To stop global warming we need to remove as much CO2 as we emit each year. Here’s a modest proposal to pay for it.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), at our current rate of carbon emission—36 billion tons per year—the atmospheric temperature will rise by 1.5℃ within twelve years. This is because we have a remaining carbon budget—the amount of CO2 we can still dump into the atmosphere to maintain a 1.5-degree rise in atmospheric temperature—of 420 billion tons. For a 2-degree temperature rise, the carbon budget would be higher. Any temperature rise beyond 1.5 degrees could pose an existential threat to humanity, according to the IPCC.
After twelve years are up, our only option to save the planet would be to start paying Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) companies for the removal of the entirety of our planet’s annual emissions. In that event, we would need to enact a planet-tax to pay for it. This means we only have twelve years to develop CDR technology. The good news is that twelve years should be enough time to develop it. NASA put a human on the moon in less than ten years. The Manhattan Project that created the atom bomb was developed in just three years.
Even though we can avoid having to remove CO2 until the planet comes close to the brink of extinction, we need the money to develop CDR technology right now. In fact, we also need to start removing CO2 to create a robust market for CDR, which would bring down its cost by the time it becomes indispensable.
Unfortunately, most of us have not even heard of CDR, the only viable solution to global warming. Even many climate activists believe that CDR is a mere distraction created by the fossil fuel industry so it can continue to do business as usual.
The poor IPCC has become the whipping boy of both the Right and the Left. The Right is (still!) spreading misinformation about global warming, claiming it is a hoax or greatly exaggerated. The Left is spreading misinformation, insinuating that the IPCC is a stooge of the fossil fuel industry. (For an example of what I mean, take a look at the video titled “The Rotten Core of The New IPCC Report” by Simon Clark.)
The ultimate irony is that many climate activists are opposed to the only solution for global warming: CDR. They are willing to upend their own lives to reduce their carbon footprints, having been brainwashed by the ingenious British Petroleum propaganda that popularized the term carbon footprint to deflect the attention of the public away from the producers of fossil fuels and foist the responsibility onto us, the consumers.
Reducing your carbon footprint means you are responsible for less CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere compared to what you were responsible for before. But, I’m sorry to tell you, no matter how much you manage to shrink the size of your carbon-feet, you are still making footprints. You are still dumping. You cannot stop the CO2 level from rising merely by dumping less CO2 into the atmosphere. It is like trying to stop your bank balance from rising by depositing less money every month. Just as the only way to keep your bank balance constant is to withdraw as much as you deposit each year, the only way to keep the CO2 level constant is by removing as much CO2 as we emit. Only by keeping the atmospheric CO2 level constant can we keep the atmospheric temperature constant.
The following math shows the absurdity of reducing one’s carbon footprint:
Greta Thunberg refuses to travel by air because airlines produce too much emission. Fine, let us ground all airlines.
Electric car enthusiasts think that replacing all gasoline-run cars with electric ones would stop global warming. So let us take all those cars off the road.
Some vegans falsely claim that giving up meat and dairy could stop global warming. Let us not argue with them. In fact, let the entire world stop eating altogether.
Giving up food would reduce our emissions by 9 billion tons (25 percent of emissions come from agriculture). Grounding all airlines would reduce emissions by 0.7 billion tons. Taking all cars off the road would save 3 billion tons. The total savings in emissions would be 12.7 billion tons. Emissions would be reduced from 36 billion tons to 23.3 billion tons.
At the rate of 23.3 billion tons per year, the carbon budget of 420 billion tons would be exhausted in about eighteen years instead of twelve. This means that we could kick the can down the road by just six years by doing something impossible, such as the entire world giving up food, cars, and airplanes.
Humanity has lost its sanity.
How did this happen?
That ingenious propaganda campaign of British Petroleum, which turned reducing one’s carbon footprint into a moral issue. You are a bad person if you eat meat, travel by air, drive personal cars, drive gas guzzlers, travel in personal planes and yachts, own huge homes with huge heating and cooling costs, use too much energy, and so on.
Even if reducing one’s carbon footprint could save the planet—which, as we have seen, it will not—giving up every activity that makes modern life enjoyable and worth living is an absurd idea. Yet we have been persuaded that living a good life is an immoral act.
Why increase a country’s GDP if not to acquire more comforts and luxuries for its people? The cure should not be worse than the disease. Trading one problem for another problem cannot be called a solution.
You are fooling yourself if you think you are doing a noble act by reducing your carbon footprint. You are simply acting as a useful tool of the fossil fuel industry that has been spectacularly successful at convincing you that you are the problem.
Now, if you really want to help save the planet, there is something you can do. You can start paying every month to a CDR company such as Climeworks for Carbon Dioxide Removal. Even if there are not yet enough people willing to voluntarily pay for CO2 removal, some people starting to pay for it now would still create a large enough market for CDR to spur the development of an innovative and competitive CDR industry. The cost of CDR would come down.
A decade or so from now, when huge climate disasters become much more frequent, all the world’s nations will be scrambling for a solution. The CDR industry will be ready to save the planet. But it won’t be free. A “planet tax” will have to be imposed by all nations to pay for the annual cost of CO2 removal. And we will need someone to make the crucial decisions about how best to spend that money based on the best science, not politics.
The governments of the world have shown they are unwilling to work together to address something as existentially critical as climate change. So how can we possibly expect them to agree upon something such as a planet-wide tax system? What politicians would be courageous and persuasive enough to sell it to their constituents and then devise a means of enforcement? We’re going to need more novel and creative solutions to fund the planet’s salvation. And we will need a global agency run by the world’s brightest engineers and scientists, unfettered by the whims and agendas of politicians. We already have a global organization: the United Nations. The IPCC, a body of the UN, already knows how to save the planet.
The IPCC needs to be upgraded to a Planet Maintenance Organization (PMO) to do more than merely write reports about the crisis the planet is facing, but to take on the responsibility of maintaining the planet’s health. The United Nations would need a budget of more than $1 trillion per year to keep our planet at the right temperature to avert total disaster and keep it healthy. Most of this money would be spent on removing all the planet’s annual CO2 emissions from the air.
According to the IPCC, it would be difficult to bring down our annual emissions below 10 billion tons. At a cost of $100 per ton for CO2 removal, it would cost $1 trillion per year.
The United States, the richest nation in the world and has also inflicted the most damage on the planet, would most likely not fund such an organization because of its domestic politics. What happened to the World Health Organization (WHO) is a case in point. In 2020, the Donald Trump administration suspended financial support for the WHO and initiated a process to withdraw the United States from membership in the organization. President Joe Biden reversed that decision upon taking office in January 2021 and restored U.S. funding to the WHO.
Globalism has become a dirty word in U.S. politics, and the “America First” attitude is likely to continue to wreak havoc on the planet. Meanwhile, the United States is currently the largest financial contributor to the UN, providing about 28 percent of the total UN budget. If the United States won’t take a leadership role in funding the UN as it has in the past, no other nation will either.
However, the case of global warming is different. Most nations are likely to feel that it is unfair to have to pay for their emissions when the United States has already consumed most of the world’s carbon budget without having to pay for it. It is unlikely that such a huge investment into the UN would be possible with the current state of politics. Even if it were to be funded, what happened with the WHO might repeat. Each nation would threaten to withdraw support if the UN didn’t spend its money as each nation desires.
Both domestic and international politics would make it impossible to run the Planet Maintenance Organization efficiently. Our only option, then, is to fund it directly from voluntary contributions from the public while leaving politicians out of it. The good news is that we can easily find the money if we can convince everyone in the world to voluntarily pay one cent for each email they send. The public has shown that we are not sufficiently frightened of global warming to be willing to voluntarily pay even this pittance to save the planet.
Because fear isn’t enough, let us try greed.
Let us suppose that we set up an email service that gives away a $1 million prize to both the sender and the recipient of a randomly selected email. The more emails you send and receive, the more favorable your odds of winning a million dollars.
Suppose 1,000 prizes of $1 million are given every single day (500 to senders and 500 to their recipients). The news of a thousand people becoming millionaires every day should be enough incentive for people to pay for saving the planet and have the opportunity to become millionaires.
This probably sounds like a very expensive idea. Does the math work out? Let us calculate whether we can get enough revenue to pay for the prizes and still be left with enough money to save the planet.
Approximately 320 billion emails are sent and received on the internet every day. This does not even count the emails stopped by spam filters. Our proposed service will not only not block unsolicited emails but would find ways for people to send as many emails as possible to increase revenue. Our service would allow anyone to send an email to anyone in the world based on their residential address, whether you knew their email address or not. You would be able to send mail to even the president of a company or a country, simply by paying the correct “postage.”
Even better, the cost of postage for unsolicited emails would be set by you, the recipient.
If you happen to be a celebrity, you might wish to set the postage to a very high value to limit the number of emails you receive. Celebrities alone could generate an enormous amount of revenue simply by spending a few minutes a day on their email.
The more time you spend on the internet, the more you would be helping save the planet, while increasing your odds of winning a million dollars … every day. I expect that most people would likely set their incoming postage rate quite low to increase the number of unsolicited emails they receive, thereby increasing their odds of winning a million dollars. If people got rid of spam filters to receive more email, it would easily increase the number of emails to 500 billion per day, from the current 320 billion. At that rate of activity, with a cost of one cent per email, the revenue generated would be $0.01 X 365 X 500 billion, or about $1.8 trillion per year.
The annual cost of giving away 365,000 prizes of 1 million dollars each would be $365 billion. The net revenue after paying for the prizes would be about $1.4 trillion (1.8 – 0.365). That’s a pretty nice margin.
There is a crucial advantage in funding the PMO without taking money from individual nations through taxes: no interference from politicians.
Keeping our planet at the right temperature is a complex engineering task. Ideally, all the decisions about how to do so should be left solely to the scientists and engineers of the PMO. The PMO would be free to spend money anywhere on the planet where it would be most cost effective in reducing global emissions.
And it would not have to wait for the advent of advanced carbon dioxide renewal technologies to get started. For example, the PMO could spend money to save mangroves in Asia, save forests in Brazil, or plant trees in Pakistan, instead of providing subsidies for the weatherizing of homes in the United States.
The PMO would avoid the absurdity of focusing on the reduction of emissions in the United States rather than a country such as India, where doing so is much more cost-effective. It would determine which CDR technologies to invest in. It would decide whether investment in a new process for producing cement is better or worse than paying a CDR company to remove the emissions produced by the cement industry. It could fund research in universities around the world aimed at solving every problem facing the planet, such as the disposal of plastic waste, the disposal of nuclear waste, the extinction of bees and other species, and so on.
We need an organization in charge of keeping our planet at the right temperature and to solve all the other existential problems facing the planet. It must be funded directly by the world’s people, not nations, to keep the politicians out of the way. We have to give up this fantasy that the politicians are gods who alone can save the planet. Let us face the inconvenient truth that the planet has to be saved from politicians, not by them.
What more evidence do we need that waiting for politicians to save the planet is not a reasonable option? My idea is just one possible way to save the planet without self-serving politicians mucking things up. If you think it will not work, I challenge you to think of something that will and then go do it.