more on geoengineering

As a follow-up to my recent post on climate change and the various means of addressing it, see this from the Economist:

Some form of geoengineering technology, therefore, would seem inevitable if the world has any hope of meeting the Paris targets.

Despite the uptick in interest, the technologies themselves are nowhere near ready. Resistance from some scientists and environmentalists has made research in the field very difficult. In March, for example, a project in Sweden that would have tested scientific equipment to be used in future experiments to release particles into the atmosphere had to be cancelled after protests from local environmental groups. The locals argued — as have others who oppose geoengineering — that the technology being tested would distract from the more important task of reducing carbon emissions.

That is a worthwhile argument. But preventing research on geoengineering has risks too. There are plenty of technical, ethical and environmental questions to answer about these technologies: do they work as intended at scale? If they do work, who should control them? What are the unintended side-effects of all this climate-tampering? If the technologies are not properly scrutinised and governments don’t agree on rules for their proper use, what’s to prevent a rogue actor (whether a country or a billionaire) from going it alone and doing something dangerous?

Geoengineering cannot (and should not) displace the urgent need to cut global carbon emissions. But in the long-term struggle against climate change, the world will need the best information and every useful tool it can invent.

The argument that the exploration and testing of geoengineering technologies should be stopped is not “a worthwhile argument.” It’s a dumb argument. We cannot afford to put all our eggs in the emissions-reduction basket, for the simple reason that there is no good reason to believe that the world’s governments will impose the necessary constraints. We have to have a Plan B, and also Plans C, D, E, and so on. It is tragically wrong for activists to allow their desire to punish us all for our bad choices, to force us all to confront and suffer for our reckless behavior, to overwhelm the need to stop warming by whatever means available. As the article rightly says.

Climate activists often say — Kim Stanley Robinson effectively says this in The Ministry for the Future — that the struggle against climate change is a struggle against climate injustice, and you can’t disentangle those: fighting against climate change necessarily entails dismantling the system that produced it. There are many things one might say in response to this claim, but the most obvious and to my mind irrefutable one is simply this: When faced with an enormous problem you don’t know how to solve, it’s not a good move to chain it to another enormous problem you also don’t know how to solve.

As someone with a great sympathy for anarchism — and indeed for the Mondragon-style anarcho-syndicalism that KSR often commends — I would certainly like to see transnational capitalism dismantled. It is my fervent hope that that happens, ideally through a peaceful process of subsidiarist devolution. But we don’t know how to do that, and even if we ever figure out how to do it, the process of devolution will be very long. (The idea that you can simply sow chaos and expect something better to emerge, somehow, from that is just childish.) In the meantime, if it’s possible for the current global capitalist order to develop technologies that will ameliorate climate change, then I think that would be a very good thing indeed.

UPDATE: This additional piece from the Economist usefully suggests the difference between, on the one hand, reckless and overbold forms of geoengineering and, on the other, more limited and responsible forms.

UPDATE 2: One more along these lines, from Todd Myers: “On The Dispatch Podcast last week, Sarah Isgur and Jonah Goldberg expressed the hope that a future Norman Borlaug would do for reducing CO2 emissions what the original Borlaug did to feed the world. There may be a climate Borlaug out there, but it is far more likely that climate change will be solved by a million Borlaugs — small innovators whose efforts add up to big changes. The cost of innovation has declined radically since the Green Revolution of the 1960s, and we are already seeing an explosion of new carbon-reducing technologies.”