Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [89]
One can also imagine the wars that might break out over who controls the dials on Budyko’s Blanket. A government that depends on high oil prices might like to crank up the sulfur to keep things extra cool; others, meanwhile, might be happier with longer growing seasons.
Lowell Wood recounts a lecture he once gave, during which he mentioned that a stratospheric shield could also filter out damaging ultraviolet rays. An audience member suggested that fewer ultraviolet rays would lead to more people getting rickets.
“My response,” Wood says, “was that your pharmacist can take care of that with vitamin D, and it’ll be better for your overall health as well.”
All the rocket scientists, climate scientists, physicists, and engineers around the IV conference table chuckle at Wood’s riposte. Then someone asks if IV, with Budyko’s Blanket up its sleeve, should be working toward a rickets-prevention patent. Now they laugh louder.
But it’s not entirely a joke. Unlike most of the patents IV owns, Budyko’s Blanket has no clear route to profits. “If you were an investor of mine,” Myhrvold says, “you might ask: ‘Remind me again why you’re working on this?’” Indeed, many of IV’s most time-consuming projects, including a variety of AIDS and malaria solutions, are substantially pro bono work.
“This is the world’s greatest philanthropist sitting on the other side of the table,” Wood says with a chuckle and a nod toward Myhrvold. “Involuntarily so, but there he is.”
As dismissive as Myhrvold can be toward the prevailing sentiments on global warming, he is quick to deny that he dismisses global warming itself. (If that were the case, he’d hardly spend so much of his company’s resources working on solutions.) Nor is he arguing for an immediate deployment of Budyko’s Blanket—but, rather, that technologies like it be researched and tested so they are ready to use if the worst climate predictions were to come true.
“It’s a bit like having fire sprinklers in a building,” he says. “On the one hand, you should make every effort not to have a fire. But you also need something to fall back on in case the fire occurs anyway.” Just as important, he says, “it gives you breathing room to move to carbon-free energy sources.”
He is also eager to get geoengineering moving forward because of what he sees as “a real head of steam” that global-warming activists have gathered in recent years.
“They are seriously proposing doing a set of things that could have enormous impact—and we think probably negative impact—on human life,” he says. “They want to divert a huge amount of economic value toward immediate and precipitous anti-carbon initiatives, without thinking things through. This will have a huge drag on the world economy. There are billions of poor people who will be greatly delayed, if not entirely precluded, from attaining a First World standard of living. In this country, we can pretty much afford the luxury of doing whatever we want on the energy-and-environment front, but other parts of the world would seriously suffer.”
Certain new ideas, no matter how useful, are invariably seen as repugnant. As we mentioned earlier, a market for human organs—even though it might save tens of thousands of lives each year—is one such example.
Over time, some ideas do cross the repugnance barrier to become reality. Charging interest on loans. Selling human sperm and eggs. Profiting from a loved one’s premature death. This last example of course describes how life insurance works. Today it is standard practice to wager on your own death in order to provide for your family. Until the mid-nineteenth century, life insurance was considered “a profanation,” as the sociologist Viviana Zelizer writes, “which transformed the sacred event of death into a vulgar commodity.”
Budyko’s Blanket may simply be too repugnant a scheme to ever be given a