Geoengineering

Geoengineering is going to be in the news a bunch again: a new book on the topic, by Jeff Goodell, is coming out in a month. David Roberts of Grist has posted an extensive Q&A with the author, and I think it's really useful if you're interested in getting into the different issues involved. This issue is going to be something you're going to hear more and more about.

Goodell comes across to me as a thinking guy. And it's scary that he doesn't come down too much 'against' geoengineering. Says Goodell:

We're not talking about the climate equivalent of putting a housing development in virgin redwood forests. We're already messing with the planet in profound ways, and as Stewart Brand and others have said, we might as well get good at it. It's not crazy that we could learn how to control the levers of this system better.

In a certain way, we're already doing this. Even by setting climate targets -- 350 parts per million, or 80 percent reductions by 2050, or whatever -- we're making implicit judgments about what kind of world we want to live in. One of the interesting things about geoengineering is that it makes that conversation explicit. That's an important idea: we are in charge of the climate whether we like it or not. It's not a question of do we want to try to take control -- we're already in control. We're already fucking with this system in a profound way.