Abstract
Can global warming be reversed or kept within ‘safe’ limits? Since at least the late 1980s the standard answer is that it can be … but only if greenhouse gas emissions are cut significantly, and soon. This approach informed the Kyoto treaty. And it is now enshrined in the Paris climate agreement. In reality though, climate action to date has been underwhelming. National emissions targets are insufficiently ambitious. The United States (and now Brazil) are no longer committed to the Paris agreement and its goals. Average global surface temperatures are currently about 1°C above pre-industrial levels and rising. So are greenhouse gas emissions. In the face of this gloomy outlook there is a different kind of solution circulating in climate policymaking circles, but still largely out of public view, that it is the earth, not human behaviour which should be modified. Specifically, the argument is being put forth by some that a cooler climate could be engineered. This Chapter introduces the book as a whole. It outlines the basic idea of solar geoengineering (SGE). It argues that, as a highly controversial and not-yet-deployed technology, how SGE is imagined will shape (or prevent) its emergence. The focus of the book is to conduct a sociotechnical rather than a technoscientific analysis of SGE. It makes the argument for focusing on competing imaginaries of SGE and for looking at the assumptions about power relations, about what knowledge counts, and about which values matter which pervade the many ‘official’ assessments of SGE and the work of key knowledge-brokers.
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Notes
- 1.
It is an indication of the unsettled and controversial status of SGE that it goes by a variety of names. The term ‘Solar Radiation Management’ is widely used (for example IPCC 2013), although strictly speaking the sulphate aerosol approach is only one imagined technology for reducing incoming solar radiation, and ‘management’ suggests something far more administrative, practical and achievable than is likely the case. The terminology geoengineering by ‘Sulphate Aerosol Injection’ (SAI) is also widely used. The NRC report adopts the dull but descriptive label of “stratospheric aerosol albedo modification” (2015). All these terms refer to same technique, which I label ‘solar geoengineering’ (SGE). The more general term ‘geoengineering’ is similarly contested and is often called ‘climate engineering’. Various IPCC reports use both (for example 2012). Efforts to put a positive gloss on the idea have suggested calling it “climate remediation” (BPC 2011), and terms such as “planet hacking” (Kintisch 2010) and “geopiracy” (ETC Group 2010), with clearly negative connotations, can also be found.
- 2.
Keith calculates that to counterbalance half of the current carbon dioxide forcing—that is, to offset about 120 billion tons of carbon—“… would require injecting only one million tons of sulphur into the stratosphere each year” (2013: 67).
- 3.
For a recent account of the science of SGE see Irvine et al. (2016).
- 4.
When I use the word ‘proponent’ it is important not to read ‘cheerleader’, but rather understand it as those who think SGE is a path down which we need to be willing to go, and for which we must actively prepare. Although some of SGE’s proponents are enthusiastic, many are tentative and embrace it reluctantly as unavoidable or a ‘lesser evil’. Tellingly, one of the leading participants in the United Kingdom’s SPICE project calls his blog ‘The Reluctant Geoengineer’.
- 5.
Major volcanic eruptions which shoot sulphate particles into the stratosphere which then spread globally are often seen as a natural analogue for SGE, a proof of concept.
- 6.
Or a fourth leg if one considers Loss and Damage to be the third leg.
- 7.
The Paris climate agreement includes implicit backing for some geoengineering of the Negative Emissions Technology (NETs) variety, sometimes called Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). But it is silent about SGE, eerily so since, as I will discuss, SGE lurks in the text as a shadow presence. It is hard to see the temperature targets of 1.5°C or 2°C being met without utilising SGE (Xu et al. 2018).
- 8.
There are some similarities between this approach and that of science journalist Oliver Morton in his book The Planet Remade (2015). For Morton “the way a society imagines its future matters. Who gets to do the imagining matters” and utopian thinking is important, not because utopias are attainable, but because “imagining geoengineered worlds that might be good to live in, in which people could be safer and happier than they otherwise would be, is worth doing” (2015: 30). Morton’s goal is what he calls “a deliberate planet”, but one which people “take care not control” (2015: 344). I am less committed to validating the geoengineering turn.
- 9.
Movie-goers may recognise some similarities with the storyline in the film Downsizing.
- 10.
This is not to suggest that there are no vested interests promoting geoengineering or likely to emerge, only that it is hard to see a for-profit industry interest at any great scale. Hamilton (2013) has pointed to the role of patents, ultra-rich benefactors (including Bill Gates), and the interests emerging from elements of the security establishment in promoting pro-geoengineering perspectives (see also Long and Scott 2013).
- 11.
Those generally supportive of geoengineering have been labelled the ‘geo-clique’. It is a term which has gained traction but which I avoid. Nevertheless, it is the case that there is a small, but expanding, and relatively close-knit group of individual knowledge-brokers who play an outsized role in shaping the debate around SGE. Key names commonly identified include Ken Caldeira, John Shepherd, David Keith, David Victor, Jason Blackstock, Ben Kravitz, Peter Irvine, Andy Jones, Philip Rasch, Andy Parker, Scott Barrett, Gernot Wagner and Michael MacCracken (Kintisch 2010: 8; Oldham et al. 2014)—brokers at the centre of debates around geoengineering (Möller n.d., unpublished). It may or may not be relevant that the key knowledge-brokers are overwhelmingly pale, male, First-world scientists.
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Baskin, J. (2019). Introduction. In: Geoengineering, the Anthropocene and the End of Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17359-3_1
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