In the best case scenario, wherein all of their best plans would be put to work, two engineers conscripted by Google to hunt down some way to reverse global warming say …

“Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking: Not only had RE<C failed to reach its goal of creating energy cheaper than coal, but that goal had not been ambitious enough to reverse climate change.”

Crap.

Google engineers Ross Koningstein and David Fork recently wrote those despairing words in a post-mortem of the RE<C project, which was mothballed in 2011. The search-engine giant fired up the Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal or RE<C initiative in 2007. But …

… not every Google moon shot leaves Earth orbit. In 2011, the company decided that RE<C was not on track to meet its target and shut down the initiative. The two of us, who worked as engineers on the internal RE<C projects, were then forced to reexamine our assumptions.

Their essay or reexamination — What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change — was published in “IEEE Spectrum” last week. (IEEE is self-described as “the flagship magazine and website of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences.”)

The gist of their post-mordum is that we’re screwed. Because CO2 producing energy is much cheaper to produce, dig up and use than any of the alternatives the two engineers could come up with even in the best-case scenarios, they despaired of any mass energy switch.

And even if all those energy producing companies and mega-gazillion-watt power users making planes, trains, automobiles and smart phones switched to more expensive alternate energy …

Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use. So our best-case scenario, which was based on our most optimistic forecasts for renewable energy, would still result in severe climate change, with all its dire consequences: shifting climatic zones, freshwater shortages, eroding coasts, and ocean acidification, among others. Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon.

Trying to be optimists, Koningstein and Fork, however, say their dream turned out to be “a false hope—but that doesn’t mean the planet is doomed.”

So, they trot out that one hope that has been pumped up by no less than Bill Gates (see below): The miracle solution.

To be frank, their conclusion reminds me a little bit of the old joke about the mathematician who has this spot in his equation that reads “and then a miracle happens.”

We’re hopeful, because sometimes engineers and scientists do achieve the impossible. Consider the space program, which required outlandish inventions for the rockets that brought astronauts to the moon. MIT engineers constructed the lightweight and compact Apollo Guidance Computer, for example, using some of the first integrated circuits, and did this in the vacuum-tube era when computers filled rooms. Their achievements pushed computer science forward and helped create today’s wonderful wired world. Now, R&D dollars must go to inventors who are tackling the daunting energy challenge so they can boldly try out their crazy ideas. We can’t yet imagine which of these technologies will ultimately work and usher in a new era of prosperity—but the people of this prosperous future won’t be able to imagine how we lived without them.

Related story: Midterm elections prove global warming a myth

Video by Jake Ellison Scariest conversation yet about global warming This is a video in which Dennis Hartmann, University of Washington scientist and a lead author of the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, very calmly and with precision scares the bejesus out of us.

Bill Gates and the need for a miracle

The only hope of keeping our biosphere human friendly is to invent and fund new energy sources, says Bill Gates. We’re clearly not going to stop producing CO2 through reduction in energy use, we need instead to replace it.

Gates wrote on his blog “Gatesnotes” this summer:

I often talk about the miracle of vaccines: With just a few doses, they protect children from deadly diseases forever. When it comes to clean energy, we need breakthroughs that are just as miraculous. Just like vaccines, clean-energy miracles don’t just happen by chance. We have to make them happen, through long-term investments in research and development. Unfortunately, right now neither the private sector nor the U.S. government is making anywhere near the scale of investment it takes to produce these breakthroughs. Why are clean-energy breakthroughs so important? As I mentioned here, the world is going to need a lot more energy in the coming decades—an increase of 50 percent or more between 2010 and 2040, according to U.S. government estimates. But today our biggest sources of energy are also big sources of carbon dioxide, which is causing climate change.

Video by Jake Ellison

The problem is that neither the government nor private industry is investing in our future energy needs:

The wealthy who want to make a difference in the long term survival of more than a handful of their peers, who may be able to escape the worst parts of warming in some version of “Elysium,” have to invest in risky new technology and energy science. Since the wealthy are in line for the next big round of tax breaks from the GOP Congresss, the federal government will not be able to meet this challenge.

In other words, we’re going to have to invent our way out of this mess. Restriction policies work in America on specific bad products like plastic bags, but CO2 production as a result of energy production is nothing at all like plastic bags or DDT or any other specifically bad-for-the environment product.

And we’ve got to start funding research, basic research, wild-eyed research … shoot-the-moon research … etc.

Jake Ellison can be reached at 206-448-8334 or jakeellison@seattlepi.com. Follow Jake on Twitter at twitter.com/Jake_News. Also, swing by and *LIKE* his page on Facebook.

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