Jeff Goodell: ‘It’s a bad idea for geoengineering to be the equivalent of the Pompeii sex room’:
To head off the worst impacts of climate change, should human beings deliberately engineer the earth’s climate? Or rather, should they try, with uncertain odds of success and at least some chance of inadvertent catastrophe? Should they even learn how, or would the knowledge itself wreak havoc?
These are the sorts of questions journalist Jeff Goodell grapples with in How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate, due out on April 15. As readers of his previous book Big Coal know, Goodell’s talent lies in addressing heavy economic and political issues through the prism of individual human narratives. Once again he’s gathered a cast of eccentric characters and darkly entertaining stories that carry the reader through choppy conceptual waters.
Goodell and I discussed the promise and perils of geoengineering in wide-ranging conversation earlier this month. Here are some highlights, followed by more in-depth excerpts from our conversation.
Click on through for the short interview (and an explanation for the gratuitous porn reference in the title of this post).
My view of geoengineering hasn’t changed much, if at all, in recent months:
- I don’t like it.
- I think there’s a pretty good chance we’ll screw it up on technical grounds, e.g. Ocean Geoengineering Scheme May Prove Lethal.
- I think there’s also a good chance we’ll screw it up politically, e.g. countries or groups of them run off and do their own thing, as Goodell suggests might happen.
- I think it’s a virtual certainty that once geoengineering is even semi-officially “on the table” that far too many people will see it as a quick fix and a cheaper solution than decarbonizing economies.
- The schemes we’re most likely to try are the ones that block or reflect away sunlight, which does precisely nothing for ocean acidification.
- We’re far enough down this slippery slope, thanks to the policy, implementation, and climate timing issues and the (possible) proximity to a permafrost-fueled feedback, that we’ll have no choice but to resort to geoengineering.
See also Joe Romm’s take on this: Sole “Strategic Partner” of landmark geo-engineering conference is Australia’s “dirty coal” state of Victoria
