Reactionary Fruits of Futurology, "Geo-Engineering" Edition

The pernicious contribution of futurologists to environmentalist discourse is, in a word, just a word: "geo-engineering."

While the futurological enthusiasts of "geo-engineering" resent the accusation to no end, it remains as true as ever that their discussions of the "geo-engineering" topic tend to devote themselves much more to defeatist resignation about real-world environmental activism and policy and to very broad brushstrokes handwaving about mega-industrial behemoths of a kind that have no reality apart from the splashy covers of pulp-sf novels and CGI-animations, than they do to substantive discussions concerning, for example:

[one] How these proposals conceptually connect to one another to explain their subsumption under the term in question?

[two] How these proposals differ substantially from existing proposals to explain the necessity to introduce the cherished neologism in the first place?

[three] How the costs and risks that multiply upon the least contemplated contact of these proposals with actual eco-systemic and engineering realities still justify these proposals over others?

[four] How the political processes (funding, oversight, labor conditions, safety concerns, jurisdictional disputes) to which such proposals would need to be answerable to their stakeholders escape the political dysfunction that typically resigns their advocates to "geo-engineering" rather than standard environmentalism demanding regulation, education, structural incentives, and public investments to address climate change and resource descent in the first place?

[five] And why on earth we should choose of all people the very corporate-militarist bad actors who most benefited and still benefit from anthropogenic climate change to take charge of solving it as most of these mega-scale geo-engineering proposals just so happen to require?

I've written on this topic many times before, of course, and many of these posts are collected under the heading Futurology Against Ecology over on the sidebar (probably the best posts are also the most widely read ones, "Geo-Engineering" As Futurological Greenwashing and "Geo-Engineering" Is A Declaration of War That Doesn't Care About Democracy).

To the extent that futurology is really just an extreme edge of conventional corporate marketing and promotion discourse, it shouldn't be surprising that the coining of a phrase or the introduction of gimmick label would be imagined by futurologists to constitute a substantive contribution to environmental politics.

After all, re-packaging the given and treating the result as the "new and improved" the better to peddle the status quo as progress, and distraction as deliberation is the essence of advertizing. It is only the masquerade of futurologists as "experts" in an actual subject and their "think-tanks" as quasi-academic sites that makes the identification of their fraudulent and hyperbolic peddling of corporate-militarist incumbent-elites as straightforward promotional discourse more difficult than it would be otherwise.

Once again, it may be useful to think of "geo-engineering" proposals as a kind of macro-greenwashing correlated with the micro-greenwashing of consumer/lifestyle-green proposals, rather as macro-economics and micro-economics correlate in the literate post-Keynesian economic imaginary.