Abstract
This Chapter explores the history and understandings of geoengineering in the period prior to 2005 and draws out the continuities and discontinuities between how geoengineering, and especially solar geoengineering (SGE), have been understood and imagined at different times. It identifies three phases in geoengineering’s history prior to its recent re-emergence: Mastery, Unimaginability and Taboo. It tracks the enthusiastic embrace of geoengineering as an idea after 1945 and shows how this formed part of a larger Cold War imaginary. In the West this involved the triad of modernity: a belief in progress, the invention of development, and a faith in science and the technologies it could generate, and with all three underpinned by an assumption of human entitlement, even obligation, to mastery over nature. These had almost identical counterparts in the Soviet sphere. Geoengineering was embraced because it was possible, and as part of US-Soviet Cold War techno-rivalry, and not because there was a climate problem needing a solution. The Chapter examines the hiatus period, an interregnum in which geoengineering was seen as unnecessary and unwise and was no longer commonly imagined, before coming to be regarded as taboo. It was a taboo that persisted even during an unsuccessful attempt by some US scientists to revive the idea in the early 1990s. This Chapter seeks to understand the reasons for geoengineering’s effective disappearance from the climate policy table, and to explore its relationship to the rise of neo-liberal globalisation from the 1980s. It reveals some of the specific thinking about science, climate and nature that made geoengineering essentially (although not literally) unimaginable.
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Notes
- 1.
Huxley ’s own biography is fascinating with a combination of interests virtually unthinkable today. He was an influential scientist, a committed eugenicist, a colonialist, an old-style conservationist (and founder of WWF), and first head of UNESCO (although he was ousted before his term ended, being perceived as too left-wing once the Cold War commenced in earnest).
- 2.
Teller was a key figure in the practice and politics of ‘big science’ throughout the Cold War and beyond. US President Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell speech, famously warned against both the ‘military-industrial complex’ and the hijacking of public policy by the ‘scientific-technological elite’, and he let it be known afterwards that it was Teller and Werner von Braun that he had in mind (Goodchild 2004: xxiii).
- 3.
Von Neumann was a Hungarian-born, Jewish refugee, mathematician, physicist and polymath. He has become famous for his brilliance, his right-wing and militaristic views, his pivotal role in developing the H-bomb, and his foundational role in computing, amongst many other achievements. He was extremely well-connected to the military and political establishment even at the time he endorsed Zworykin’s proposal.
- 4.
In the early nineteenth century Laplace had argued that the world was ‘wholly knowable’, at least in principle. Von Neumann’s comments have roots in this aspect of the European Enlightenment. Similar views pervaded the Soviet bloc. As Czech dissident and later President Vaclav Havel, talking about communism, put it in 1992: communism displayed the extreme, arrogant and proud belief that “… man, as the pinnacle of everything that exists, was capable of objectively describing, explaining and controlling everything that exists” (1992).
- 5.
- 6.
See, for example, a 1968 Stanford Resource Institute report for the American Petroleum Institute (Robinson and Robbins 1968). Drawing on the work of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, it noted that exploiting all fossil fuel then thought to be recoverable would lead to concentrations of 830 ppm. The report warned that rising CO2 would result in increases in temperature at the earth’s surface, which could lead to rising seas and warming. It has been suggested the oil industry suppressed this report (see Milman 2016) and it would certainly have been in its interests to do so. But a more charitable explanation can perhaps be found in the uncertainty in the report itself, still common at that time. The report concludes by arguing that “there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe”. But it then goes on to say: “Whether one chooses the CO2 warming theory as described in detail by Revelle and others or the newer cooling prospect [from smog and industrial pollutants] indicated by McCormick and Ludwig, the prospect for the future must be of serious concern” (Robinson and Robbins 1968: 110).
- 7.
As we now know, at this time a range of think-tanks were switching from the now disappeared ‘red peril’ to the ‘green peril’ of environmentalism, and a range of corporate interests were starting to promote doubt about global warming (Oreskes and Conway 2010).
- 8.
I follow Litfin’s more expanded use of Haas’s ‘epistemic communities’ notion, and her emphasis on paying particular attention to how “discursive practices promote specific narratives about social problems” (1995: 252).
- 9.
This intriguing study prefigures the idea of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), not only in its participants, but also in its call for “…an international consensus among concerned scientists…” (SMIC 1971: 3–4). The reports instincts were to seek non-anthropogenic causes for climate change, and, if anything, to link human industrial activities and attendant pollution with recorded cooling of 0.3 degrees in the Northern hemisphere between 1940 and 1970 (p. 10).
- 10.
The story is in fact slightly more complex and, from the 1960s, in the United States, a political bifurcation starts to emerge. The biology-centred disciplinary side was focused on ecological problems and publishing openly. The geophysics-centred side remained, in large part, more directly responsive to the military’s operational needs, and its key findings were often classified (Doel 2003). It was largely the former that gravitated towards a more environmentally aware politics, and only some of the latter. As Masco argues: during the Cold War and beyond, the damaged biosphere was “[b]oth discovered as an object of state interest and repressed as a political project” (2010: 17). This may also help explain why scientists from the military-linked Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (LLNL) could never be credible promoters of solar geoengineering.
- 11.
Later this would manifest in prominent establishment scientists, such as NASA’s James Hansen, becoming activist in relation to climate policy.
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Baskin, J. (2019). Geoengineering’s Past: From Mastery to Taboo. In: Geoengineering, the Anthropocene and the End of Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17359-3_2
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