4. Geoengineering games: Playable interventions in the earth’s climate
This is part 4 of a series of 6 essays looking at how games and interactive models can be used to grapple with some of the challenges facing different sectors.
This series is particularly intended for practitioners in these sectors interested in new tools to address complex problems and to bring together people for rich conversations.
It’s also for any artists or game designers interested in applying their skills to real-world scenarios.
You can read the other essays here.
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In 2012, a small fishing boat took to the seas beyond the Haida Gwaii archipelago off the west coast of Canada. Over several weeks, the crew poured more than 100 tons of iron-rich dirt into the ocean, in a process known as ‘ocean fertilization’.
The idea is this: iron is a nutrient for plankton. The increase in iron stimulates a bloom in plankton growth. Plankton absorbs carbon from the atmosphere. The plankton is then eaten by other animals or dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean. Either way, the carbon is removed out of the atmosphere, helping to cool the planet.
The project was instantly controversial. Some critics argued that the project contravened international maritime law. Others accused the team of dumping waste at sea and carrying out dangerous uncontrolled experiments with potential for severe side effects.
It didn’t help that the lead scientist in the project was Russ George, an American entrepreneur who has described himself as a ‘rogue geoengineer’. The whole affair looked like a vanity project by a wealthy adventurer with a saviour complex.
Complicating this view is the fact that the project was actually funded and initiated by the Indigenous Haida Gwaii people. The Haida Gwaii coastal region of British Columbia is under the management of the First Nations Haida people, following an agreement with the Canadian government. Haida Gwaii elders embarked on the iron fertilization project out of concern for their traditional fisheries, which have been severely damaged by climate change.
The experiment did indeed result in a large phytoplankton bloom. In the year following the project, the Haida salmon catch was 224 million fish, more than four times the expected number. Scientists have found no conclusive link between the experiment and the high levels of fish — but for this kind of uncontrolled experiment, conclusive evidence is hard to come by.
Should this project have happened? What are the ethics of this kind of experiment? In a world where industrial fishing and ocean pollution is devastating natural ecosystems, do we have the right to carry out experiments that may help? Or are the potential side effects to great to risk it?
Holly Jean Buck refers to this experiment as a kind of ‘free range science’ — a non-controlled scientific experiment. It could never happen under the strict rules of academic research institutions — but that doesn’t mean nothing can be learned from it.
Geoengineering
One of the biggest conversations happening in the world right now is around the transition to a low carbon energy system. Shifting to a new model of energy production impacts every sector at every level.
But while we transition to a low carbon system, severe climate impacts are already hitting. At the same time as minimising our greenhouse gas emissions, we need to adapt our existing infrastructure for shocks which will keep escalating for decades to come.
The urgent need for both mitigation and adaptation is opening up the space for conversation about geoengineering.
A taxonomy of intervention
Geoengineering is a loosely-defined term with many different interpretations. Here I use it to mean ‘large-scale interventions in the earth system intended to alter the climate’.
The possibilities for geoengineering cover a huge range of projects. They can be grouped under two loose headings:
1. Carbon capture
2. Addressing symptons
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1. CARBON CAPTURE
Carbon capture projects seek to capture carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the ground or the ocean. This includes what can be described as biological methods, or ‘natural climate solutions’, including:
- Regenerative agriculture
- Afforestation
- Soil carbon sequestration
- Biochar
- Kelp cultivation
Carbon capture also encompasses geologic methods — capturing carbon through various technologies and injecting it directly into the rock or the bottom of the ocean, such as:
- Direct air capture
- Enhanced rock weathering
- Carbon capture and storage at power plants
Somewhere in this mix is the practice of ocean fertilisation — aka pouring iron-rich dirt into the ocean to stimulate phytoplankton blooms.
2. ADDRESSING SYMPTOMS
Alongside carbon drawdown projects are projects designed to address the symptoms of climate change, to cool the planet down or to prevent us from hitting certain dangerous tipping points. Projects here include:
- Solar geoengineering — blocking sunlight from hitting the earth
- Genetically modifying corals to better withstand heat
- Building seawalls to stop glaciers from sliding into the sea.
These projects tend to be controversial — even among the people proposing them.
Geobegging
The thing that characterises all geoengineering schemes is ambition. To make a meaningful impact on the planet, these projects will need to be implemented at the scale of the whole human-earth system.
Given that many of these projects don’t exist beyond a prototype, and sometimes not even that, this lends the geoengineering community an air of hubris.
To even use the term ‘geoengineering’ may be a stretch. ‘Engineering’ suggests a degree of control and understanding which we simply don’t have when it comes to large-scale climate interventions. Kim Stanley Robinson suggests we describe these projects instead as ‘geobegging’, to indicate the degree of hope and earnest faith they entail.
Meanwhile, many people in the ‘predatory delay’ camp (what we used to call climate deniers) have seized on geoengineering as a failsafe backup that allows them to continue to emit as usual.
Despite these significant issues, geoengineering projects have already been folded into our projections for the future. Every climate model (including the IPCC scenarios) that sees us avoiding warming of more than 2 degrees celcius is factoring in massive amounts of carbon drawdown, using one or more of the methods listed above.
So our best hopes for the future rely on projects which are often untested, come with unknown side effects, and are at worst actively harmful?
It’s fair to say that we need a well-informed public conversation on this topic. Games and experiential models can be useful instruments in this process, offering space to explore different outcomes and engage stakeholders in rich discussions.
The trade-offs
One way that games can be helpful in this space is by illustrating some of the trade-offs involved in making decisions about geoengineering projects.
One challenging trade-off in this space is land use. Most geoengineering and energy production projects demand large amounts of space to operate at scale. That land is often then unable to be used for anything else.
As an example: a 2020 study by a group from Princeton University found that to achieve 100% renewable power generation by the year 2050, the United States would need wind and solar farms spanning 1 million km2 — an area roughly the size of France and Spain.
What are the social and political implications of transforming this amount of land? At the very least, this means meaningful, robust consultations with rural communities, and thinking through the potential unintended consequences of these projects before they emerge.
Future Seas
In 2021, Jordan Prosser and I were commissioned to create a new performance by the Centre for Marine Socioecology in Hobart, Tasmania.
In collaboration with 20 other marine research institutions worldwide, researchers at CMS had produced a series of 12 research papers under the heading ‘Future Seas’.
These papers explored the coming decade of changes to the world’s oceans, looking at fishing, aquaculture, mining and offshore development. A team of First Nations scholars from different nations worldwide provided input into the research, and produced their own research paper examining the future for Indigenous coastal communities.
Collectively, these scientists and researchers developed two scenarios for the world’s oceans in 2030:
· Business-as-usual, in which the current trajectory of ocean ecosystem destruction continues, and
· More Sustainable, in which there is a pivot to more equitable and less impactful systems over the decade.
Having attended our CrimeForce performance, the Future Seas team invited Jordan and I to develop a interactive game which illustrated these two future scenarios and the key themes of the research papers.
Full Metal Aquatic
Using CrimeForce as a starting point, Jordan and I created a new work titled Full Metal Aquatic.
Our first challenge was finding the right narrative to fit the material. The Future Seas research papers looked at the whole world’s oceans. That’s a big subject, and we needed a story that would work at that scale.
Full Metal Aquatic took the form of a globetrotting action thriller in the vein of James Bond, Tom Clancy or Katherine Bigelow.
The blurb is as follows:
When an offshore platform is hijacked by kidnappers, its original designer Lara Nguyen is forced out of retirement and brought back to her creation in a high-stakes mission to infiltrate the facility before it is blown to pieces.
Within this classic hostage drama format, we were able to chart a tale that took us from coastal villages to offshore reefs to the deep oceans, exploring the themes in the Future Seas papers on the way.
The Full Metal Aquatic story takes place in two different futures — two different visions of what the world of 2030 might look like. In both futures, the characters are the same, the setting is the same, but the world is different.
In both scenarios, the story begins with the hijacking of the offshore platform. From there, it unfolds very differently in each scenario, as the world shapes the characters’ choices. Each version of the story ends in a very different place.
Geoengineering futures
In creating the story of these two different future worlds, Jordan and I kept returning to questions about geoengineering and the sustainable energy transition.
In the Business-as-Usual future, corporations control massive sea bream farms fed by dense clouds of farm-grown nutrients. In the More Sustainable future, rewilded carpet shark sanctuaries are guarded by drones targeting invasive crown-of-thorns starfish.
In the Business-as-Usual future, underwater natural gas drilling has been extended by injecting CO2 into underwater rock deposits. In the More Sustainable world, power is generated in huge undersea columns by temperature differentials between ocean floor and surface.
We presented Full Metal Aquatic to audiences at the Centre for Marine Socioecology in Hobart in early 2022. The debates among audience members in response to these alternative futures underscored how important these questions are for all of us. Geoengineering and the energy transition are not remote abstractions for people — they are real concerns that we all have a stake in.
Full Metal Aquatic pointed to the possibility for games to open up some of the issues around geoengineering for wider discussion. The next step is to develop new games that go deeper into the emerging debates surrounding geoengineering — that look at the root causes of climate change and that address accountability, reckoning and reparation.
Future games in this space might explore resource management, land use, policy negotiations and climate scenarios. They could be physical games for a group of players around a table or digital games for people working remotely, or anything and anywhere in between.
An ethical transition
To repeat the old adage: ‘Change is inevitable — justice is not.’ Many of the geoengineering projects that have been proposed could be beneficial — or they could be actively destructive. A net zero world could be a world that’s just and fair — or it could be a world in which a few corporations balance the planet’s carbon budget by ringfencing much of the world’s land for private use.
Much of the question of ‘should we or shouldn’t we?’ depends on who is making the decision. A large-scale solar geoengineering project proposed by the people of Bangladesh and Fiji, guided by an international treaty, is very different to a project proposed and delivered by Silicon Valley technocrats with no consultation.
But how do these diverse groups get a meaningful say in these conversations? This is where games and experiential models have a place — to open up the debate to new groups and communities
These future games can provide space for conversations about compensation for loss and damage, about transparency in research and about the moral accountability of climate change.
And perhaps most critically, games can provide players with a attitude of play and experimentation, a reminder that the future is not fixed, that we create it collectively through our choices every day.
