This Changes Everything (47 page)

And all the while, just as Vonnegut warned, any acknowledgment of the people way down below the wispy clouds disappears—people with attachments to particular
pieces of land with very different ideas about what constitutes a “solution.” This chronic forgetfulness is the thread that unites so many fateful policy errors of recent years, from the decision to embrace fracked natural gas as a bridge fuel (failing to notice there were people on those lands who were willing to fight against the shattering of their territory and the poisoning of their
water) to cap-and-trade and carbon offsets (forgetting the people once again, the ones forced to breathe the toxic air next to refineries that were being kept open thanks to these backroom deals, as well as the ones locked out of their traditional forests that were being converted into offsets).

We saw the same above-it-all perspective take its toll, tragically, when many of these same players
persuaded themselves that biofuels were the perfect low-carbon alternative to oil and gas—only to discover what would have been blindingly obvious if people had figured as prominently in their calculations as carbon: that using prime land to grow fuel puts the squeeze on food, and widespread hunger is the entirely predictable result. And we see the same problems when policymakers ram through industrial-scale
wind farms and sprawling desert solar arrays without local participation or consent, only to discover that people are living on those lands with their own inconvenient opinions about how they should be used and who should benefit from their development.

This lethal amensia is once again rearing its head in geoengineering discussions like the one at Chicheley Hall. It is awfully reassuring to
imagine that a technological intervention could save Arctic ice from melting but, once again, far too little attention is being paid to the billions of people living in monsoon-fed parts of Asia and Africa who could well pay the price with their suffering, even their lives.

In some cases, the effect of the astronaut’s eye view proves particularly
extreme. Their minds hovering out in orbit, there
are those who begin to imagine leaving the planet for good—saying, “Goodbye Earth!” to quote Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill, who, in the mid-1970s, started calling for the creation of space colonies to overcome the earth’s resource limits. Interestingly, one of O’Neill’s most devoted disciples was Stewart Brand, the founder of the
Whole Earth Catalog
, who spent a good chunk of the 1970s arguing
that the U.S. government should build space colonies; today he is one of the most vocal proponents of Big Tech fixes to climate change, whether nuclear power or geoengineering.
⁵⁹

And he’s not the only prominent geoengineering booster nurturing the ultimate escape fantasy. Lowell Wood, co-inventor of the hose-to-the-sky, is an evangelical proponent of terraforming Mars: there is “a 50/50 chance
that young children now alive will walk on Martian meadows . . . will swim in Martian lakes,” he told an Aspen audience in 2007, describing the technological expertise for making this happen as “kid’s stuff.”
⁶⁰

And then there is Richard Branson, Mr. Retail Space himself. In September 2012, Branson told
CBS This Morning
that, “In my lifetime, I am determined to be part of starting a population on Mars. I think it is absolutely realistic. It will happen.” This plan, he said, includes “people inhabiting Mars . . . in sort of giant domes.” In another interview, he revealed that he has put a striking amount of thought into who should be invited to this outer space cocktail party: “You’re going to
want physicians, you’re going to want comedians, you’re going to want fun people, beautiful people, ugly people, a good cross-section of what happens on Earth on Mars. People have got to be able to get on together, because it’s going to be quite confined.” Oh and one more person on the list: “It may be a one-way trip. . . . So maybe I’ll wait till the last 10 years of my life, and then maybe go, if
my wife will let me,” Branson said. In explaining his rationale, the Virgin head has invoked physicist Stephen Hawking, who “thinks it’s absolutely essential for mankind to colonize other planets because one day, something dreadful might happen to the Earth. And it would be very sad to see years of evolution going to waste.”
⁶¹

So said the man whose airlines have a carbon footprint the size of
Honduras’ and who is pinning his hopes for planetary salvation not on emissions cuts, but on a carbon-sucking machine that hasn’t been invented yet.
⁶²
Per
haps this is mere coincidence, but it does seem noteworthy that so many key figures in the geoengineering scene share a strong interest in a planetary exodus. For it is surely a lot easier to accept the prospect of a recklessly high-risk Plan
B when you have, in your other back pocket, a Plan C.

The danger is not so much that these visions will be realized; geoengineering the earth is a long shot, never mind terraforming Mars. Yet as Branson’s own emissions illustrate so elegantly, these fantasies are already doing real damage in the here and now. As environmental author Kenneth Brower writes, “The notion that science will save us
is the chimera that allows the present generation to consume all the resources it wants, as if no generations will follow. It is the sedative that allows civilization to march so steadfastly toward environmental catastrophe. It forestalls the real solution, which will be in the hard, nontechnical work of changing human behavior.” And worst of all, it tells us that, “should the fix fail, we have someplace
else to go.”
⁶³

We know this escape story all too well, from Noah’s Ark to the Rapture. What we need are stories that tell us something very different: that this planet is our only home, and that what goes around comes around (and what goes up, stays up for a very long time, so we’d better be careful what we put there).

Indeed, if geoengineering has anything going for it, it is that it slots
perfectly into our most hackneyed cultural narrative, the one in which so many of us have been indoctrinated by organized religion and the rest of us have absorbed from pretty much every Hollywood action movie ever made. It’s the one that tells us that, at the very last minute, some of us (the ones that matter) are going to be saved. And since our secular religion is technology, it won’t be god that
saves us but Bill Gates and his gang of super-geniuses at Intellectual Ventures. We hear versions of this narrative every time a commercial comes on about how coal is on the verge of becoming “clean,” about how the carbon produced by the tar sands will soon be sucked out of the air and buried deep underground, and now, about how the mighty sun will be turned down as if it were nothing more than
a chandelier on a dimmer. And if one of the current batch of schemes doesn’t work, the same story tells us that something else will surely arrive in the nick of time. We are, after all, the super-species, the chosen ones, the God Species. We will triumph in the end because triumphing is what we do.

But after so many of our most complex systems have failed, from BP’s deepwater drilling to the
derivatives market—with some of our biggest brains failing to foresee these outcomes—there is some evidence that the power of this particular narrative arc is beginning to weaken. The Brookings Institution released a survey in 2012 that found that roughly seven in ten Americans think that trying to turn down the sun will do more harm than good. Only three in ten believe that “scientists would be able
to find ways to alter the climate in a way that limits problems” caused by warming. And in a paper published in
Nature Climate Change
in early 2014, researchers analyzed data from interviews and a large online survey conducted in Australia and New Zealand—with the biggest sample size of any geoengineering public opinion study to date. Malcolm Wright, the study’s lead author, explained, “The results
show that the public has strong negative views towards climate engineering. . . . It is a striking result and a very clear pattern. Interventions such as putting mirrors in space or fine particles into the stratosphere are not well received.” Perhaps most interesting of all given the high-tech subject, older respondents were more amenable to geoengineering than younger ones.
⁶⁴

And the best news
is that the time of astronaut’s eye-view environmentalism appears to be passing, with a new movement rising to take its place, one deeply rooted in specific geographies but networked globally as never before. Having witnessed the recent spate of big failures, this generation of activists is unwilling to gamble with the precious and irreplaceable, certainly not based on the reassuring words of overconfident
engineers.

This is a movement of many movements, and though utterly undetectable from space, it is beginning to shake the fossil fuel industry to its core.

I
. The retreat took place under the Chatham House Rule, which allows those attending to report on what was said in sessions, but not on who said what. (Any interviews conducted outside of the official sessions are exempt from these rules.)

II
. It’s particularly troubling that within the small group of scientists, engineers, and inventors who dominate the geoengineering debate, there have been a disproportionate share of big public errors in the past. Take, for instance, Lowell Wood, co-creator of Myhrvold’s StratoShield. Before becoming a prominent proponent of the “Pinatubo Option,” Wood was best known for coming up with some of
the more fantastical elements of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense program, widely discredited as expensive and reckless.

III
. That said, we would be wise to anticipate even small amounts of geoengineering unleashing a new age of weather-related geopolitical recrimination, paranoia, and possibly retaliation, with every future natural disaster being blamed—rightly or wrongly—on the people
in faraway labs playing god.

IV
. Ironically, the most reproduced of the earth-from-space photos was likely taken by Harrison Schmitt, a card-carrying climate change denier, former U.S. senator and a regular speaker at Heartland conferences. He was rather blasé about the experience: “You seen one Earth, you’ve seen them all,” he reportedly said.

“The day capitalism is forced to tolerate non-capitalist societies in its midst and to acknowledge limits in its quest for domination, the day it is forced to recognize that its supply of raw material will not be endless, is the day when change will come. If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with
tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them.

“The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination—an imagination
that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future.”

—Arundhati Roy, 2010
¹

“When I started
the lawsuit against Chevron in 1993, I thought, ‘What we need to do to fight this company and to get justice is we need to unite the Amazon.’ And that was a hard challenge. That was a hard task ahead. And now, today, I dare to say that we must unite the entire world. We have to unite the entire world to fight these companies, to fight these challenges.”

—Luis Yanza, cofounder, Frente de Defensa
de la Amazonía (Amazon Defense Front), 2010
²

“Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

—The United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, 1992
¹

“An honest and scrupulous man in the oil business is so rare as to rank as a museum
piece.”

—U.S. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, 1936
²

“Passport,” says the cop, tear gas canisters and grenades hanging off his bulletproof vest like medals of honor. We hand over the passports, along with press passes and other papers attesting that we are nothing more exciting than a vanload of Canadian documentary filmmakers.

The riot cop takes the documents wordlessly, motioning to our translator
to get out of the car. He then whispers at length to a colleague whose eyes remain fixed on the enormous biceps bulging from his own crossed arms. Another cop joins the huddle, then another. The last one pulls out a phone and painstakingly reads the names and numbers on each document to whoever is on the other end, occasionally shooting a question to our translator. More uniformed men mill
nearby. I count eleven in total.

It’s getting dark, the dirt road on which we have been apprehended is a mess and drops off sharply on one side. There are no streetlights.

I have the strong impression we are being deliberately screwed with—
that the whole point of this lengthy document check is to force us to drive this rough road in the dark. But we all know the rules: look pleasant; don’t make
eye contact; don’t speak unless spoken to. Resist the impulse to take pictures of the line of heavily armed cops standing in front of coils of barbed wire (happily it turns out our camera guy was filming through his mesh hat). And Rule No. 1 on encounters with arbitrary power: do
not
show how incredibly pissed off you are.

We wait. Half an hour. Forty minutes. Longer. The sun sets. Our van fills
with ravenous mosquitoes. We continue to smile pleasantly.