What Are People Really Talking About When They Talk About "Geo-Engineering"?

My latest article published at The Futurist is here. I am re-posting here it at Amor Mundi as well:

This article is not intended as a contribution to the debate on "geo-engineering." I insist on that because it seems to me the more important point to make about "geo-engineering" is that it is, strictly speaking, non-debatable. More specifically, I think the principal work of "geo-engineering" discourse is to displace debate, not to have it, in the first place.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I fear that the topic of "geo-engineering," such as it is, ends up being a way of not debating serious environmental problems and any serious technical, practical, educational, organizational, legislative efforts at solving them, by preoccupying and distracting us with non-debatable fancies. And the fact that many of those who are caught up in "geo-engineering" discourse are themselves quite serious people, and even quite serious about environmental problems, makes the ultimate unseriousness of "geo-engineering" seem to me all the more serious.

Part of the reason I say that "geo-engineering" is non-debatable is the rather obvious fact that there really are no actually existing instances of "geo-engineering" for us to debate. Even the handful of proposals of various "geo-engineering" projects that have attracted enormous amounts of attention and generated all sorts of enthusiasm are inevitably pitched at a level of generality that falls far short of the sort of specificity that could yield serious engineering schematics and actual budgeting proposals.

Indeed, the pattern with "geo-engineering" proposals, so-called, so far -- whether they have called for dumping vast quantities of iron filings in our oceans or for spewing vast quantities of sulfur in our skies -- has been that precisely as these proposals become more detailed warnings of their deleterious environmental impacts have multiplied so explosively, concerns about their unknowable environmental impacts have proliferated so threateningly, questions about the legal, logistical, technical, funding hurdles to their implementation have ramified so breathtakingly that these proposals get tossed into the wastebasket by the serious within moments of being taken the least bit seriously.

Of course, in making this last point I might seem to be conceding what I began by denying: that "geo-engineering" is debatable. It might now seem to the contrary, that as someone who tends to be rather skeptical about "geo-engineering" proposals, I would want to draw the opposite conclusion, that "geo-engineering" is not only debatable but should be debated all the more seriously because when it is debated it is its critics rather than its enthusiasts who have tended to benefit from such debate.

But what I mean to emphasize is that it is never really "geo-engineering" that is being debated in any of these cases. It is not clear to me that any number of definitive critiques against specific proposals onto which the "geo-engineering" label has attached can ever diminish the enthusiasm with which proponents of "geo-engineering" declare it an important consideration, a necessary strategy, a last ditch effort, a crucial "Plan B." Neither is it clear to me why the particular details leading us to reject one "geo-engineering" proposal would necessarily have any connection at all to the details that would lead us to reject another. This is actually another way of saying that neither is it clear to me just what it is that causes some climate-change mitigation proposals to be corralled together under the "geo-engineering" label and not others in the first place. All this is to say, that although when people talk about "geo-engineering" they tend to talk as if they are saying something about technologies or strategies or plans, there really are no technologies, no strategies, no plans, no underlying commonalities at hand.

What I want to propose, then, is that "geo-engineering" actually isn't a technique or a practical approach or a plan at all, but a discourse. That is to say, "geo-engineering" is a way of talking, it is a way of framing a discussion, it is a kind of style of thinking about certain problems, it is an intellectual genre with highly characteristic preoccupations, conceits, figures, and argumentative gestures.

I mentioned a moment ago that it is not always clear why some sorts of environmentalist proposals tend to be described as "geo-engineering" while others are not. When people talk about "geo-engineering" proposals they tend to start talking about vast mega-engineering projects, about dreamy archipelagos of mirrors in high earth orbit, about tanker fleets converging for megaton sea dumps of iron filings, about fleets of airships spraying pseudo-volcanic aerosols into cloud banks, about undersea cathedrals of vertical piping to cool ocean surfaces. Sometimes, but only rarely, massive tree-planting efforts and cool-roof painting projects are also described as "geo-engineering." It is interesting to note that reforestation or roof-painting is hardly anybody's go-to imagery for "geo-engineering," and yet these are the only kind of plausibly describable "geo-engineering" proposals that have ever been undertaken in the real world. It is also interesting to note that what is emphatically NOT regarded as "geo-engineering" proposals are efforts to regulate fuel efficiency standards for automobiles or to incentivize the purchase of energy efficient appliances or to enforce more renewable materials in construction practices or to regulate power plants or to make public investments in mass transit or bike lanes or to mandate the introduction of smokestack soot filters or to create loan incentives for homeowners who introduce geothermal pumps, attic fans, front porches, or solar panels in new or renovated homes. Even if the aggregate impacts of especially national efforts at legislation, regulation, education, investment, incentive play out on a scale comparable to that presumably involved in "geo-engineering" proposals, these more familiar kinds of environmentalist proposals are not only not regarded as "geo-engineering" but advocacy of "geo-engineering" is often accompanied by a strong disdain for precisely these kinds of environmentalist proposals. Indeed, the inevitability of their failure is often the very foundation on which advocacy of "geo-engineering" is premised. Although some "geo-engineering" enthusiasts insist that they are proposing a supplementation and not a replacement for conventional environmentalist regulation, education, and investment it is interesting to note that while one is talking about the one, one is not talking about the other. And it is a strange thing to supplement something real with something that is not real, especially when the problems, the dangers, and the damage remain very real.

I would describe “geo-engineering” as an apparently environmentalist discourse in which corporate-military organizations are imagined to declare and wage war on climate change on an industrial scale. I say that "geo-engineering" is only APPARENTLY environmentalist, first of all, because it functions to direct our attention away from so many of the premises, aspirations, and concrete proposals with which environmentalist activism and concern are indispensably identified, across the range of its mainstream and radical forms. I have already mentioned the way "geo-engineering" discourse systemically directs our attention from recognizable environmentalist proposals, but I would have you notice also that to the extent that "geo-engineering" simply amounts to the proposal that large-scale human activity can change the planetary climate for the better then "geo-engineering" is really little more than a kind of smiley-faced can-do variation on the foundational notion of anthropogenic climate change as such. If human behavior in the aggregate is causing global warming, then it seems plausible in turn (though this is not logically necessarily true) that human behavior might also be made to cause global cooling. Be that as it may, considering how many people are either ignorant of or actively deny the overwhelming consensus of relevant scientists that catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is a clear and present danger -- mostly the result of massive ongoing public relations and misinformation campaigns on the part of actors who parochially profit from activities contributing to global warming -- "geo-engineering" simply seems to be another way of not talking about what must be talked about, another way of evading the necessity of education in the facts of the matter, another way of indulging in denial about the reality of the threat at hand as a collective threat and not just another opportunity for individual profit. I would add that in quite a lot of "geo-engineering" discourse there is a kind of alienated attitude toward the earth itself, in which environmentalism is re-cast as a kind of science fictional narrative in which humans are aliens arriving on a distant planet and technologically setting about terraforming it to suit their needs, rather than a recognition that we are earthlings evolved for fitness and flourishing on a good earth that we have damaged in our ignorance and aggression and short sighted greed. I am not sure that a genuine environmentalism can arise and abide from such an earth-alienated vantage when all is said and done. (And I say this is someone who views artifice and technique as part of human nature all the while remembering that humans are earthlings, and who sees all culture as essentially prosthetic all the while remembering the connection of culture with cultivation and of cultivation, once again, to the earth.)

Part of what it means to rewrite environmentalism in the image of competitive corporate-military organizations waging war on climate change on an industrial scale is that "geo-engineering" proposes that the very agents most responsible for environmental catastrophe are finally the only ones suited to resolve it. I think this vision is, to say the least, doubly discomfiting to a proper environmentalist. For one thing, as I said, we know that many corporations profiting from the pollution and waste that contributes to anthropogenic climate change devote considerable resources to deceptive public relations campaigns undermining the force of the scientific consensus about the reality and danger of climate change as well as to lobbying and other kinds of political organizing to undermine legislative efforts to regulate pollution and invest in sustainable alternatives. Further, it envisions attacking climate change primarily in the very mode of mega-scale brute-force extractive-industrial agency through which environmental catastrophe has been wrought.

Futurological discourses, of which "geo-engineering" very definitely is one, regularly drift into the cadences of redemptive wish-fulfillment fantasy. A post-war America traumatized by the implications of Hiroshima was all too willing to be peddled a redemptive fantasy of clean nuclear power too cheap to meter (a fantasy purchased at the cost of a constellation of ruinously costly, unfathomably dangerous, centuries-poisonous boondoggles). An America terrified by the implications of Peak Oil is all too willing to be peddled a redemptive fantasy of "clean coal" or petrochemical multinationals peddling soothing images of sunflowers and languidly turning wind turbines. An America harassed and controlled by targeted marketing and panoptic data profiling and fine-grained always-on surveillance is no doubt all too willing to be peddled a redemptive fantasy of iPad democracy and facebook liberation. I suppose it may be logically conceivable that industrial juggernauts will find profitable ways of healing the devastating planetary wounds they have wrought in their industrialized profit-taking, but there are plenty of reasons to be supremely skeptical of the impulses that make such redemptive endorsements of incumbent elites seductive.

It is certainly difficult to understand how those who declare themselves forced into advocacy of "geo-engineering" as a Last Resort or a Plan B given the conspicuous failure of conventional environmental politics actually imagine the fantastic mega-engineering projects they sigh over would actually be funded, regulated, and maintained if not by conventional funding and regulatory agencies, or just how they square the faith that such conventional investment and governance will prevail over "geo-engineering" with their despair that such governance will never rise to the challenge of our shared environmental problems. To advocate more mainstream-legible environmentalist proposals of legislation, regulation, education, incentivation, and public investment is not to advocate the same old nothing rather than something promising and new, but to advocate something still over a nothing pretending to be something else. It remains to be seen if human beings will grasp the truth of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change and organize in large enough numbers to impel equitable accountable governance to address our shared planetary problems in time, but I refuse to pretend loose techno-utopian wish-fulfillment fantasies are real alternatives, rather than the distractions and derangements and denialisms they really are.