It is a simple “tech fix”. That is all that is needed to correct the imbalances wrought by climate change. I heard this hubris first at a conference at Georgetown University back in 2003. But the temptation is strong. There is potential for huge profits for some. And it seems such a convenient escape hatch, given the political difficulties of reducig green house gas emissions. Oil, gas, and coal will not go without a fight. Indeed, they seem to be winning the fight to stay.
And so, geoengineering is upon us with the act of a rogue businessman seeding the pacific ocean with iron.
Naomi Klein writing in the New York Times tells us that geoengineering destroys forever the natural refuge from the messy world of human affairs.
The situation does not seem so absolute to me. This is more like an add-on. It is one more hybrid on top of all the others. We use lasik to fix our defective eyes, psycho-pharmaceuticals to fix defective minds, blue pills for defective desire, invitro fertilization and surrogate wombs for those couples who cannot get sperm and egg to unite productively, screens to fix our boredom with our accessible time-space dimension, and genetics to change crops. We humans have been engineering landscapes since the dawn of agriculture.
Engineering the weather is not so very different from these other technologies. And like all others: it is a means of profit, it serves those who can pay for it, and it will be subject to error.
This is not a new monster, but an old one grown more complicated.
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