Geoengineering: Plan B, Triage Method or Dangerous Illusion?
Posted on 21. Mar, 2010 by admin in FullContent
Andy Revkin has a new post up over at the NYT, talking about “wishful thinking” and “real action” on climate, and it’s raised some interesting points about geoengineering.
The post is a response to Joe Romm’s attack on remarks Andy is reported to have made at a recent talk, where he called the idea of global diplomatic solutions to climate change wishful thinking. Joe accuses Andy of mistaking US climate change politics (by far the most backward of any major nation) with global realities. Andy responds:
“On the overarching question of “solving” the climate problem, I’m sure Joe would agree that global warming is inevitably going to be, at best, managed — not “fixed” — given the trajectories for emissions in a world inexorably headed toward roughly nine billion people seeking energy-enabled lives and with substantial warming already in the pipeline, according to a heap of research.
“As I mentioned in my talk, it’s not hard to find signals that diplomatic and legislative efforts are destined to be inadequate and new approaches are needed. When Friends of the Earth (U.K.) says that some geoengineering options need to be explored (cloud management and direct air capture of carbon dioxide) you know they’re not counting on emissions pledges.”
This would make you think that Friends of the Earth has given up on climate action and is calling for us to geoengineer our way to safety. I don’t find FoE particularly authoritative on this subject, but the FoE report (PDF) says something very different anyways:
Scientific understanding has moved on since the 2 degree threshold was first suggested, with an understanding now that the impacts of 2 degrees are likely to be much greater than originally envisaged and that a threshold of 1 to 1.5 degrees would be more appropriate.
Because the effects of greenhouse gasses last for quite some time (something like 35% of the gasses we emit today will still be in the atmosphere in 100 years), FoE is saying, and because the impacts of a two-degree temperature rise are more severe than we previously thought, we need not only incredibly bold action on climate mitigation, but plans for how to hold down temperatures while greenhouse gas levels fall. This is anything but a blanket endorsement of geongineering:
“Mitigation has to be the priority for action, action far in excess of currently being considered by politicians is needed. It is now clear that mitigation alone cannot keep global temperatures below a safer threshold of 1-1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. However many of the geoengineering options suggested are totally unacceptable due to the adverse environmental or social impacts they bring or risk bringing.”
They’re assuming we go all-in, and it’s still not enough. That’s a reasonable stance to have.
Diplomatic/legislative efforts may not be sufficient now, though a political breakthrough is entirely possible (it’s ethically important to continue to note that our failure to act is based on political inertia, not the impossibility of making these changes themselves, which has been exhaustively demonstrated to be within our means: we could reach (net) zero emissions, with the will to do so).
However the idea that geoengineering is in some way a substitute for emissions reductions is crazy. No one credible is saying that. There are some credible people saying we need to eliminate emissions *and* research geoengineering as a backup to blunt worst short-term effects of emissions we’re already committed to or have already released. The idea that geoengineering is a “plan b” is completely political spin:
“The same network of think tanks, pundits and lobbying groups that denied climate change for the last 30 years has seized on geoengineering as a chance to undermine new climate regulations and the U.N. climate negotiations… They’re still using scare tactics about the economic costs of change, but now, instead of just denying the greenhouse effect, they’ve begun trying to convince the rest of us that hacking the planet with giant space-mirrors or artificial volcanoes is so easy that burning a lot more coal and oil really won’t be a problem.”
David Roberts has a great interview up with Worldchangig ally Jeff Goodell, where Jeff tries to put all this in perspective:
There are a few things I worry about most. One is the fantasy of the quick fix. You already have people like Bjorn Lomborg talking openly about this. I’m sure we will see Heritage Foundation stuff coming out about the virtues of geoengineering. My immediate fear is that it will co-opt the political debate. That’s why it’s really important for scientists and journalists who understand that this is not a substitute for cutting emissions to get out in front. That’s my near-term fear.
Farther out is the idea that a nation or a group of nations will decide, for nationalistic or militaristic reasons, or a genuine belief that they can fix their problems, to do this. And it won’t be a nation like the United States or western Europe. It will be China, India, a collection of developing nations. It could be any group of nations. They will do it badly, and cause a lot of climate chaos, and it’s not clear where we will go from there. It’s a scary scenario… without any kind of vetting, safety guards, or transparency.
But as I wrote in the book, my nightmare scenario is that we won’t do anything. It will just be decades more of apathy. We’ll block progress on research on geoengineering, we won’t reform our energy system, we will just continue with the status quo for another two or three decades. We’ll just ride straight ahead into climate chaos.
The point is this: There is no “other” path than emissions reductions. Whether some geoengineering ideas are even reasonable triage methods, to get the planet through the crisis we’ve already induced — that’s a reasonable discussion, and depends in part on what actions we include under the geoengineering umbrella.
I tend to think that geoengineering as a whole is one big fit of carbon blindness, and that our standard for whether or not a given large-scale adaptation/harm reduction plan is worth considering is whether or not it’s something we’d want to do anyways, for other reasons. Afforestation, ecosystem restoration, biochar and terra preta — all these are things we might very well want to do even if there wasn’t a climate crisis. There’s no reason we’d want to even think about creating an artificial volcano or dumping thousands of shiploads of iron filings into the sea if the climate wasn’t heating — and the results of some of these kinds of “solutions” could be disastrous.
It’d be irresponsible not to demand much bolder political climate action. There isn’t any solution that doesn’t involve that. The question is, have we waited to long to leave the discussion there, or do we need, now to talk about “Copenhagen squared” and begin to think about a world of radical emissions reductions, climate adaptation on the ground, and emergency measures to slow heating while we mobilize?
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(Posted by Alex Steffen in New Science at 10:35 AM)
