On Fire

by Naomi Klein

  V. This is a systemic problem. According to a 2014 study published in Climate Change, the denial-espousing think tanks and other advocacy groups making up what sociologist Robert Brulle calls the “climate change counter-movement” are collectively pulling in more than $900 million per year for their work on a variety of right-wing causes, most of it in the form of “dark money,” funds from conservative foundations that cannot be fully traced.

  GEOENGINEERING: TESTING THE WATERS

  Wouldn’t it be better to change our behavior—to reduce our use of fossil fuels—before we begin fiddling with the planet’s basic life-support systems?

  OCTOBER 2012

  FOR ALMOST TWENTY YEARS, I’VE been spending time on a craggy stretch of British Columbia’s shoreline called the Sunshine Coast. A few months ago, I had an experience that reminded me why I love this place, and why I chose to have a child in this sparsely populated part of the world.

  It was 5 AM, and my husband and I were up with our three-week-old son. Looking out at the ocean, we spotted two towering, black dorsal fins: orcas, or killer whales. Then two more. We had never seen an orca on this part of the coast, certainly not just a few feet from shore. In our sleep-deprived state, it felt like a miracle, as if the baby had awakened us to make sure we didn’t miss this rare visit.

  The possibility that the sighting may have resulted from something less serendipitous did not occur to me until recently, when I read reports of a bizarre ocean experiment off the islands of Haida Gwaii, several hundred miles from where we spotted the orcas swimming.

  There, an American entrepreneur named Russ George dumped 120 tons of iron dust off the hull of a rented fishing boat. The plan was to create an algae bloom that would sequester carbon and thereby combat climate change.

  George is one of a growing number of would-be geoengineers who advocate high-risk, large-scale technical interventions that would fundamentally change the oceans and skies in order to reduce the effects of global warming. In addition to George’s scheme to fertilize the ocean with iron, other geoengineering strategies under consideration include pumping sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere to imitate the cooling effects of a major volcanic eruption and “brightening” clouds so they reflect more of the sun’s rays back to space.

  The risks are huge. Ocean fertilization could trigger dead zones and toxic tides. And multiple simulations have predicted that mimicking the effects of a volcano would interfere with monsoons in Asia and Africa, potentially threatening water and food security for billions of people.

  So far, these proposals have mostly served as fodder for computer models and scientific papers. But with George’s ocean adventure, geoengineering has decisively escaped the laboratory. If George’s account of the mission is to be believed, his actions created an algae bloom in an area half the size of Massachusetts that attracted a huge array of aquatic life from across the region, including whales that could be “counted by the score.”

  When I read about the whales, I began to wonder: could it be that the orcas I saw swimming north were on their way to feed on George’s bloom? The possibility, unlikely though it is, provides a glimpse into one of the disturbing repercussions of geoengineering: once we start deliberately interfering with the earth’s climate systems, whether by dimming the sun or fertilizing the seas, all natural events can begin to take on an unnatural tinge. An absence that might have seemed like a cyclical change in migration patterns or a presence that felt like a miraculous gift suddenly can feel sinister, as if all of nature were being manipulated behind the scenes.

  Most news reports characterize George as a “rogue” geoengineer. But what concerns me, after researching the subject for two years, is that far more serious scientists, backed by far deeper pockets, appear poised to actively tamper with the complex and unpredictable natural systems that sustain life on earth—with huge potential for unintended consequences.

  In 2010, the chairman of the United States House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology recommended more research into geoengineering; the British government has begun to spend public money in the field. Bill Gates has funneled millions of dollars into geoengineering research.I And he has invested in a company, Intellectual Ventures, that is developing at least two geoengineering tools: the “StratoShield,” a nineteen-mile-long hose suspended by helium balloons that would spew sun-blocking sulfur dioxide particles into the sky and a tool that can supposedly blunt the force of hurricanes.

  The appeal is easy to understand. Geoengineering offers the tantalizing promise of a climate change fix that would allow us to continue our resource-exhausting way of life, indefinitely. And then there is the fear. Every week seems to bring more terrifying climate news, from reports of ice sheets melting more rapidly than predicted to oceans acidifying far faster than expected. Meanwhile, emissions soar. Is it any wonder that many are pinning their hopes on a break-the-glass-in-case-of-emergency option that scientists have been cooking up in their labs?

  But with rogue geoengineers on the loose, it is a good time to pause and ask, collectively, whether we want to go down the geoengineering road. Because the truth is that geoengineering is itself a rogue proposition. By definition, technologies that tamper with ocean and atmospheric chemistry on a planetary scale affect everyone. Yet it is impossible to get anything like unanimous consent for these interventions. Nor could any such consent possibly be informed, given that we don’t, and can’t, know the full risks involved until these planet-altering technologies are actually deployed.

  While the United Nations’ climate negotiations proceed from the premise that countries must agree to a joint response to an inherently communal problem, geoengineering raises a very different prospect. For well under a billion dollars, a “coalition of the willing,” a single country, or even a wealthy individual could decide to take the climate into their own hands. Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, an environmental watchdog organization, puts the problem like this: “Geoengineering says, ‘we’ll just do it, and you’ll live with the effects.’ ”

  The scariest part is that models suggest that many of the people who could well be most harmed by these technologies are already disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Imagine this: North America decides to send sulfur into the stratosphere to reduce the intensity of the sun, in the hope of saving its corn crops—despite the real possibility of triggering droughts in Asia and Africa. In short, geoengineering would give us (or some of us) the power to exile huge swaths of humanity to sacrifice zones with a virtual flip of the switch.

  The geopolitical ramifications are chilling. Climate change is already making it hard to know whether events previously understood as “acts of God” (a freak heat wave in March or a Frankenstorm on Halloween) still belong in that category. But if we start tinkering with the earth’s thermostat, deliberately turning our oceans murky green to soak up carbon and bleaching the skies hazy white to deflect the sun, we take our influence to a new level. A drought in India will come to be seen, accurately or not, as a result of a conscious decision by engineers on the other side of the planet to put the region’s annual monsoon season in jeopardy. What was once bad luck could come to be seen as a malevolent plot or an imperialist attack.

  There will be other, visceral, life-changing consequences. A study published this spring in Geophysical Research Letters found that if we inject sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere in order to dial down the sun, the sky would not only become whiter and significantly brighter, but we would also be treated to more intense “volcanic” sunsets. But what kind of relationships can we expect to have with those hyper-real skies? Would they fill us with awe—or with vague unease? Would we feel the same when beautiful wild creatures crossed our paths unexpectedly, as happened to my family this summer? In a popular book on climate change, Bill McKibben warned that we face “The End of Nature.” In the age of geoengineering, we might find ourselves confronting the end of miracles, too.

  Now that geoengineering threat
ens to escape the laboratory on a much larger scale than one artificial algae bloom, the real question we face is this: Wouldn’t it be better to change our behavior, to reduce our use of fossil fuels, before we begin fiddling with the planet’s basic life-support systems?

  Because unless we change course, we can expect to hear many more reports about sun shielders and ocean fiddlers like Russ George, whose iron-dumping exploit did more than test a thesis about ocean fertilization. It also tested the waters for future geoengineering experiments. And judging by the muted response so far, the results of George’s test are clear: geoengineers proceed, caution be damned.

  * * *

  I. Gates is one of the funders of a Harvard University–based research group that has announced it will attempt a groundbreaking field experiment spraying aerosols into the stratosphere in 2019, a plan that has attracted considerable controversy and been delayed several times. According to leading climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, “solar geoengineering is not the answer” to the failure to reduce emissions. “Cutting incoming solar radiation affects the weather and hydrological cycle. It promotes drought. It destabilizes things and could cause wars. The side effects are many and our models are just not good enough to predict the outcomes.”

  WHEN SCIENCE SAYS THAT POLITICAL REVOLUTION IS OUR ONLY HOPE

  Most of these scientists were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores, running global climate models, and studying ocean acidification, only to discover that they “were unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order.”

  OCTOBER 2013

  IN DECEMBER 2012, A PINK-HAIRED complex systems researcher named brad Werner made his way through the throng of twenty-four thousand earth and space scientists at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of NASA’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the filmmaker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.

  But it was Werner’s session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).

  Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego, walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations, and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism had made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient, and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” were becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”

  There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance”: movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture.” According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups.”

  Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people (along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement, or Occupy Wall Street) represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved,” he pointed out. So, it stands to reason that “if we’re thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics.” And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but “really, a geophysics problem.”

  Plenty of scientists have been moved by their research findings to take action in the streets. Physicists, astronomers, medical doctors, and biologists have been at the forefront of movements against nuclear weapons, nuclear power, war, and chemical contamination. And in November 2012, Nature published a commentary by the financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and “be arrested if necessary,” because climate change “is not only the crisis of your lives—it is also the crisis of our species’ existence.”

  Some scientists need no convincing. The godfather of modern climate science, James Hansen, is a formidable activist, having been arrested some half-dozen times for resisting mountaintop removal coal mining and tar sands pipelines. (He even left his job at NASA this year in part to have more time for campaigning.) Two years ago, when I was arrested outside the White House at a mass action against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, one of the 166 people in cuffs that day was a glaciologist named Jason Box, a world-renowned expert on Greenland’s melting ice sheet. “I couldn’t maintain my self-respect if I didn’t go,” Box said at the time, adding that “just voting doesn’t seem to be enough in this case. I need to be a citizen also.”

  This is laudable, but what Werner is doing with his modeling is different. He isn’t saying that his research drove him to take action to stop a particular policy; he is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability. And, indeed, that challenging this economic paradigm, through mass movement counterpressure, is humanity’s best shot at avoiding catastrophe.

  That’s heavy stuff. But he’s not alone. Werner is part of a small but increasingly influential group of scientists whose research into the destabilization of natural systems, particularly the climate system, is leading them to similarly transformative, even revolutionary, conclusions. And for any closet revolutionary who has ever dreamed of replacing the present economic order with one a little less likely to cause Italian pensioners to hang themselves in their homes (as happened recently in the midst of that country’s austerity crisis), this work should be of particular interest. Because it makes the ditching of that cruel system in favor of something distinctly fairer no longer a matter of mere ideological preference but, rather, one of species-wide existential necessity.

  Leading the pack of these new scientific revolutionaries is one of Britain’s top climate experts, Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which has quickly established itself as one of the United Kingdom’s premier climate research institutions. Addressing everyone from the Department for International Development to Manchester City Council, Anderson has spent more than a decade patiently translating the implications of the latest climate science to politicians, economists, and campaigners. In clear and understandable language, he lays out a rigorous road map for emissions reduction, one that provides a decent shot at keeping global temperature rise below the temperature target that most governments have determined would stave off catastrophe.

  But in recent years, Anderson’s papers and slide shows have become more alarming. Under titles such as “Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous . . . Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope,” he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast.

  With his colleague Alice Bows, a climate mitigation expert at the Tyndall Centre, Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies—all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned—that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritizing GDP growth above all else.

  Anderson and Bows inform us that the often-cited long-term mitigation target, an 80 perce
nt emissions cut below 1990 levels by 2050, has been selected purely for reasons of political expediency and has “no scientific basis.” That’s because climate impacts come not just from what we emit today and tomorrow, but from the cumulative emissions that build up in the atmosphere over time. And they warn that by focusing on targets decades into the future, rather than on what we can do to cut carbon sharply and immediately, there is a serious risk that we will allow our emissions to continue to soar for years to come, thereby blowing through our “carbon budget” and putting ourselves in an impossible position later in the century.

  Which is why Anderson and Bows argue that if the governments of developed countries are serious about hitting the agreed-upon international target of keeping warming below 2°C, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle, then the reductions need to be a lot deeper, and they need to come a lot sooner.

  Anderson, Bows, and many others warn that 2°C of warming already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts and that a 1.5°C target would be far safer. Still, to have even a fifty-fifty chance of hitting the 2°C target, the industrialized countries need to start cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by something like 10 percent a year (more if they want to hit 1.5°C), and they need to start right now. But Anderson and Bows go further, pointing out that this target cannot be met with the array of modest carbon pricing or green tech solutions usually advocated by big green groups. These measures will certainly help, to be sure, but they are simply not enough: a 10 percent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 percent per year “have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval,” as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.