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Do you have a good source for the costs of geo-engineering? Unfortunately, currently the field looks like an absolute shitshow to me. It's at the same time full of taboo and hype, riddled with known/unknown unknowns and (to my knowledge), foundational research is sparse and actually engineering is non-existent.
I'm especially interested in details like the delivery mechanism in stratospheric SO2 seeding. What does the engineering look like? Minor altitude-boosting redesigns of the 737, or is it a from-scratch design of a "U2-cargo"? Do we build 100 or 10 000 new airframes?
Same with marine cloud brightening. Is that 1000 drone boats with a snow-cannon spraying sea water, or 100 000 platforms each carrying a gigantic stack-effect chimney?
Wikipedia article on the topic seems fine. A while back there was a big back and forth between Bryan Caplan and some others on this topic. I've rarely seen anyone question that this is one of the cheapest methods. Usually the complaints are along the lines of "side effects"
Yeah, I don't doubt that it's comparatively cheap.
"Tens of billions" is just... extremely cheap. Since stratospheric seeding involves aircraft development, billions go fast. Both Airbus and Boeing spent between $5B and $10B on their last couple of civilian airframes (and that price just gets you a prototype and a manufacturing line). And since those future stratospheric seeders need to both fly a lot and fly unusually high, I wouldn't expect a civil development budget, I'd expect a military budget - those tend to run 2 orders of magnitude higher (but that gets you a couple hundred airframes and their continued maintenance).
And yes, I consider side effects part of those unknown unknowns.
Two other options:
Artillery and rockets.
I can't tell if you are being sarcastic, but yes tens of billions is cheap when carbon emissions reductions are measured in tens of trillions of dollars
Edit: rereading, it doesn't seem like sarcasm. I do think the estimates are fair. The cost of carbon supression and sequestration is also an estimate. And we are ultimately comparing different climate change proposals.
The costs of global warming have been much debated over, but IPCC estimates of damages overlap with solutions like "do nothing and let economic growth solve the problem".
Everything is in orders of magnitude for these comparisons.
No sarcasm, just a misunderstanding. I assumed we're talking total mitigation costs, you almost certainly were talking about the yearly budget of the project.
I agree, with $10B per year you can design a new airframe, build a few hundred and then fly them around the clock, resulting in a few dozen megatons lifted to the stratosphere per year. That certainly would get some results.
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