agricultural production to crash. The cities went hungry. The countryside starved. Millions died.

However, joining together the country’s peasant farms even without the necessary tractors and combines meant that the regime would never again be held to ransom by richer peasants, the kulaks. Throughout the 1920s they had held back grain when prices were considered too low. The state had to respond, either by increasing prices (and thereby denying industry, the army, etc) or by sending out special armed detachments to seize grain supplies.

But collectivization merely collectivized primitiveness. The peasants were, to all intents and purposes, re-enserfed. They were state helots. When tractors and combines eventually came on stream, productivity remained notoriously low. Collective farm members had to be allocated individual plots to grow fruit and vegetables for their own consumption and for sale in special, private, markets established in the towns and cities. Despite lacking machinery, productivity on the individual plots was far higher than on the kolkhoz and sovkhoz.

As one of many techo-fixes, in the second half of the 1940s Stalin proposed his ‘Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature’ - a superambitious response to the 1946 drought, which in 1947 left an estimated half to one million dead. Huge bands of land were to be forested in the southern steppe to provide a network of shelterbelts. Rivers feeding into the Aral Sea were to be diverted - once the world’s fourth largest lake, it has now virtually disappeared. Irrigation canals, reservoirs and countless ponds were going to upgrade the thin soils. Trofim Lysenko’s “elite strains of seed”, so went the presumption, would ensure fabulously high yields.

Lysenko, of course, contemptuously dismissed the Mendelian theory of gene inheritance as an example of “metaphysics and idealism”.⁴¹ Instead he upheld a neo-Lamarckian doctrine of crops passing on environmentally acquired characteristics, such as cold resistance and drought resistance.

This was vigorously opposed in Britain by the CPGB’s scientific superstar, JBS Haldane (much to the chagrin of the official leadership faction).⁴² Haldane was famously one of the originators of the Darwinian-Mendelian synthesis⁴³ and eventually resigned from the CPGB in 1950. A great loss.

Lysenkoism had been elevated into official doctrine in the Soviet Union. Those who disagreed were viciously denounced, dismissed from academic posts and often ended up in the gulag. That or they were simply shot. The message was clear: politics, not scientific facts - certainly not nature - was in command. In 1948, Lysenko made his notorious speech to the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He rhetorically asked: “What is the attitude of the central committee of the party to my report?” He answers: “the central committee has examined my report and approves of it (Stormy applause. Ovation. All rise).” The “most chilling passage in all the literature of the 20th century science”, writes Stephen Jay Gould.⁴⁴

The Great Plan ended in complete failure. The trees were of the wrong kind, went untended and died. The crops were of the wrong kind too, and froze or wilted. Topsoils were quickly exhausted and were washed away by rain or blown away on the winds (they contained, of course, the highest concentrates of organic matter and microorganisms). All negative and unintended consequences.

Once upon a time it was lazily assumed - and not only by the paid apologists for the Soviet regime - that, untrammelled by the capitalist profit motive, with universal nationalisation, and hence the ability to organise on a vast scale, environmental protection was guaranteed.

So no, it does not go.

Notes

1. wmo.int/news/media-centre/global-temperature-likely-exceed-15degc-above-pre-industrial-level-temporarily-next-5-years↩︎
2. Which Car February 9 2024.↩︎
3. The Independent March 29 2002.↩︎
4. nucleationcapital.com/ocasio-cortez-green-new-deal-leaves-the-door-open-to-nuclear↩︎
5. inews.co.uk/news/inside-labour-plan-mini-nuclear-reactors-uk-3174460↩︎
6. labour.org.uk/change/make-britain-a-clean-energy-superpower↩︎
7. For the lower figure, see electricalreview.co.uk/2024/01/24/hinkley-point-c-faces-further-delays-cost-overruns For the higher figure, inews.co.uk/news/inside-labour-plan-mini-nuclear-reactors-uk-3174460↩︎
8. www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSKBN1W909J↩︎
9. www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/radwaste.html↩︎
10. J Conrad, ‘Fusion is no solution’ Weekly Worker January 26 2023.↩︎
11. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER↩︎
12. Financial Times October 25 2021.↩︎
13. D Jassby Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists April 19 2017.↩︎
14. theconversation.com/all-at-sea-making-sense-of-the-uks-muddled-nuclearpolicy-48553; and braveneweurope.com/andrew-stirling-phil-johnstone-why-is-support-for-nuclear-power-noisiest-just-as-its-failures-become-most-clear; and www.sgr.org.uk/resources/hidden-military-implications-building-back-new-nuclear-uk.↩︎
15. www.shell.com/business-customers/catalysts-technologies/licensed-technologies/refinery-technology/shell-blue-hydrogen-process.html↩︎
16. BK Haya et al, ‘Comprehensive review of carbon quantification by improved forest management offset protocols’ Fronteirs in Forst and Glabal Change March 21 2023.↩︎
17. Quoted in Time March 21 2023.↩︎
18. See www.xprize.org/prizes/carbonremoval.↩︎
19. www.cbo.gov/system/files/2023-12/59345-carbon-capture-storage.pdf↩︎
20. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200420125510.htm↩︎
21. www.statista.com/topics/7747/gross-domestic-product-gdp-worldwide/#topicOverview.↩︎
22. www.politico.com/newsletters/power-switch/2022/07/12/this-climate-techno-fix-is-back-in-vogue-00045297↩︎
23. www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/electric-vehicle-statistics.html↩︎
24. Vox July 29 2024.↩︎
25. PJ Crutzen, ‘Albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulphur injections: a contribution to resolve a policy dilemma’ Climatic Change No77, July 25 2006, pp211-19.↩︎
26. See W Behringer Tambora and the year without summer: how a volcano plunged the world into crisis Cambridge 2019; G D’Arcy Wood Tambora the eruption that changed the world Princeton NJ 2015; scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/how-climate-works/mount-tambora-and-year-without-summer.↩︎
27. E Kolbert Under a white sky: the nature of the future London 2021, p32.↩︎
28. B Gates How to avoid a climate disaster: the solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need New York NY 2021.↩︎
29. Editors, ‘The hidden dangers of geoengineering’ Scientific American Vol 299, No5 (November 2008).↩︎
30. CH Trisos et al, ‘Potentially dangerous consequences for biodiversity of solar geoengineering implementation and termination’ Nature Ecology and Evolution March 2018.↩︎
31. M Huesmann and J Huesmann Techno-fix: why technology won’t save us or the environment Gabriola Island BC 2011, pxxv.↩︎
32. www.vice.com/en/article/ppxpdm/luxury-communism-933↩︎
33. L Trotsky Literature and art - see: www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch08.htm↩︎
34. www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-help-to-tackle-climate-change↩︎
35. K Marx Capital Vol III, Moscow 1971, p121.↩︎
36. TD Lysenko The situation in biological science Moscow 1951, p24. ↩︎
37. See: www.marxists.org/archive/haldane/works/1940s/lysenko.htm. For Haldane’s MI5-bugged exchanges with CPGB tops see: blogs.ucl.ac.uk/sts-observatory/2017/07/26/science-and-the-cold-war-at-ucl-1-surveillance.↩︎
38. JBS Haldane The causes of evolution London 1932. The title deliberately included the plural. See: jbshaldane.org/books/1932-Causes-of-Evolution/haldane-1932-causes-of-evolution-flat.pdf.↩︎
39. SJ Gould Hen’s teeth and horse’s toes New York 1983, p135.↩︎
40. See S Kara Cobalt red: how the blood of Congo powers our lives New York NY 2023.↩︎
41. www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/is-lithium-mining-bad-for-the-environment↩︎
42. www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-help-to-tackle-climate-change↩︎
43. www.wired.co.uk/article/ev-battery-recycling-cobalt↩︎
44. climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-well-can-electric-vehicle-batteries-be-recycled↩︎