Is it time to get a cease and desist order against all discussions aimed at solving climate change via geo-engineering?
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This isn’t a great response to the ongoing chatter about tech fixes, I know, particularly because the climate news is so very grim. And devastation wrought by raging weather might actually demand some kind of Big Science intervention.
But if we’re going to have this conversation, it had better be a serious one, and – sorry – Jeff Goodell’s How To Cool The Planet: Geoengineering And The Audacious Quest To Fix Earth’s Climate (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) isn’t it.
True, Goodell takes us deep into the psyches of inventors who believe they have the big fix, and asks if this is scientific hubris or true earthly salvation. But it’s what he doesn’t say that’s ominous. California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, for example, is exploring ways to deliver sulphur aerosols into the stratosphere to deflect sunlight, and about other schemes aimed at modifying clouds.
Goodell does detail a host of potential problems with these technologies. The depletion of the ozone layer would certainly be one. He also exposes the often greedy motives of those ready to tamper on such a colossal scale with so little thought for the consequences. Planktos, a San Francisco-based geo-engineering firm, seeks to dump iron filings into the ocean as a way of growing plankton to absorb CO2.
But despite these cautions, there’s more glib advocacy in this book than prophetic warning, more description of the scientists’ personal charms than of the arguments of their critics, who worry that large-scale interference will set off unanticipated chains of events.
Goodell is unable to let go of his worship of technology. He writes a hymn of praise to the virtues of industrial agriculture, for example, but entirely ignores the potential of earth-cooling roof gardens.
Nowhere does he show that he appreciates the value of massive reforestation as a carbon sink, a sin only made worse by his refusal to deal with natural solutions to the Arctic ice cap meltdown.
Goodell is right to say the risk to the Arctic is one of the strongest rationales for geo-engineering. But there are routes to naturalization that don’t involve adding more pollutants to our skies and oceans. Reducing carbon emissions is obviously one. Ventures like Pleistocene Park, in northern Siberia, where Russian scientists are restoring former steppe plains to the willow savannah of 10,000 years ago, along with vanished species, is another.
What’s so irritating about Cool The Planet is that the author is simply too cool. He fails to put forward a coherent plan to lower the planet’s temp, but waxes eloquent about dangerous schemes that he admits are more desperate than desirable.
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