The stupid and necessary climate pill

Your body is going to hell. Diabetes is at the door. Your doctor suggests you adjust your diet and exercise—change your behavior—or you can start taking metformin to prop up your biochemistry.

We tend to opt for the pill. Crisis averted, or at least delayed.

In the early 1970s, US air quality was terrible. We needed to dramatically curtail our addiction to the internal combustion engine—change our behavior—or mitigate its effects with catalytic converters and regular emissions testing, a mix of pill and behavior.

In 1975, we opted for the pill, grumbling just a little at the behavior part. I grew up on the side of a mountain overlooking LA in the 1970s, and I can tell you the difference was astonishing. Crisis averted.

Vaccinations, water filtration, and the switch from CFCs to HCFCs addressed their various crises —“pills” without much need for new behaviors. Seatbelt mandates and smoking bans were behavior changes made possible by some governmental strong-arming.

Ending societal and individual damage from alcohol and moving to the "paperless office" both failed, largely because they made behavioral demands.

The “pill” works best when the added solution is seamless, does not disrupt daily life, and effectively mitigates the problem (catalytic converters, vaccines, HCFCs). Changing behaviors is effective when society can align around a clear benefit, and cultural or legal norms enforce the shift (smoking, seatbelts).

In either case, failure occurs when solutions are overly complex, costly, or do not address the root cause after all. Turns out that HCFCs, for example, help the ozone but massively exacerbate the greenhouse effect.

Please don’t tell me that changing behaviors is our only option to unbreak the planet.

Carbon capture: the pill for climate change

When Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, he laid out a behavior-centered assessment of problem and solution: "Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that."

Oh well.

To his credit, he put the promise of abject failure right in the title: The solution would be inconvenient.

So the search was on for a pill.

We didn't have to search very far. Carbon capture, a process by which CO₂ is either separated from industrial emissions as they are emitted (carbon capture utilization and storage, or CCUS) and jammed into the ground, or sucked out of the atmosphere (direct air capture, or DAC) and jammed into the ground, was developed in the 1930s.

There’s a lot to recommend carbon capture as part of the solution to the climate crisis. It’s directly imaginable, for one thing: We’ve put too much carbon into the atmosphere—we should take some out. Instead of requiring a change of basic behaviors, it involves pasting an extra layer on top of the problem, something we much prefer. And it works! We just need a massive and expensive upscaling—admittedly a big 'just'—but it's more pill than behavior change, which makes me hopeful about the possibilities.

The best case scenario for carbon capture involves the rapid scaling of technologies and practices to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide annually from the atmosphere, along with aggressive emission reduction efforts. A good goal would be net-zero emissions globally by 2050 and net-negative emissions in the latter half of the century, so let's do that. Here's how:

1. Initiate global direct air capture through large-scale deployment of DAC facilities capable of removing gigatons of CO₂ per year.
2. Integrate CCUS (by law) in industries like cement, steel, and energy.
3. Expand afforestation, reforestation, and soil carbon sequestration. Massively.

We'll need a global network of pipelines and storage facilities for captured carbon. The carbon capture industry should obviously run on renewable energy to avoid sawing off the branch it sits on. We'll need government support to lower the costs of the tech, a global carbon price to make carbon capture financially viable, ongoing investments in R&D, and the political will to fund it all.

Timescale estimates suggest 10 years (2025-35) to ramp up research and pilot projects, deploy regional-scale CCUS, and develop and test CO₂ storage hubs and transport, then another 15 years (2035-50) to scale up globally. In the last half of the century, we actually achieve net negative emissions and start removing existing CO₂ from the atmosphere.

It would be insanely expensive. But starting this immediately and aggressively could keep global temperatures below +2°C compared to pre-industrial levels.

And yet

Carbon capture is a stupid plan. It's like dealing with gun violence in schools by putting every student in a Kevlar vest. It's bailing water out of the boat instead of fixing the hole, guzzling painkillers instead of setting your broken arm. Horses and barn doors.

It has been correctly and loudly (but not loudly enough) noted that carbon capture is essentially a PR strategy to help the fossil fuel industry delay the phaseout of the planetary cancer that makes their boat payments. The obvious solution is and has always been behavioral, converting key industries from fossil fuels and other pollutants to clean energy. It would be insanely expensive, but we are out of cheap options.

We are also out of discipline, as if we ever had any. And so, I suppose, the stupid pill it is.