Carbon abatement schemes always seem too much like closing -- or rather not closing -- the barn door while forgetting about the horse. Something needs to be done about the immediate effects like sea level rise and ocean acidification. Instead of a billion people building higher and higher levees and sea walls every 20 years while hoping the CO2 will just go away, it might be cheaper to just sequester and/or reverse osmosis sea water for irrigation and aquifer injection to stop sea level rise.
Obviously it seems like an impossibly massive project, but consider,
- Only 75% of sea level rise comes from ice melt. 25% comes from irrigation from ground water. The project would need to pump less than -- maybe much less than -- 4 times more water out of the ocean than all the planets' farmers pump for irrigation. To be sure most irrigation water isn't pumped very far but on the other hand farmers do not seem to complain a lot about irrigation pumping costs. One week or so of a lower Mississipi flow rate should equal all the world's farm runoff for a year, a couple months the entire sea level rise.
- Just about all the aquifers are depleting so farmers will eventually be getting water from the ocean anyway, even without AGW causing droughts. There is no way around that fact. This doesn't mean all the sea water must be desalinated just that it could sweeten up things politically. Few things are better in life than to be on the winning side of a water war.
- Once the canals are dug, if necessary with my bare hands, it could be all solar and wind. The pump system as well as the grid could be over-sized to help load level.
The proposal isn't to drop carbon taxation or cap and trade but to consider the more immediate effects, weight them by the cumulative carbon footprint, and put them into the overall equation.
Something similar to ocean de acidification credits would be included. If a country wants to burn oil or coal or cut down its rainforests it would look for some lime deposits or other source of OH+.
Bret Cahill