This Changes Everything (43 page)

Two months earlier, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s global bestseller
SuperFreakonomics
had come out, devoting an entire awestruck chapter to Myhrvold’s hose to the sky. And whereas most scientists engaged in this research are careful to present sun blocking as a worst-case scenario—a Plan B to be employed only if Plan A (emission cuts) proves insufficient—Levitt and Dubner declared that the Pinatubo Option was
straight-up preferable to getting off fossil fuels.
“For anyone who loves cheap and simple solutions, things don’t get much better.”
¹⁴

Most of those calling for more geoengineering research do so with significantly less glee. In September 2010, the New America Foundation and
Slate
magazine held a one-day forum in Washington, D.C., titled “Geoengineering: The Horrifying Idea Whose Time Has Come?”
¹⁵
That one sentence pretty much sums up the tone
of grim resignation that has characterized the steady stream of conferences and government reports that have inched geoengineering into the political mainstream.

This gathering at Chicheley Hall is another milestone in this gradual process of normalization. Rather than debate whether or not to engage in geoengineering research—as most previous gatherings have done—this conference seems to take
some kind of geoengineering activity as a given (or else why would it need to be “governed”). Adding to the sense not just of inevitability but general banality, the organizers have even given this process a clunky acronym: SRMGI, the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative.

Geoengineering debate generally takes place within a remarkably small and incestuous world, with the same group
of scientists, inventors, and funders promoting each other’s work and making the rounds to virtually every relevant discussion of the topic. (Science journalist Eli Kintisch, who wrote one of the first books on geoengineering, calls them the “Geoclique.”) And many of the members of that clique are in attendance here. There is David Keith, the wiry, frenetic physicist, then at the University of Calgary
(now at Harvard), whose academic work has a major focus on SRM, and whose carbon-sucking machine—blessed by both Richard Branson and Bill Gates—stands to make him rather rich should the idea of a techno fix for global warming take off. This kind of vested interest is a recurring theme: many of the most aggressive advocates of geoengineering research are associated with planet-hacking start-ups,
or hold patents on various methods. This, says Colby College science historian James Fleming, gives them “skin in the game” since these scientists stand “to make an incredible amount of money if their technique goes forward.”
¹⁶

Here too is Ken Caldeira, a prominent atmospheric scientist from the Carnegie Institution for Science, and one of the first serious climate sci
entists to run computer
models examining the impact of deliberately dimming the sun. In addition to his academic work, Caldeira has an ongoing relationship with Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures as a “Senior Inventor.”
¹⁷
Another player present is Phil Rasch, a climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state, who has been preparing to launch perhaps the first cloud-brightening
field experiment.

Bill Gates isn’t here, but he provided much of the cash for the gathering, allocated through a fund administered by Keith and Caldeira. Gates has given the scientists at least $4.6 million specifically for climate-related research that wasn’t getting funding elsewhere. Most of it has gone to geoengineering themes, with Keith, Caldeira, and Rasch all receiving large shares. Gates
is also an investor in Keith’s carbon capture company, as well as in Intellectual Ventures, where his name appears on several geoengineering patents (alongside Caldeira’s), while Nathan Myhrvold serves as vice chairman at TerraPower, Gates’s nuclear energy start-up. Branson’s Carbon War Room has sent a delegate and is supporting this work in various ways.
¹⁸
If that all sounds confusing and uncomfortably
clubby, especially for so global and high stakes a venture, well, that’s the Geoclique for you.

Because governing geoengineering, as opposed to just testing it, is the focus of this retreat, the usual club has been temporarily expanded to include several climate scientists from Africa and Asia, as well as legal ethicists, experts in international treaties and conventions, and staffers from several
green NGOs, including Greenpeace and WWF-UK (Greenpeace does not support geoengineering, but WWF-UK has come out in cautious support of “research into geo-engineering approaches in order to find out what is possible”).
¹⁹

The organizers have also invited a couple of outspoken critics. Alan Robock, a famously gruff white-bearded climatologist from Rutgers University, is here. When I last saw him
in action, he was presenting a slide show titled “20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea,” ranging from “Whitening of the sky” (#7) to “Rapid warming if deployment stops” (#10). Most provocative is Australian climate expert Clive Hamilton, who has wondered aloud whether “the geoengineers [are] modern-day Phaetons, who dare to regulate the sun, and who must be struck down by Zeus before
they destroy the earth?”
²⁰

In the end, the conference manages to agree on nothing of substance—not even the need for small-scale field trials to take place. But throwing this group of people together in a country mansion for three days does make for some interesting intellectual fireworks.

After a night’s sleep, the guests at Chicheley Hall are ready to dive into
the debates. In a sleek slate-and-glass lecture hall located in the old coach house, the organizers separate the group into breakout sessions. Everyone receives a sheet of paper with a triangle on it, and on each point is a different word: “Promote,” “Prohibit,” “Regulate.” The instructions say “Mark where you feel your current perspective best fits on the triangle.” Do you want further research
into sun-shielding banned? Aggressively promoted? Promoted with some measure of regulation?

I spend the morning eavesdropping on the different breakouts and before long a pattern emerges. The scientists already engaged in geoengineering research tend to categorize their positions somewhere between “regulate” and “promote,” while most everyone else leans toward “prohibit” and “regulate.” Several
of the participants express a desire to promote more research, but only to establish that geoengineering
isn’t
a viable option that we can bank on to save the day. “We particularly need to know if it’s not going to work,” one environmentalist pleads to the scientists in his session. “Right now we’re struggling in the dark.”

But in one breakout group, things have gone off the rails. A participant
flatly refuses to place his views on the triangle and instead, helps himself to a large piece of poster paper. On it he writes three questions in blue marker:

• Is the human that gave us the climate crisis capable of properly/safely regulating SRM?

• In considering SRM regulation, are we not in danger of perpetuating the view that the earth can be manipulated in our interests?

• Don’t we have
to engage with these questions before we place ourselves in the triangle?

When the groups come back together to discuss their triangular mind maps, these questions are never acknowledged, let alone answered. They just hang on the wall of the lecture hall as a sort of silent rebuke. It’s too bad, because the Royal Society, with its long and storied history of helping to both launch the Scientific
Revolution and the age of fossil fuels, offers a unique vantage point from which to ponder these matters.

The Royal Society was founded in 1660 as an homage to Francis Bacon. Not only is the organization’s motto—
Nullius in verba
—“take nothing on authority”—inspired by Bacon but, somewhat bizarrely, much of the society’s basic structure was modeled on the fictional scientific society portrayed
in Bacon’s proto-sci-fi/utopian novel
New Atlantis
, published in 1627. The institution was at the forefront of Britain’s colonial project, sponsoring voyages by Captain James Cook (including the one in which he laid claim to New Zealand), and for over forty years the Royal Society was led by one of Cook’s fellow explorers, the wealthy botanist Joseph Banks, described by a British colonial official
as “the staunchest imperialist of the day.”
²¹
During his tenure, the society counted among its fellows James Watt, the steam engine pioneer, and his business partner, Matthew Boulton—the two men most responsible for launching the age of coal.

As the questions hanging on the wall imply, these are the tools and the logic that created the crisis geoengineering is attempting to solve—not just the
coal-burning factories and colonial steam ships, but Bacon’s twisted vision of the Earth as a prone woman and Watt’s triumphalism at having found her “weak side.” Given this, does it really make sense to behave as if, with big enough brains and powerful enough computers, humans can master and control the climate crisis just as humans have been imagining they could master the natural world since the
dawn of industrialization—digging, damming, drilling, dyking. Is it really as simple as adding a new tool to our nature-taming arsenal: dimming?

This is the strange paradox of geoengineering. Yes, it is exponentially more ambitious and more dangerous than any engineering project humans have ever attempted before. But it is also very familiar, nearly a cliché, as if the past five hundred years
of human history have been leading us, ineluctably, to precisely this place. Unlike cutting our emissions in line with the scientific consensus, succumbing to the logic of geoengineering does not
require any change from us; it just requires that we keep doing what we have done for centuries, only much more so.

Wandering the perfectly manicured gardens at Chicheley Hall—through the trees sculpted
into lollipops, through the hedges chiseled into daggers—I realize that what scares me most is not the prospect of living on a “designer planet,” to use a phrase I heard at an earlier geoengineering conference. My fear is that the real-world results will be nothing like this garden, or even like anything we saw in that technical briefing, but rather something far, far worse. If we respond to a
global crisis caused by our pollution with more pollution—by trying to fix the crud in our lower atmosphere by pumping a different kind of crud into the stratosphere—then geoengineering might do something far more dangerous than tame the last vestiges of “wild” nature. It may cause the earth to go wild in ways we cannot imagine, making geoengineering not the final engineering frontier, another triumph
to commemorate on the walls of the Royal Society, but the last tragic act in this centuries-long fairy tale of control.

A great many of our most brilliant scientists have taken the lessons of past engineering failures to heart, including the failure of foresight represented by climate change itself, which is one of the primary reasons there is still so much resistance to geoengineering among
biologists and climate scientists. To quote Sallie Chisholm, a world-renowned expert on marine microbes at MIT, “Proponents of research on geoengineering simply keep ignoring the fact that the biosphere is a player (not just a responder) in whatever we do, and its trajectory cannot be predicted. It is a living breathing collection of organisms (mostly microorganisms) that are evolving every second—a
‘self-organizing, complex, adaptive system’ (the strict term). These types of systems have emergent properties that simply cannot be predicted. We all know this! Yet proponents of geoengineering research leave that out of the discussion.”
²²

Indeed in my time spent among the would-be geoengineers, I have been repeatedly struck by how the hard-won lessons about humility before nature that have
reshaped modern science, particularly the fields of chaos and complexity theory, do not appear to have penetrated this particular bubble. On the contrary, the Geoclique is crammed with overconfident men prone to complimenting each other on their fearsome brainpower. At one end
you have Bill Gates, the movement’s sugar daddy, who once remarked that it was difficult for him to decide which was more
important, his work on computer software or inoculations, because they both rank “right up there with the printing press and fire.” At the other end is Russ George, the U.S. entrepreneur who has been labeled a “rogue geoengineer” for dumping some one hundred tons of iron sulphate off the coast of British Columbia in 2012. “I am the champion of this on the planet,” he declared after the experiment
was exposed, the only one with the guts to “step forward to save the oceans.” In the middle are scientists like David Keith, who often comes off as deeply conflicted about “opening up Pandora’s Box”—but once said of the threat of weakened monsoons from Solar Radiation Management that “hydrological stresses” can be managed “a little bit by irrigation.”
²³

The ancients called this hubris; the great
American philosopher, farmer and poet Wendell Berry calls it “arrogant ignorance,” adding, “We identify arrogant ignorance by its willingness to work on too big a scale, and thus to put too much at risk.”
^II
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It doesn’t provide much reassurance that just two weeks before we all gathered at Chicheley Hall, three nuclear reactors at Fukushima melted down in the wake of a powerful tsunami. The story
was still leading the news the entire time we met. And yet the extent to which the would-be geoengineers acknowledged the disaster was only to worry that opponents of nuclear energy would seize upon the crisis to block new reactors. They never entertained the idea that Fukushima might serve as a cautionary tale for their own high-risk engineering ambitions.

Which brings us back to that slide
showing parts of Africa lit up red that caused such a stir on opening night: is it possible that geoengineering, far from a quick emergency fix, could make the impacts of climate change even worse for a great many people? And if so, who is most at risk and who gets to decide to take those risks?