The Right and the Wrong Questions: What It Means to Be Serious About Climate Change
At the 2018 Earth Week conference held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s venerable Nelson Institute, Paul Robbins, the director of the Institute, stands in front of a crowd of climate scientists, policy wonks and students and makes this claim: “if you aren’t thinking about geoengineering and nuclear energy, you aren’t serious about climate change.” A palpable tension fills the room. This is the default reaction whenever someone mentions the word “geoengineering” to a group meeting to discuss climate change. The goateed director smooths his tie and doubles down on his sentiment, reminding the tense room that this is a place for listening. He reaches out his hand to sweep over the left side of the room, gesturing to a small cohort of crisp, collegiate-looking young men supposedly pursuing careers in nuclear energy and says that it makes him so proud to see young people who are working to build a climate-adapted future. Robbins brings an expert up to the stage, Wil Burns, a man who admits readily that he is not a scientist but a lawyer — the woman interviewing him, she is also a lawyer. Both of them seem tense.
In a steady, even voice, with his eyes on the hands folded in his lap, Burns slowly and methodically explains the process by which geoengineers propose to release sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere as a means of averting the climate disaster. Behind me, a pair of women gasp and ask each other in whispers if he is serious. Burns then calmly explains other proposals: mirrors in the sky to reflect solar energy away from the earth or changing the chemical composition of the oceans to absorb more carbon, since apparently those are done for anyway. After he has explained both sides of these issues — the many things that could go wrong, the many things geoengineers do not know about the consequences of these technologies, and, conversely, the constant refrain from geoengineers of “but climate change is scary too” — Burns poses the dilemma: what is scarier, the unknown disasters that could come along with geoengineering or the mostly-known disasters that will come with climate change? We are past the point of incremental change, Burns informs us with unconcealed sorrow. So which is it going to be? The monster we create knowingly or the monster born of our ignorance?
Geoengineering is a broad term. In the most general sense, it means technology with which we alter the earth’s natural systems for this or that helpful purpose. This could mean everything from mechanical carbon sequestration to fertilizing the oceans to alter the rate algae grows to actual mirrors in space that will reflect some of the sun’s solar energy away from earth back into space. Some seem more benign: cloud-brightening, for example, by having boats spray seawater into the sky at regular intervals. Far and away though, the possibility that scares me the most is also the most feasible: injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. In Naomi Klein’s groundbreaking book, This Changes Everything, David Keith, a proponent of geoengineering, seems terrifyingly flippant about this process: “It’s pretty clear that just putting a lot of sulfur in the stratosphere isn’t terrible. After all, volcanoes do it.” (Klein 271). Indeed, this process was largely inspired by huge volcanic eruptions, such as the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which some took as “a natural test of some of the concepts underlying solar radiation management” (Klein 271).
Is such an operation really feasible? It turns out yes. Of the processes mentioned, Burns identified sulfur dioxide injection to be the least costly project to undertake, well within the reach of a single eccentric billionaire. The technology already exists and the results would be almost immediate. This process could help cool global temperatures almost immediately, perhaps even quick enough to stave off further glacial melt. But what about the negatives? Aside from casting the skies of Earth into a permanent, sulfuric pall, much is up in the air. It would almost certainly alter the precipitation patterns globally — some areas, like the Indian subcontinent, could lose their monsoon seasons while others could see Macondo-like rains that flood the streets for weeks. What would that do to the crops? What about the people who live there? What might be the reaction of a country with nuclear weapons, like India, who might not take kindly to the end of the weather systems that have made living in their country possible? And what would happen to all of that carbon while we on the ground continue burning fossil fuels, content that our problems are over? We would have to keep pumping sulfur dioxide up there forever because without that, the carbon would continue to accumulate. Once the sulfur stops, it all comes back — the heat, the storms, the glacier melt — and because there has been no reason to change things on land, it comes back with a vengeance.
So what’s stopping this from happening? According to Burns, not much. There is an international agreement between the United Nations to freeze geoengineering projects but there are gaping loopholes. As already mentioned, solar management is not expensive. Hypothetically speaking, we are perhaps one drunken Elon Musk away from never having a blue sky again. But what of Burns’ question: which future do we choose? A permanent post-volcano-eruption earth — artificially cooler while a storm above brews — or the slow death march of climate catastrophe? He presents this choice with such certainty, as if part of being a realist means that these are the two choices we have and there are no others. It falls upon our species to be the masters of the earth anyway, does it not? We innovated our way into this mess, we must innovate our way out.
The answer, I believe, is neither. Albert Einstein is apocryphally credited with the saying “you cannot solve a problem with the same thinking used to create it.” The idea, then, that the same sort of worldview that created this problem can be used to solve it is poor logic of the worst order. Technology cannot save us. The myth of Western ingenuity cannot save us. The question of geoengineering presents a false choice: to destroy our world strategically or by accident. It ignores the idea that we could, if we wanted to, stop destroying the planet altogether. The problem with that possibility is that it presents a choice that scares many Western scientists even more than climate change. To me and to many others, being serious about climate change (as Nelson Institute Director Robbins challenged us to be) demands an examination of our image of ourselves as the individualistic, driven masters of creation that industrial societies so exalt. It begs the question of what is more dear to you: the world you leave for your children or your feeling of dominance over it? Your imagined sense of power or your sense of moral culpability? Your world or your worldview? Unlike the false choice presented by Burns, the choices that we make about these questions might actually get us somewhere.
