Just when you think the last boomlet for geoengineering the climate has
expended itself and we might be rid of any serious consideration of it as
a strategy for addressing climate change, it rises zombie-like from the
dead and starts roaming the Earth again.
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has recommended spending
$100 to $200 million over the next five years to study the idea—its
feasibility, possible unintended consequences, and an ethical framework
for governing it.
The most important thing you need to know about geoengineering the
climate is that we
humans have probably been doing it since at least the dawn of
agriculture. What we need now it seems is an intervention from TV
talk show psychologist Dr. Phil to ask us his favorite question,
"How's that working for you?"
We have certainly been doing geoengineering since the dawn of the
industrial age which we know has stoked climate change through carbon
emissions caused by the burning of fossil fuels; changes in land use
(deforestation, primarily); modern agricultural practices (methane
released by livestock fed on grains, for example); and industrial
chemical releases, the most egregious of which is currently sulfur
hexafluoride used in the utility industry as "a
hugely effective insulating material for medium and high-voltage
electrical installations." Sulfur hexafluoride is 16,300 times more
potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year time horizon and 23,900 times
more potent over a 100-year horizon.
Now that's a feat of real geoengineering and the people who discovered
sulfur hexafluoride in 1901 weren't even trying to affect the climate!
What I'm getting at is even more important than the unintended consequences mentioned in the NAS report above. "Unintended" in that case means we are actively looking for and evaluating such consequences. I'm more concerned
about unanticipated consequences, that is, consequences we are completely blind to. That is, after all, what
we are dealing with today, the massively negative unanticipated
consequences of industrial society on the climate (and a lot of other
natural systems).
What is it that makes us think we can anticipate the consequences
of geoengineering the climate with enough precision that we won't
make things worse than they already are? I am reminded of an observation often attributed to
Albert Einstein: "The significant problems we face cannot be solved
at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." We have
treated the building and governing of industrial society as engineering
problems. We believe that if we just use the proper equations for building
a skyscraper or managing the economy, we'll be all right.
If we treat climate change as simply an engineering problem, albeit on a
large scale, we will be faced once again with the possibility of
engineering failures on a planetary scale. Climate change is quintessentially
a product of the way we think, the reductionist thinking we apply to
practically everything we plan and execute in industrial society. We
rarely, if ever, think about the consequences of our actions for the
biosphere, the very envelope of life-sustaining processes that is our only
home.
We generally act without reference to systemic effects which can amplify
small changes radically. The small changes in the amount of carbon in the
atmosphere cannot alone account for changes in the Earth's temperature.
Instead, those small changes trap heat which warms water creating more
water vapor which, as it turns out, is
the biggest driver of climate change. The excess vapor wouldn't be
in the atmosphere, however, were it not for the small additions to the carbon
in the atmosphere brought on primarily through human activity.
Today, of course, we regard our carbon emissions as very large even
though human-caused additions to the atmosphere are still counted in
parts per million. We count those emissions as very large because their effects
are very large.
If we set out on the path of geoengineering, we may face a
host of unanticipated consequences that could be ruinous for some
(and not others)—or ruinous for us all. I understand that the inability of
our civilization to make any meaningful progress on addressing climate
change is truly a crisis. But I do not believe we will address that crisis
successfully by deploying strategies that use the same kind of thinking
that got us here in the first place.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider, and many other places. He
is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.
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