There Is No "Plan B"

Sometimes I get the feeling that its enthusiasts think "geo-engineering" is a magic word. Sometimes I get the feeling that "geo-engineering" enthusiasts have the idea that they and a handful of other futurologists in some Bay Area think-tank are going to overthrow the government and implement all their plans, whether prudent or kooky, no holds barred, no expense spared, whether anybody likes it or not.

"Geo-engineering" enthusiasts don't get to blink conventional politics out of existence just because they happen to have given up on them for whatever reasons -- any more than climate change profiteers and denialists get to blink catastrophic anthropogenic climate change out of existence because it pays to lie.

Education, agitation, organization, legislation, subsidization of sustainable lifeways, public works projects (some of which might be described by some people as "geo-engineering," others not, but in no case is anything clarified by either doing so or failing to do so) are all part of the already going already legible already proper environmentalist address of the problems at hand.

That's "Plan A" -- or, more to the point, that's the constellation of Plans A, efforts, campaigns, foci of which environmental theory and practice already consist. Needless to say, nobody who grasps the scale of the problems at hand is satisfied with the disastrously inadequate response of our public discourse and institutions to these problems, but we have no choice but to keep plugging away until we either prevail or fail.

To the extent that "Geo-Engineering" peddles itself as a "Plan B" premised on the ineradicable inadequacy of these Plans A, or defined as implementable by some other set of mechanisms than the ones already in evidence among the Plans A -- well, we find ourselves on a fool's errand with no time to spare for one. For there is no Plan B.

Either the "Geo-Engineers" need to recast their so-called "Plan B" in terms already in evidence among the many Plans A -- at the cost of admitting they aren't introducing some daring new futurological modality of sooper-environmentalism into the mix, and with the benefit of no longer talking smack about all the indispensable things happening among the Plans A -- Or they need to be made aware that pretending otherwise is just to indulge in distraction or greenwashing marketing for corporate-military concerns.

Either we the people are equal to this challenge or we are not.

If we are not, the world ends. If our address of environmental catastrophe is not equitable and pluralist, as well as sustainable, the world ends.

The "Geo-Engineers" may be reluctantly willing or even eager to welcome our new corporate- military- robotic- overlords (meet the new overlords same as the old overlords), but more fool they -- these competitive-profitmad-reductionist overlords are ill-disposed to address the commensal-interdependent-dynamic problems at hand, which is why they were so instrumental in creating the problems at hand (not to quibble or anything).

That the solutions to environmental problems will be flabbergastingly costly, unfathomably difficult, unspeakably fraught is already understood by most people who understand what our environmental problems are. If these well-understood difficulties are not what the "geo-engineers" are talking about, then, well, just what are they talking about? What exactly are these "bad things" we are going to have to steel ourselves to accept, who exactly are these "bad people" we are going to have to reconcile ourselves to giving in to?

Anti-democratic sentiments, supposedly hard-boiled declarations that "we don't have time for ethics" are attitudes that were instrumental in leading and misleading us into planetary catastrophe. I strongly believe that the solicitation of diverse energies and responsiveness to diverse knowledges arising from democratic mechanisms and ethical deliberations will be indispensable to the remedy of the both the geophysical and sociocultural wounds of accumulated, serial environmental crises exacted by extractive-industrial-petrochemical-corporatist-militarist-colonialist enterprises. To dismiss concerns with democracy, equity, plurality as dispensable niceties, stylistic superficialities -- oblivious to their practical and epistemological indispensability to the actual problems at hand is to re-enact the crime at the scene of the crime and pretend this time, somehow, the error, the delusion, the madness will work.

To the extent that a particular proposed intervention is plausible or necessary (spraying sea water on clouds from airliners, say) it should be judged on the merits -- which are unrelated to the merits and limits of the other projects that get corralled together under the moniker "geo-engineering" -- from iron filings in the sea to piping icy water from the sea floor to cool the surface -- and then funded, regulated, held accountable, and maintained by way of the same educational, organizational, legislative, and governance mechanisms as would already fund, regulate, implement Plan A mandated carbon emissions reductions, make building standards sustainable, make prices reflect environmental costs, subsidize reforestation projects, put solar panels on millions of rooftops, bootstrap a wind-turbine industry as large as the US automobile industry, and so on.

There isn't a Plan B, and to the extent that any of these individual proposals have merit neither do they constitute a Plan B, and these futurological sooper aka post-environmentalists need to decide whether they are part of the solution or part of the problem.