Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
MONDAY 17 NOVEMBER 2008
DR PHIL
WILLIAMSON, PROFESSOR
NICK JENKINS,
DR TIM
FOX AND
PROFESSOR STEVE
RAYNER
Q1 Chairman: Could I welcome our
first panel of witnesses to the Innovation, Universities, Science
and Skills Sub-Committee looking at geo-engineering, two oral
sessions looking at an emerging discipline of geo-engineering.
Welcome, Dr Tim Fox, from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers,
welcome Tim, Professor Steve Rayner from the Said Business School
at the University of Oxford, welcome to you again, Dr Phil Williamson
from NERC, on behalf of RCUK, welcome to you, Phil, and last but
by no means least an old friend of the Committee and a past adviser,
Professor Nick Jenkins from Cardiff University, who is here on
behalf of the Royal Academy of Engineering, but hopefully on his
own account as well. This is a very interesting short inquiry,
gentlemen, which the Sub-Committee is looking at in terms of geo-engineering.
I wonder if I could start with you, Professor Rayner, to ask you
if you could in a nutshell define geo-engineering for us and see
if your colleagues agree?
Professor Rayner: I am not sure,
actually, that I am the best qualified to define the field since
I am actually a social scientist rather than an engineer, but
I take it basically to encompass a very wide range of technological
options which could be brought in to being to counter either the
processes or the effects of climate change, largely either by
changing the radiative balance of the atmosphere or alternatively
by extracting carbon from the atmosphere. That is a fairly conventional
distinction, I think. I would like to lay across that a different
distinction, which is between what I would describe as interventions
which are designed to tune or tinker with eco-systems and interventions
which are actually hard engineering interventions. If you actually
lay that distinction across the former distinction, you actually
end up with four quite distinctive types of geo-engineering options
with very different characteristics, I think, and certainly very
different implications for management and governance and public
acceptability.
Q2 Chairman: Professor Jenkins, you
are an engineer so perhaps you would either agree or disagree
with that?
Professor Jenkins: I am happy
to agree with that definition, which as I understand it accords
with the terms of reference of the Royal Society's inquiry.
Dr Williamson: Agreement there.
Dr Fox: Yes, I agree with that.
Q3 Chairman: All right. So we have
now got a definition. Professor Jenkins, last week when we had
two experts from the States giving evidence before us they made
a very clear distinction between indirect carbon sequestration,
which they did not regard as geo-engineering, and those aspects
of other things which you are actually doing to manipulate, if
you like, the earth's eco-system, or in fact been able to put
in safeguarding elements. Do you agree with that sort of rough
definition?
Professor Jenkins: No, I come
back to Professor Rayner's view, if I interpret that correctly,
these are elements of a two dimensional matrix with both reducing
solar radiation and indirect carbon sequestration but through
these two routes, one of engineering and the other manipulating
the eco-systems. I would have thought that where one is in the
subject at the moment, to maintain that breadth would be helpful.
Q4 Chairman: Any disagreement with
that on the panel?
Professor Rayner: Not in the least,
and actually I would caution against narrowing it because I think
we are quite accustomed to climate change being a field in which
political battles get fought out through scientific surrogates,
and I am afraid that there are very strong partisan views within
various parts of the scientific and engineering community as to
which of these kinds of options they favour and which they hold
in disfavour. So I think it is actually very important to keep
a broad view of the range.
Dr Fox: At the holistic overview
level, I think I would certainly agree with that for the Institution
of Mechanical Engineers. Carbon sequestration, in the sense of
removing from power stations the source of emissions and finding
a storage for those, could in some definitions be regarded as
a mitigation approach and a mitigation strategy, but if you step
back and look at the overall definition of geo-engineering then
carbon sequestration from power stations could be regarded as
a geo-engineering approach.
Professor Rayner: Although I think
we are talking here about actual carbon removal and sequestration
by air capture, are we not?
Q5 Chairman: Yes, indirectly in that
sense. Dr Williamson?
Dr Williamson: The other area
of potential sort of overlap or confusion is in re-forestation
and change in agricultural policy,[1]
and whether or not that is global in its implications. I think
the "geo" of geo-engineering has to be a global approach
and to a certain extent it relates back to the governments and
who takes the action, whether or not one is removing a pollution
at source or trying to come afterwards and then trying to put
things right afterwards. On the whole, the geo-engineering is
something afterwards, saying, "Here is a problem. What are
we going to do with it?" rather than stopping the problem
in the first place.
Chairman: Okay, that is a fairly broad
definition there. I will come on to Ian Gibson.
Q6 Dr Gibson: What about public finance?
Is there much public finance going into this area, geo-engineering?
Dr Williamson: Very little directly
from the research councils but, as from the RCUK submission, there
is a lot of relevant research which is funded by EPSRC and NERC
in terms of the fundamental knowledge which is necessary, and
very, very roughly a figure of £50 million per annum is in
the category of geo-engineering relevant, but in terms of absolutely
directly saying, "This is money to support geo-engineering
research," up until now I do not think we have actually funded
any research grants or studentships, but the EPSRC has put aside
£3 million for next year's spend on a "geo-engineering
ideas factory", which is an exercise to encourage proposals
in the area initially of an inter-disciplinary nature and so although
it is EPSRC funded, other environmental and social science work
would be considered, and that is for next year.
Q7 Dr Gibson: When is that meeting
taking place?
Dr Williamson: I do not think
the dates have been decided, but provisionally autumn 2009.
Q8 Dr Gibson: Do you think that is
a long time in the future?
Dr Williamson: Not that long in
the sense that then it could take the benefit of the Royal Society
study, which will be reporting next summer, and also for these
meetings they have a sift through expressions of interest beforehand
and at that meeting they then make the decisions of what is to
be funded, so there is not another year before the results.
Q9 Dr Gibson: You are an old hand.
Do you think the money is going to be around then, in 2009? Do
you think you should be pressurising them now to get the money
now? Research councils have got a kind of reputation for moving
things about a bit.
Dr Williamson: I think this is
pretty firm. It may be that there might be the possibility of
more funding coming in from other sources to supplement that.
Q10 Dr Iddon: We have had some pretty
whacky ideas like trillions of mirrors in the sky, sun shades
to protect the polar caps, you name it, artificial trees—CO2
in, oxygen out—spraying salt into the atmosphere, and today
more realistic things like carbon capture and storage. What are
the top priorities for the researchers in this area? What are
we concentrating on? If funding is going in, where will it go
in?
Dr Fox: From an engineering perspective,
we really do need to try to filter out these potential approaches
and to look at those which have a real practical potential to
be applied. What really needs to be done is to create a listing,
a ranking if you like, of the risks associated with the projects
and the possibilities of the project's benefits and for engineering
teams to look at these and to assess the feasibility of these,
the practicality of these, the costs and risks associated with
implementation and deployment to enable usto make those initial
assessments and recommendations as to which solutions might offer
potential should geo-engineering be regarded as a route which
we need to go down. There has been little, if none, engineering
assessment of these solutions.
Q11 Chairman: When will that be done,
Tim, do you think?
Dr Fox: We really need the scientific
community initially to sort out an order of merit, if you like,
for these solutions so that the engineering community and the
engineering profession can pick those up and look at them. So
a first step from the scientific community is to really come forward
with the solutions which are really viable from a scientific potential
point of view and with regard to an understanding of any unforeseen
consequences or risks associated with those. We, within the Institution
of Mechanical Engineers, are already beginning to try to make
some initial assessments of the feasibility of some of these systems
through our young membership by organising a competition and engaging
our young membership in looking at these, but we really need some
guidance from the scientific community as to which ones offer
the most scientific potential for us to do a really detailed professional
feasibility assessment.
Professor Rayner: Could I suggest
that the assessment of feasibility needs to be extended to consider
the socioeconomic, legal and institution implications as well.
For example, ecosystem tinkering or tuning approaches, such as
iron fertilization and stratospheric sulphate aerosols, are probably
quite inexpensive. In fact, it has been suggested that these are
possibly within the price range of some well-intended individuals
of great wealth. As somebody has described, the possibility of
a Greenfinger rather than Goldfinger being behind such intervention.
Q12 Dr Gibson: You are not talking
about Sir Richard Branson, are you?
Professor Rayner: On the other
hand, they are ones which from the public's point of view would
be likely to raise significant issues of concern about the unwanted
environmental side-effects, and there is a point of view which
says that tinkering with the ecosystem is the problem and further
tinkering is not the solution. I am not saying that I agree with
that, I am just trying to put forward what some of the considerations
are. On the other hand, the space mirrors technologies that we
have talked about will probably be very expensive and could probably
only be implemented by nation states with access to the necessary
heavy lift and launch technology. Mechanical air capture—there
seems to be disagreement about the relative costs of that. We
can also think about financing. To push Ian's question a bit further
beyond the research stage, both iron fertilization of oceans and
mechanical air capture—in other words going down the carbon
removal dimension—are things which could conceivably be
funded within a carbon pricing framework, whether you favour a
carbon tax or cap and trade to drive the price. It is very difficult
to see how that mechanism could be used to fund measures to alter
the radiative balance. There are all kinds of institutional, economic
and potential legal implications. There are concerns that iron
fertilization might violate treaties like the London Dumping Convention
or the Convention on Biodiversity. So there is a lot of socioeconomic,
legal, and institutional factors which need to be considered right
up front alongside the technical dimensions of feasibility.
Q13 Chairman: That is precisely the
basis of my next question, Professor Rayner. These are global
problems and I admit they require global solutions, but do we
have the global legislation in place to prevent somebody causing
a major economic disaster of the kind you have alluded to? Should
the legislation come first, before we start tinkering with these?
Professor Rayner: It is very difficult
to have the legislation come first because we still have so much
indeterminacy about what the actual shape of the technologies
will be. It is quite foreseeable that we could design legislation
with one set of technologies in mind and find that we accidentally
preclude ourselves from developing other alternatives which we
might want to pursue.
Q14 Chairman: We are not putting
any resources into this area. We have heard from Research Councils
UK that they are going to have an ideas factory in 2009, which
might in fact bring something forward. All our witnesses last
week said it was only private finance that was actually funding
their research. If we are not putting anything in and people like
the UK Government are not putting anything in, we are not going
to have anything on which to base decisions, are we?
Professor Rayner: I think certainly
there needs to be a significant investment in the R&D necessary
to characterise the technologies, both from their technical dimensions
and also the social -
Q15 Chairman: Do you all support
that view?
Dr Fox: Yes.
Professor Rayner: But I think
we need to go forward with that characterisation in a way which
does not put too many constraints on the R&D process. For
example, it has been suggested in Europe already that there be
a moratorium on field tests with iron fertilization outside of
coastal waters. Unfortunately, as I understand it, iron fertilisation
is not supposed to work in coastal waters and there is not a good
legal definition of what constitutes coastal waters anyway. As
David Victor, an American political scientist, has pointed out,
a moratorium in this area is likely to penalise those nations,
companies and individuals who proceed in a socially responsible
manner whilst allowing those who are less inclined to be socially
responsible to go ahead unrestricted. So a moratorium would not
be the answer.
Chairman: Okay, I think you have rightly
raised that incredibly important issue, which goes alongside the
R&D. I will bring Ian back in specifically on the R&D.
Q16 Dr Gibson: Is this all joined
up between different councils and different individuals? I know
you as a man who is very concerned about the socioeconomics and
they kind of bring you in too late I often think. Are you involved
in it right at the beginning? Would it not be better to have a
sort of general research grouping to handle all questions at once,
including R&D?
Professor Rayner: I would certainly
like to see a lot more engagement through the Economic and Social
Research Council in funding for social science work in this area.
It would be carried out in close collaboration with engineering
-
Q17 Dr Gibson: Let us be clear, is
there any or is there a lot?
Professor Rayner: At the moment,
to my knowledge there is certainly no dedicated funding for geo-engineering
from the social science standpoint.
Q18 Dr Gibson: So what is your biggest
fear of what might happen? Nanotechnology, GM, it all comes in,
the new technology, and there has been very little development
of the socioeconomic ideals, the social settings, the moralities,
the ethics, whatever these words all are. What have we learnt
from those episodes?
Professor Rayner: Unfortunately,
I think we are still in the mode of reinventing the wheel each
time a novel technological field comes into view.
Q19 Dr Gibson: Why is that? I am
going to probe you a bit. You are a bright guy. Why does that
happen? Why do they ignore us?
Professor Rayner: I think there
is a lot of reasons. One is that the actual technical fields shift
and so there is not much social learning between, say, GM technology
and nanotechnology, although from the social science standpoint
you would say a lot of the issues are actually very similar in
both cases. So we tend to define things by their technology rather
than by the kinds of management and governance challenges which
they present. So we need a different cut into the projects.
1 Note from the witness: "For example,
biofuels, carbon sequestration in soil and other land-use changes
affecting albedo or the global carbon cycle". Back
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