by Naomi Klein
And the risks are greater still because we might well be dealing with multiple countries launching geoengineering efforts at once, creating unknown and unknowable interactions. In other words, a Frankenstein world, in which we try to solve one problem by making new ones, then pile techno-fixes onto those. And almost no one seems to want to talk about what happens if our geoengineering operations are interrupted for some reason—by war, terrorist attack, mechanical failure, or extreme weather. Or what if, in the middle of simulating the effects of a Mount Pinatubo–like eruption, a real Mount Pinatubo erupts. Would we risk bringing on what David Keith has described as “a worldwide Ice Age, a snowball earth,” just because we forgot, yet again, that we are not actually in the driver’s seat?46
The dogged faith in technology’s capacity to allow us to leapfrog out of crisis is born of earlier technological breakthroughs—splitting the atom or putting a man on the moon. And some of the players pushing most aggressively for a techno-fix for climate change were directly involved in those earlier technological triumphs—like Lowell Wood, who helped develop advanced nuclear weaponry, or Gates and Myrhvold, who revolutionized computing. But as longtime sustainability expert Ed Ayres wrote in God’s Last Offer, the “if we can put a man on the moon” boosterism “glosses over the reality that building rockets and building livable communities are two fundamentally different endeavors: the former required uncanny narrow focus; the latter must engage a holistic view. Building a livable world isn’t rocket science; it’s far more complex than that.”47
Have We Really Tried Plan A?
On day two of the geoengineering retreat at Chicheley Hall, a spirited debate breaks out about whether the U.N. has any role to play in governing geoengineering experiments. The scientists anxious to get their field tests off the ground are quickest to dismiss the institution, fearing an unwieldy process that would tie their hands. The participants from NGOs are not quite ready to throw out the institution that has been the primary forum for climate governance, flawed as it is.
Just when things are getting particularly heated, there is a commotion outside the glass doors of the lecture hall.
A fleet of brand-new luxury cars has pulled up outside and a retinue of people—noticeably better dressed than the ones in the geoengineering session—pile out, their polished wingtips and high heels crunching noisily on the gravel pathways. One of our hosts from the Royal Society explains that for the rest of the day, another retreat put on by the auto company Audi will also be holding its sessions in the refurbished coach house. I peek outside and notice that several signs bearing Audi’s Olympics-like logo have appeared along the driveway.
For the rest of the afternoon, our tense discussions about the ethics of blocking the sun are periodically interrupted by loud cheers coming from next door. The reason for the cheering is, we are told, a corporate secret, but the team from Audi is obviously very happy about something—next season’s models, perhaps, or maybe sales figures.
The Royal Society regularly rents out Chicheley Hall for corporate retreats and Downton Abbey–inspired weddings so the fact that these two meetings are taking place cheek-by-jowl in a country mansion is, of course, pure coincidence. Still, separated by nothing more than a thin sliding wall, it’s hard not to feel that the angsty would-be geoengineers and the carefree German car sellers are in conversation with each other—as if, more than anything, the reckless experiments the people in our room are attempting to rationalize are really about allowing the car people in the next room to keep their party going.
The mind has a habit of making connections out of random proximate events, but in this case, it’s not entirely random. There is no doubt that some of the people pushing geoengineering see these technologies not as emergency bridges away from fossil fuels, but as a means to keep the fossil fuel frenzy going for as long as possible. Nathan Myhrvold, for one, has even proposed using the mountains of yellow sulfur that are produced as waste in the Alberta tar sands to shield the sun, which would conveniently allow the oil majors to keep digging and drilling indefinitely. “You could put one little pumping facility up there, and with one corner of one of those sulfur mountains, you could solve the whole global warming problem for the Northern Hemisphere.” And David Keith’s start-up company Carbon Engineering has not only Bill Gates as an investor, but also Murray Edwards, whose oil company Canadian Natural Resources is one of the biggest players in the tar sands.48
Neither of these is an isolated case. Corporations that either dig up fossil fuels or that, like car companies, are responsible for a disproportionate share of their combustion, have a long track record of promoting geoengineering as a response to climate change, one that they clearly see as preferable to stopping their pollution. This goes as far back as 1992, when the National Academy of Sciences copublished a controversial report titled Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming. To the consternation of many climate scientists, the document included a series of geoengineering options, some of them rather outlandish, from sending fifty thousand mirrors into earth’s orbit to putting “billions of aluminized, hydrogen-filled balloons in the stratosphere to provide a reflective screen.”49
Adding to the controversy was the fact that this chapter of the report was led by Robert A. Frosch, then a vice president at General Motors. As he explained at the time: “I don’t know why anybody should feel obligated to reduce carbon dioxide if there are better ways to do it. When you start making deep cuts, you’re talking about spending some real money and changing the entire economy. I don’t understand why we’re so casual about tinkering with the whole way people live on the Earth, but not tinkering a little further with the way we influence the environment.”50
And notably, it was BP’s chief scientist, Steven Koonin, who convened one of the first formal scientific gatherings on geoengineering back in 2008. The gathering produced a report outlining a decade-long research project into climate modification, with a particular focus on Solar Radiation Management. (Koonin left BP to work for the Obama administration as the Department of Energy’s under secretary for science.)51
It’s much the same story at several influential think tanks that are generously funded with fossil fuel dollars. For instance, over a period of years, as it stoked the flames of climate change denial, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) took millions of dollars in donations from ExxonMobil. It continues to be the top recipient of money from conservative foundations eager to block climate action, bringing in at least $86.7 million from those sources since 2003. And yet, in 2008, the think tank launched a department called the Geoengineering Project. The project has held several conferences, published multiple reports, and sent experts to testify before congressional hearings—all with the consistent message that geoengineering isn’t a Plan B should emission cuts fail, but rather a Plan A. Lee Lane, who for several years was AEI’s main spokesperson on the subject, explained in 2010, “For those of us who believe that climate change might, at some point, pose a grave threat—and that emissions containment is both costly and politically impractical—climate engineering is beginning to look like the last, best hope.”52
This position is striking given the think tank’s well-documented history of attacks on climate science and concerted efforts to trash virtually every serious attempt to regulate emissions, including mild legislation favoring energy-efficient light bulbs (big government interference in “how we wish to light up our lives,” as one AEI researcher put it).53 Some at the think tank have signaled their openness to a modest or revenue-neutral carbon tax in recent years, which along with geoengineering is an increasingly prominent fetish among non-climate-change-denying Republicans. Still, you would think that turning down the sun for every person on earth is a more intrusive form of big government than asking citizens to change their light bulbs. Indeed you would think that pretty much any policy option would be less intrusive. But that is to miss the point: for the fossil fuel companies and their paid champions, anything is preferable to regulating ExxonM
obil, including attempting to regulate the sun.
The rest of us tend to see things differently, which is why the fact that geoengineering is being treated so seriously should underline the urgent need for a real Plan A—one based on emission reduction, however economically radical it must be. After all, if the danger of climate change is sufficiently grave and imminent for governments to be considering science-fiction solutions, isn’t it also grave and imminent enough for them to consider just plain science-based solutions?
Science tells us we need to keep the vast majority of proven fossil fuel reserves in the ground. It seems reasonable, then, that any government ready to fund experiments into climate alteration should also be willing, at the very least, to put a moratorium on new extreme energy development, while providing sufficient funding for a rapid transition to renewable energy. As the Tyndall Centre’s Kevin Anderson points out, “At the moment we’re digging out shale gas and tar sands and lots of coal. We’re going to be digging under the Arctic. We don’t need to concern ourselves too much with geo-engineering for the future, we just need to stop getting fossil fuels out of the ground today.”54
And how about some other solutions discussed in these pages—like taking far larger shares of the profits from the rogue corporations most responsible for waging war on the climate and using those resources to clean up their mess? Or reversing energy privatizations to regain control over our grids? We have only the briefest window in which this strategy is viable, before we need to get off fossil fuels entirely, so surely it merits discussion.
The Indian author and activist Vandana Shiva, meanwhile, points out that shifting to an agriculture model based on agro-ecological methods would not only sequester large amounts of carbon, it would reduce emissions and increase food security. And unlike geoengineering, “It’s not a fifty-year experiment. It’s an assured, guaranteed path that has been shown to work.”55 Admittedly, such responses break all the free market rules. Then again, so did bailing out the banks and the auto companies. And they are still not close to as radical as breaking the primordial link between temperature and atmospheric carbon—all to meet our desire for planetary air-conditioning.
If we were staring down the barrel of an imminent and unavoidable climate emergency, the kinds of monstrous calculations implicit in geoengineering—sacrifice part of Latin America in order to save all of China, or save the remaining glaciers and land ice to prevent catastrophic global sea level rise but risk endangering India’s food source—might be unavoidable. But even if we acquire enough information to make those kinds of calculations (and it’s hard to imagine how we could), we notably are not at that point. We have options, ones that would greatly decrease the chances of ever confronting those impossible choices, choices that indeed deserve to be described as genocidal. To fail to exercise those options—which is exactly what we are collectively doing—knowing full well that eventually the failure could force government to rationalize “risking” turning whole nations, even subcontinents, into sacrifice zones, is a decision our children may judge as humanity’s single most immoral act.
The Astronaut’s Eye View
There is a photograph from the day Richard Branson launched his $25 million Virgin Earth Challenge that keeps popping into my head at the geoengineering retreat. Branson, dressed in black, has a big grin on his face and he is gleefully tossing a plastic model of Planet Earth into the air as if it were a beach ball. Al Gore, looking unsure about whether this is a good idea, is standing by his side.56
This frozen moment strikes me as the perfect snapshot of the first incarnation of the climate movement: a wealthy and powerful man with the whole world literally in his hands, promising to save the fragile blue planet on our behalf. This heroic feat will be accomplished, he has just announced, by harnessing the power of human genius and the desire to get really, really rich.
Pretty much everything is wrong with that picture. The reinvention of a major climate polluter into a climate savior based on little more than good PR. The assumption that dangling enough money can solve any mess we create. And the certainty that the solutions to climate change must come from above rather than below.
But I’ve begun to think that there is another problem too—it has to do with that pale blue sphere that Branson was tossing skyward. For more than forty years, the view of the Earth from space has been the unofficial logo of the environmental movement—featured on countless T-shirts, pins, and bumper stickers. It is the thing that we are supposed to protect at U.N. climate conferences, and that we are called upon to “save” every Earth Day, as if it were an endangered species, or a starving child far away, or a pet in need of our ministrations. And that idea may be just as dangerous as the Baconian fantasy of the earth as a machine for us to master, since it still leaves us (literally) on top.
When we marvel at that blue marble in all its delicacy and frailty, and resolve to save the planet, we cast ourselves in a very specific role. That role is of a parent, the parent of the earth. But the opposite is the case. It is we humans who are fragile and vulnerable and the earth that is hearty and powerful, and holds us in its hands. In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely. That knowledge should inform all we do—especially the decision about whether to gamble on geoengineering.
* * *
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, of course. In the late 1960s, when NASA shared the first photographs of the whole earth from space, there was a great deal of rhapsodizing about how the image would spark a leap in human consciousness. When we were finally able to see our world as an interconnected and holistic entity we at last would understand that this lonely planet is our only home and that it is up to us to be its responsible caretakers.IV This was “Spaceship Earth” and the great hope was that being able to see it would cause everyone to grasp what British economist and author Barbara Ward meant when she said in 1966, “This space voyage is totally precarious. We depend upon a little envelope of soil and a rather larger envelope of atmosphere for life itself. And both can be contaminated and destroyed.”57
So how did we get from that humility before life’s precariousness to Branson’s game of planet beach ball? One person who saw it all coming was the irascible American novelist Kurt Vonnegut: “Earth is such a pretty blue and pink and white pearl in the pictures NASA sent me,” he wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1969. “It looks so clean. You can’t see all the hungry, angry earthlings down there—and the smoke and the sewage and trash and sophisticated weaponry.”58
Before those pictures, environmentalism had mostly been intensely local—an earthy thing, not an Earth thing. It was Henry David Thoreau musing on the rows of white bush beans in the soil by Walden Pond. It was Edward Abbey ranging through the red rocks of southern Utah. It was Rachel Carson down in the dirt with DDT-contaminated worms. It was vividly descriptive prose, naturalist sketches, and, eventually, documentary photography and film seeking to awaken and inspire love for specific creatures and places—and, by extension, for creatures and places like them all over the world.
When environmentalism went into outer space, adopting the perspective of the omniscient outsider, things did start getting, as Vonnegut warned, awfully blurry. Because if you are perpetually looking down at the earth from above, rather than up from its roots and soil, it begins to make a certain kind of sense to shuffle around pollution sources and pollution sinks as if they were pieces on a planet-sized chessboard: a tropical forest to drink up the emissions from a European factory; lower-carbon-fracked gas to replace coal; great fields of corn to displace petroleum; and perhaps in the not too distant future, iron in the oceans and sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere to counter carbon dioxide in the lower atmosphere.
And all the while, just as Vonnegut warned, any acknowledgment of the people way down below the wispy clouds disappears—people with attachments to particular pieces
of land with very different ideas about what constitutes a “solution.” This chronic forgetfulness is the thread that unites so many fateful policy errors of recent years, from the decision to embrace fracked natural gas as a bridge fuel (failing to notice there were people on those lands who were willing to fight against the shattering of their territory and the poisoning of their water) to cap-and-trade and carbon offsets (forgetting the people once again, the ones forced to breathe the toxic air next to refineries that were being kept open thanks to these backroom deals, as well as the ones locked out of their traditional forests that were being converted into offsets).
We saw the same above-it-all perspective take its toll, tragically, when many of these same players persuaded themselves that biofuels were the perfect low-carbon alternative to oil and gas—only to discover what would have been blindingly obvious if people had figured as prominently in their calculations as carbon: that using prime land to grow fuel puts the squeeze on food, and widespread hunger is the entirely predictable result. And we see the same problems when policymakers ram through industrial-scale wind farms and sprawling desert solar arrays without local participation or consent, only to discover that people are living on those lands with their own inconvenient opinions about how they should be used and who should benefit from their development.
This lethal amensia is once again rearing its head in geoengineering discussions like the one at Chicheley Hall. It is awfully reassuring to imagine that a technological intervention could save Arctic ice from melting but, once again, far too little attention is being paid to the billions of people living in monsoon-fed parts of Asia and Africa who could well pay the price with their suffering, even their lives.
