A brief response to a couple of items here, while I mull the best longer-form reply.
First: an example of what I mean by "sober consideration" would be the announcement this past March by the UK's Royal Society scientific academy of a project to study governance of geoengineering, in concert with TWAS (the "Academy of Sciences for the Developing World"), and the Environmental Defense Fund. None of these could be considered astroturfers, cold warriors, or carbon criminals, and they are taking seriously the possible need to engage in large-scale intervention to forestall global disaster.
Second: as you hadn't focused on the technical side of geoengineering in your initial post, I did not in my response; I have surveyed the variety of possible geoengineering proposals, including highlighting critical problems, numerous times on Open the Future and in my various talks and papers on the topic. See here, for example, where I take a look at a study on side-effects of sulfate injection, and talk about both environmental and political risks.
Third: While the exact phrasing of the definition I offered may not have "canonical force," it is based on the descriptions used by the actual scientists working on geoengineering research, such as Ken Caldeira and Alan Robock. It's very important to distinguish between geoengineering scientists and geoengineering cheerleaders, and not slip into a broad-brush mindset that implies that anyone talking about geoengineering must be in the pockets of the Pentagon-Exxon-AEI triumverate. There's a very wide range of positions out there among the people advocating geoengineering research, and it's a vocal minority who see geoengineering as a way to avoid carbon reductions (in fact, every geoengineering scientist I've spoken with is adamant that geoengineering should only be used -- if it's used -- in support of aggressive carbon reductions).
Ultimately, geoengineering is a dilemma, where no answer is a good one.
We are very quickly approaching -- and may already have passed -- the point where doing the right things as quickly as humanly possible, with the right people having the right motives, simply wouldn't be enough to avoid mass casualties, mostly among the people least responsible for the problem. And since we're not doing enough of the right things, the right people aren't being listened to, and the right motives are largely being ignored by global political leadership, the chances are very high that we will find ourselves facing problems hitting too fast and too hard to deal with properly. In that situation, we have to have an answer to the question "what can we do?" You're right -- "do anything" is not the answer. The problem is figuring out what to do when "the best thing" isn't enough.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Jamais Responds
The Moot swallowed Jamais Cascio’s response to yesterday’s post ”Geo-Engineering” Is A Declaration of War, so here it is as a post of its own.
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2 comments:
I think any scientist a geo-engineering cheerleader wants to call a "geo-engineering scientist" could probably also be called some other kind of scientist that is actually a real thing.
As I have already said, I do not pre-emptively disapprove every proposal that somebody, somewhere might want to describe as "geo-engineering," I simply disagree that "geo-engineering discourse" provides much of use on the basis of which to help understand the merits of particular proposals in their specificity. To the extent that "geo-engineering" is recognizably futurological it does, however, tend to exhibit the problems of that genre: reductionism, hyperbole, elite-incumbent politics, and so on.
Of course there are no answers that are good ones, if good translates to effortless, cost-free, or perfect. I don't think that anybody who is aware of the scale and intractability of the environmental problems we face would promise anybody a rose garden. I don't think everybody will be pleased by all the costs imposed by necessary regulations, new standards, prices reflecting real costs, altered lifeways in the face of these problems.
But I don't get why "geo-engineers" seem to imply that unless we start letting bad people do unethical things millions of people will die. Why on earth would that be true? Things are happening too fast to trust the people to do what is good for them? Is nobody voting on "geo-engineering"? Are these proposals not going to be overseen by public servants, regulated by statutes, funded with tax money?
Does the failure of regulation and education now imply that regulation and education will never succeed? "Geo-Engineering" public works are presumably necessary because representative regulatory politics fails, but "geo-engineering" then will be implemented by means of something that... isn't representative regulative politics? Like what? If circumstances will have become so dire that people won't mind having no say in these projects they are funding, why would they not be dire enough to mobilize the representative regulatory educational politics "geo-engineers" have given up on?
...unless we start letting bad people do unethical things millions of people will die…
This goes back to my statement in the previous post, about "thermal inertia" and other forms of climate commitment. The climate is a long, slow system, with delays between initial cause and full effect. The point that geoengineering scientists make — the point that I'm trying to make — is that we're very close, and possibly past, the point where we're guaranteed to get widespread droughts, environmentally-triggered pandemics, agricultural collapse, significantly more intense storms, and eventually significant sea level increase, all driven by increased temperatures (all of these are increasingly likely as we move past 3° over normal). And no level of regulation or education can do anything to stop it, because it's the result of carbon we've already put into the atmosphere.
Regulation and education (and crash carbon emissions elimination programs, and non-carbon technologies, and urban redesign, and so forth) would still be absolutely necessary to keep things from getting even worse.
This is the dilemma around geoengineering: if we're locked into a 3 degree increase over the next few decades, no matter what we do now with carbon, we're stuck with a set of bad options.
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