This Changes Everything (45 page)

The risks can be debated and contested, of course—and they are. The most common response is that, yes, there could be negative impacts, but not as negative as the
impacts of climate change itself. David Keith goes further, arguing that we have the power to effectively minimize the risks with appropriate design; he proposes an SRM program that would slowly ramp up and then down again, “in combination with cutting emissions and with a goal to reduce—but not eliminate—the rate of temperature rise.” As he explains in his 2013 book,
A Case for Climate Engineering
, “Crop losses, heat stress and flooding are the impacts of climate change that are likely to fall most harshly on the world [sic] poorest. The moderate amounts of geoengineering contemplated in this slow ramp scenario are likely to reduce each of these impacts over the next half century, and so it will benefit the poor and politically disadvantaged who are most vulnerable to rapid environmental
change. This potential for reducing climate risk is the reason I take geoengineering seriously.”
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But when climate models and the historical record tell such a similar story about what could go wrong (and of course it wouldn’t be scientists but politicians deciding how to use these technologies), there is ample cause for focusing on the very real risks. Trenberth and Dai, authors of the study
on Pinatubo’s harrowing legacy, are blunt. “The central concern with geoengineering fixes to global warming is that the cure could be worse than the disease.” And they stress, “Creating a risk of widespread drought and reduced freshwater resources for the world to cut down on global warming does not seem like an appropriate fix.”
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It’s hard not to conclude that the willingness of many geoegineering
boosters to gloss over the extent of these risks, and in some cases, to ignore them entirely, has something to do with who appears to be most vulnerable. After all, if the historical record, backed by multiple models, indicated that injecting sulfur into the stratosphere would cause widespread drought and famine in North America and Germany, as opposed to the Sahel and India, is it likely
that this Plan B would be receiving such serious consideration?

It’s true that it might be technically possible to conduct geoengineering in a way that distributed the risks more equitably. For instance, the same 2013 study that found that the African Sahel could be devastated by SRM done in the Northern Hemisphere—a common assumption about
where the sulfur injections would take place—found that
the Sahel could actually see an increase in rainfall if the injections happened in the Southern Hemisphere instead. However, in this scenario, the United States and the Caribbean could see a 20 percent increase in hurricane frequency, and northeastern Brazil could see its rainfall plummet. In other words, it might be possible to tailor some of these technologies to help the most vulnerable people
on the planet, and those who contributed least to the creation of the climate crisis—but not without endangering some of the wealthiest and most powerful regions. So we are left with a question less about technology than about politics: does anyone actually believe that geoengineering will be used to help Africa if that help could come only by putting North America at greater risk of extreme weather?
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In contrast, it is all too easy to imagine scenarios wherein geoengineering could be used in a desperate bid to, say, save corn crops in South Dakota, even if it very likely meant sacrificing rainfall in South Sudan. And we can imagine it because wealthy-country governments are already doing this, albeit more passively, by allowing temperatures to increase to levels that are a danger to hundreds
of millions of people, mostly in the poorest parts of the world, rather than introducing policies that interfere with short-term profits. This is why African delegates at U.N. climate summits have begun using words like “genocide” to describe the collective failure to lower emissions. And why Mary Ann Lucille Sering, climate change secretary for the Philippines, told the 2013 summit in Warsaw,
Poland, “I am beginning to feel like we are negotiating on who is to live and who is to die.” Rob Nixon, an author and University of Wisconsin English professor, has evocatively described the brutality of climate change as a form of “slow violence”; geoengineering could well prove to be a tool to significantly speed that up.
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All of this may still seem somewhat
abstract but it’s critical to reckon with these harrowing risks now. That’s because if geoengineering were ever deployed, it would almost surely be in an atmosphere of collective panic with scarce time for calm deliberation. Its defenders readily concede as much.
Bill Gates describes geoengineering as “just an insurance policy,” something to have “in the back pocket in case things happen faster.”
Nathan Myhrvold likens SRM to “having fire sprinklers in a building”—you hope you won’t need it, “but you also need something to fall back on in case the fire occurs anyway.”
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In a true emergency, who would be immune to this logic? Certainly not me. Sure, the idea of spraying sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere like some kind of cosmic umbrella seems crazy to me now. But if my city were so
hot that people were dropping dead in the thousands, and someone was peddling a quick and dirty way to cool it off, wouldn’t I beg for that relief in the same way that I reach for the air conditioner on a sweltering day, knowing full well that by turning it on I am contributing to the very problem I am trying to escape?

This is how the shock doctrine works: in the desperation of a true crisis
all kinds of sensible opposition melts away and all manner of high-risk behaviors seem temporarily acceptable. It is only outside of a crisis atmosphere that we can rationally evaluate the future ethics and risks of deploying geoengineering technologies should we find ourselves in a period of rapid change. And what those risks tell us is that dimming the sun is nothing like installing a sprinkler
system—unless we are willing to accept that some of those sprinklers could very well spray gasoline instead of water. Oh—and that, once turned on, we might not be able to turn off the system without triggering an inferno that could burn down the entire building. If someone sold you a sprinkler like that, you’d definitely want a refund.

Perhaps we do need to find out all we possibly can about
these technologies, knowing that we will never know close to enough to deploy them responsibly. But if we accept that logic, we also have to accept that small field tests often turn into bigger ones. It may start with just checking the deployment hardware, but how long before the planet hackers want to see if they can change the temperature in just one remote, low-population location (something that
will be described, no doubt, as “the middle of nowhere”)—and then one a little less remote?

The past teaches us that once serious field tests begin, deployment is rarely far behind. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed less than a month after Trinity, the first successful nuclear test—despite the fact that many of
the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project thought they were building a nuclear
bomb that would be used only as a deterrent. And though slamming the door on any kind of knowledge is always wrenching, it’s worth remembering that we have collectively foregone certain kinds of research before, precisely because we understand that the risks are too great. One hundred and sixty-eight nations are party to a treaty banning the development of biological weapons. The same taboos
have been attached to research into eugenics because it can so easily become a tool to marginalize and even eliminate whole groups of people. Moreover the U.N. Environmental Modification Convention, which was adopted by governments in the late 1970s, already bans the use of weather modification as a weapon—a prohibition that today’s would-be geoengineers are skirting by insisting that their aims are
peaceful (even if their work could well feel like an act of war to billions).

Not all geoengineering advocates dismiss the grave dangers their work could unleash. But many simply shrug that life is full of risks—and just as geoengineering is attempting to fix a problem created by industrialization, some future fix will undoubtedly solve the problems created by geoengineering.

One version of the “we’ll fix it later” argument that has gained a good deal of traction comes from the French sociologist Bruno Latour. His argument is that humanity has failed to learn the lessons of the prototypical cautionary story about playing god: Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
. According to Latour, Shelley’s real lesson is not, as is commonly understood, “don’t mess with mother nature.” Rather
it is, don’t run away from your technological mess-ups, as young Dr. Frankenstein did when he abandoned the monster to which he had given life. Instead, Latour says we must stick around and continue to care for our “monsters” like the deities that we have become. “The real goal must be to have the same type of patience and commitment to our creations as God the Creator, Himself,” he writes, concluding,
“From now on, we should stop flagellating ourselves and take up explicitly and seriously what we have been doing all along at an ever-increasing scale.”
(British environmentalist Mark Lynas makes a similar, defiantly hubristic argument in calling on us to become “The God Species” in his book of the same name.)
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Latour’s entreaty to “love your monsters” has become a rallying cry in certain green
circles, particularly among those most determined to find climate solutions that adhere to market logic. And the idea that our task is to become more responsible Dr. Frankensteins, ones who don’t flee our creations like deadbeat dads, is unquestionably appealing. But it’s a terribly poor metaphor for geoengineering. First, “the monster” we are being asked to love is not some mutant creature of
the laboratory but the earth itself. We did not create it; it created—and sustains—us. The earth is not our prisoner, our patient, our machine, or, indeed, our monster. It is our entire world. And the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.

Because geoengineering will certainly monsterize the planet as nothing experienced in human history. We very likely would
not be dealing with a single geoengineering effort but some noxious brew of mixed-up techno-fixes—sulfur in space to cool the temperature, cloud seeding to fix the droughts it causes, ocean fertilization in a desperate gambit to cope with acidification, and carbon-sucking machines to help us get off the geo-junk once and for all.

This makes geoengineering the very antithesis of good medicine,
whose goal is to achieve a state of health and equilibrium that requires no further intervention. These technologies, by contrast, respond to the lack of balance our pollution has created by taking our ecosystems even further away from self-regulation. We would require machines to constantly pump pollution into the stratosphere and would be unable to stop unless we invented other machines that could
suck existing pollution out of the lower atmosphere, then store and monitor that waste indefinitely. If we sign on to this plan and call it stewardship, we effectively give up on the prospect of ever being healthy again. The earth—our life support system—would itself be put on life support, hooked up to machines 24/7 to prevent it from going full-tilt monster on us.

And the risks are greater
still because we might well be dealing with multiple countries launching geoengineering efforts at once, creating un
known 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?
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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.”
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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.