The Planet Remade Quotes

“Crookes was talking about fixing a couple of million tonnes of nitrogen a year to assure Europe’s wheat supplies for the foreseeable future. Today industry fixes over a hundred million tonnes a year, comfortably more than all the Earth’s nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria put together.”
― Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

“It is a strange world that has lost children and mute lightning in it, and where two men can sit overlooking an abandoned mining town and talk in sadness and hope of building ships to whitewash far-off ocean skies.”
― Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

“There is another way of taking energy out of biomass that leaves you with something storable: burn the wood into a form of charcoal that can then be used as a soil additive. This ‘biochar’ approach may work well in some places as a way of producing energy, storing carbon and improving the soil, but like other forms of soil management and local enhancement of the biosphere, it is very hard to see it being used for hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon a year, let alone for billions.”
― Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

“In the abstract, a natural disaster can feel more acceptable than the idea of tampering with nature to avert it. This is the same uneasiness that sits at the heart of the deepest concern about geoengineering, concern not about its possible evil consequences, but about the sheer scope of the idea itself.”
― Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

“Farmed in the way they were farmed at the beginning of the twentieth century, today’s 1.5 billion hectares of cropland would feed about three billion people eating a diet typical of 1900 (which is to say, an insufficient one)”
― Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

“It is obvious,’ wrote Vogt, ‘that fifty years hence the world cannot support three billion people at any but coolie standards”
― Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

“In geoengineering, ‘moral hazard’ has been used to describe the expectation that if cooling technologies seem a real possibility, people will put less effort into reducing carbon-dioxide emissions.”
― Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

“Clean air acts were not passed for the benefit of the air, but for the benefit of those who breathed it.”
― Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

“The fear of bad outcomes motivates both climate activists and their foes, but the precise details don’t matter. Both sides see themselves as averting a future that they don’t like more than creating one that they do.”
― Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

“there is a second lesson from Grübler’s studies of past energy transitions to be confronted. They have, in the main, been driven not by the availability of new ways of providing energy, but by new ways of using it: transitions are pulled by demand, not pushed by supply.”
― Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World