Dancing with the devil known as geohacking

I’ve been thinking a lot about “inescapable conclusions” lately, the answers to certain big questions that will almost certainly prove to be true in the coming years and decades. Some of these questions and answers are topics that I and other bloggers and people commenting on blogs have mentioned many times before and are anything but new insights into our situation. For example, many of us have concluded that we will continue to consume petroleum at a horrific rate until it becomes so painfully expensive that we’re finally pried loose from our comfort zone and dragged kicking and screaming into broad based adoption of new consumption patterns, technology, and infrastructure. You can call that view cynical or Economics 101; you can deride it for exhibiting a depressing lack of faith in humanity; you can consider it a normal (or simply excusable) response from those of us (including many of you) who are eroded after fighting the good fight for so long and achieving so little. None of those views would be entirely wrong or sufficient to explain the situation.

Another view, somewhat less widely accepted in the blogosphere, is one I’ve mentioned a few times, that we’re so deeply committed to a dramatically warmer and therefore altered world, and we’ve shown so little progress in changing our ways, that we will have no choice but to resort to geohacking to avoid the worst impacts of climate chaos. If our future does indeed unfold as I suspect, this will represent an enormous gamble. Not just in the obvious but critical sense of implementing a geohacking scheme in a way that does more good than harm, but also in the broader sense of trying to talk about it without it being seen as a crutch, an “easy” technofix that will let us avoid all that nasty hard work of reducing our CO2 emissions. That could be the ultimate trap of geohacking, that just talking about it openly would lock us into having to use it, whether or not we knew what we were doing.

All of this came to mind for two reasons. First, I’m about 50 pages into Eli Kintisch’s book Hack the Planet, and while I’m very hesitant to recommend any book on such a small portion of its content, so far it looks very good. I plan to read Jeff Goodell’s How to Cool the Planet (and it would be nice if the publisher got off its butt and sent me the review copy I requested weeks ago), which I expect to be very good, based on what he did in Big Coal. Kintisch makes it clear how hesitant scientists are in their embrace (to use too strong a word, for the most part) of geoacking; in other words, they largely see this as a last-ditch effort and as an addition to a massive reduction in our CO2 emissions. But scientists, being both smart and conservative, realize that it’s in our best interest to talk about this distasteful topic and even do limited testing so that we can be as prepared as possible if and when (read: when) circumstances force our hand.

Second, I just found an entry on the blog failing gracefully, The geoengineering genie, that talks about both books, and ends:

Kintisch also digs deeper than Goodell into explaining the details of how geoengineering might work – and why it would be so difficult to do well. A reporter for the journal Science who regularly covers geoengineering for the journal’s ScienceInsider blog, Kintisch likewise takes an insider’s view in Hack the Planet. that’s not to say Kintisch argues in favour of geoengineering, but that he writes from firmly within the world of science, and for an audience who’s comfortable with science, too. He never explains the term ‘hack’ in the title, for example, which is borrowed from computer hacking and reflects the idea that geoengineering involves interfering with fundamental aspects of the climate to change how the whole system works. For this reason, scientists and other science-literate readers – especially those who already have some familiarity with geoengineering – will probably prefer Kintisch’s book over Goodell’s.

In contrast, Goodell’s book takes a step back, presenting an outsider’s view -unsurprising, as he is a regular reporter for Rolling Stone, the music and politics magazine. This perspective allows Goodell to be a guide to those who might reject the whole idea of geoengineering as far-fetched or crazy. “You don’t need a Ph.D. in physics to understand the basic insanity of this undertaking,” Goodell writes, while emphasizing that the outlook for the planet is so bad that we have to think about these options anyway. Of the two authors, Goodell does a better job of taking the reader on a journey. Most chapters in How to Cool the Planet feature a central character, from geoengineer David Keith tinkering in his lab at the University of Calgary to environmentalist and scientist James Lovelock strolling the countryside around his quaint English home. By digging into their stories, Goodell portrays geoengineering as a human endeavour, carrying hefty doses of uncertainty, doubt and fear.

It what seems to be an odd coincidence, both books end by likening geoengineering to some kind of planetary gardening. Goodell takes some comfort in this notion, whereas Kintisch is sceptical about the idea that we can tame and control ecosystems, let alone the whole planet. To my mind, a better analogy for geoengineering would be industrial agriculture, with vast feedlots and fields of crops planted and harvested by machines. This system works for now, but its sustainability is increasingly coming into question. Similarly, geoengineering might appear to work well for a while before its dark side becomes evident. As Princeton University’s Robert Socolow recently told the Asilomar meeting: “Be very careful.” Geoengineering comes with some strong warnings, and they’re worth heeding.

I will add my comments about all of Kintisch’s book when I finish it, and Goodell’s book, when I either get my review copy or get tired of waiting and buy it.

Special request: Please let me know in comments what other inescapable conclusions you’ve reached. I plan to post a list of mine soon.