The Politics of Geoengineering
Posted by Big Gav
After doing a review of a Herman Kahn book in my last post, I was pleasantly surprised to see his name crop up when I wandered over to Beyond the Beyond today, with Bruce looking at Jamais Cascio's post "The Politics of Geoengineering. Is Cascio the new Kahn ?
(((I wince when I drop by Cascio's blog these days, as he has an almost Herman Kahn-like willingness to publicly ponder the unthinkable. Pray that this business about the Earth's faltering ability to absorb carbon isn't true, because if it is, we've walked into a planetary death-trap that's like some monster La Brea tar pit.)))
Link: Open the Future: The Politics of Geoengineering."Geoengineering -- or, as I sometimes call it, re-terraforming the Earth -- is back in the news, with a sobering editorial in today's New York Times by Carnegie's Dr. Ken Caldeira. Caldeira's commentary arrives in the wake of news that the geophysical mechanisms for cycling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere are beginning to slow down, thereby increasing the degree to which CO2 accumulates as a greenhouse gas. (((AIEEEEEEE!!!)))
"This is exactly the kind of news that makes one suspect that we may not have the time to re-imagine our urban systems, transform our agricultural methods, and move to a carbon-free economy. Geoengineering seems to provide a solution (of varying appeal) for just this kind of situation, focusing not on resolving the causes of global climate disruption, but on ameliorating the symptoms.
"I've addressed the question of support for or opposition to geoengineering in the past, and given its increasing visibility, debates among scientists, environmentalists, and engineers are not hard to find. But these debates center on the scientific risks and merits of the re-terraforming proposals. Few people, regardless of position, have focused on a fundamental non-geophysical risk of the method: political control, costs, and stability...."
(((Now that I think about it, my new novel is all about this subject. I didn't think it was gonna be, but now that I've got it done, it's clear that it pretty much is.)))
Cool - a new Sterling novel on the way - it has been years since I last read one...
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