New Scientist has an opinion piece by John Shepherd, Geoengineering is no longer unmentionable, that’s definitely worth your time:
MOST people and nations now recognise the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid dangerous climate change. However, there is a growing fear that this fragile support for action could be at risk because geoengineering – the large-scale manipulation of the environment to counteract climate change – is now receiving serious attention from scientists, policy-makers and the media.
This is sometimes referred to as the “moral hazard” argument. It holds that even discussing geoengineering methods, such as fertilising the oceans with iron or seeding clouds with sea water, may lead to a drop in support for emissions reductions because of a premature conviction that geoengineering could provide an easier way out.
If the mere mention of geoengineering were to have such an effect on public opinion, it would be a serious matter. Social and political inertia are already an impediment to tackling climate change, and it is not hard to imagine that people may prefer to put their faith in untried technologies rather than change their high-carbon lifestyles.
What is more, for reasons of vested interest or ideology, a number of people and organisations oppose action on climate change, and there is a sophisticated and well-funded (mis)information and lobbying industry that seeks to promote such views. Some of these organisations are now showing great interest in geoengineering, and may try to promote it as an alternative to emissions reductions. It is not, as this week’s Royal Society report clearly shows (see “Top science body calls for geoengineering ‘plan B’”).
While we need to take seriously the possibility that geoengineering will undermine efforts to reduce emissions, it is based on an assumption which has not yet been tested empirically. Indeed, it is possible that geoengineering could have the opposite effect. The politics of climate change are notoriously complex and it is difficult to predict people’s behaviours and attitudes.
Please go read it all, but for now, let me say that I’m much more worried about the moral hazard issue than Shepherd is. The danger is not that people will spontaneously look at geoengineering and say, “Golly gee, this ere is a silver bullet for all our nasty old climate woes! Let’s just do that thing and then we can burn all the coal and oil and natural gas, and generate all the methane we could want!” The problem I see relates to those individual and groups with financial and ideological reasons for opposing action on climate change. Put bluntly, I think their track record to date of selling yet more candy to the kids with bad teeth and telling them (by which I mean a disturbingly high percentage of all of us) that we don’t have to go see scary Mr. Dentist portends considerable success in selling geoengineering as a silver bullet.
Remember, these are the same people who tell us stories about “clean coal”, fund the forging of letters to elected representatives in the US Congress, and generally seem to have a bottomless sack of lies and disinformation tricks they use to hose down numerous web sites. Why should we think that they would be beyond selling one or more geoengineering schemes as a “better, cheaper way to solve global warming with modern technology, exactly the kind of common sense approach we need instead of the environmentalists’ prescription for a no-growth future of self-denial”. The more you try to parody the things they’re likely to say, the easier it is to imagine them taking exactly that line of attack in full-page newspaper ads, billboards, TV and radio ads, and, of course, via their tireless and shameless talk show minions.[1]
I’ve said many times online, here and on other sites, that the deniers and delayers have barely begun to fight. I meant it every time I said it, and I’m increasingly convinced that the “geoengineering pivot”, going from the “there is no global warming or if it is then it’s not man-made or if it is there’s nothing we can do about it” gambit to “OK, it’s real after all, but we can fix it!” will become a staple of online conversations for years to come as they ratchet up their rhetoric. In this respect, I think Bjorn Lomborg (see Bjorn again on CC) is merely the first high profile person to execute the geoengineering pivot.
A potentially useful response to this coming onslaught would be to ask mainstreramers (the ultimate target of the effort) if they would change their lifestyles significantly to avoid forcing themselves and their kids to have a four-way heart bypass operation or even a transplant. That’s pretty much the choice we’re facing now: Make some very serious, sweeping lifestyle changes; endure an expensive, risky (and in the case of geoengineering, unprecedented), and unpleasant process; or die. That would lead a lot of people to make the right choice, I suspect, even if the deniers are as successful as I fear they’ll be in selling geoengineering as a silver bullet.
[1] Minor details, like the fact they spent all that time, money, and effort telling us that “global warming was a hoax” and they now “accept it”, or the fact that nothing short of pulling massive amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere will do anything about ocean acidification–Exhibit A showing why it’s “climate change” and not “global warming”–will be conveniently overlooked.
