One more binary merits discussion here—one that lies within carbon removal practices themselves. Scientific and policy reports categorize these practices as biological (or natural) climate solutions, on one hand, and engineered solutions, on the other. This is reasonable to some degree: carbon can be sequestered either by growing more things (the focus of Part I of this book), or by burying it geologically (discussed in Part II of this book). In climate policy discourse, though, the divide between the industrial and the biological is playing out within carbon removal itself, with one side often (but not always) privileged over another. At the brink of desperation, activist groups like the Sunrise Movement, The Climate Mobilization and Extinction Rebellion are beginning to engage with demands for carbon drawdown. But many climate justice groups are ambiguous about how the drawdown can be achieved, and there is often a cognitive gap between the demand for drawdown and the scale of industrial activity required to accomplish it.
These overlapping binaries—geoengineering versus real change, geoengineering versus agroecology—obscure the reality that there is a spectrum of ways of doing, enacting, practicing, deploying, or implementing climate intervention. The implementation does not inhere in the technology. Sticking rigidly to these binaries keeps us from seeing possible futures: it gives the terrain for shaping climate engineering over to the few.
Climate intervention as practice
Climate engineering is not a monolithic “technology,” but a variety of practices (or activities), and actors have some level of choice about how they will practice it. Jack Stilgoe, in Experiment Earth, suggests that we need to view geoengineering not as a noun but as a verb: “Viewed as a set of technologies, geo-engineering resembles no more than a mixed bag of half-baked schemes. If we take literally the meaning of ‘geoengineering’ as a present participle, it becomes a project, a work-in-progress.” Stilgoe suggests that viewed this way, geoengineering is a form of governance.29 Yet often, climate engineering is still viewed as a “thing,” an artifact that comes out of this box of emerging technologies, alongside genetics, robotics, information technology, and nanotechnology. In some very important ways, climate geoengineering is not like these other emerging technologies.
Emerging technologies are sometimes imagined to spur new long waves of innovation, or “Kondratiev waves,” after the economist who theorized them. First there were textiles during the Industrial Revolution, followed by steam and rail, and then electricity, and then automobiles and the petroleum age, and later information technology; some new transformative innovation comes along every forty to sixty years. This theory isn’t a particularly fashionable one in mainstream economics right now, but I mention it here because it helps illustrate an interesting point: geoengineering is never going to be like those other emerging technologies, all of which played transformative roles in economies. Instead, carbon removal is likely to be analogous to waste control: a massive industry, but not a transformative one. Solar geoengineering, in particular, is ameliorative and not generative; that is, it doesn’t generate new wealth. Its growth is necessarily limited, and the number of actors that would be needed for its realization is also limited. What would be their motivation to engage? Researchers can gain individual glory and social capital, maybe, but it is difficult to imagine solar geoengineering being accomplished through an investment/shareholder corporate model. When it comes to real-world benefits, solar geoengineering is so broad, crude, risky, and low profit that it is best viewed as a global public project. The benefits of carbon removal would also be a global public good, though potentially one with damaging effects in particular places, depending on policy design. In short, it’s easier to envisage climate engineering as undertaken for the benefit of the many.
The point here is that solar geoengineering is not actually “a technology”—indeed, most of these socio-technical systems aren’t. The planes and nozzles, and the software that drives and creates solar geoengineering would be technologies, as are the computer models that indicate it would cool the planet. But while solar geoengineering relies on such technology, it would be more than that. When we put it in the “technology” box, it becomes the domain of technology experts, and we fail to see what else it is; the social life of the intervention is obscured.
If geoengineering is not simply an emerging technology, what is it? Let’s consider three alternative frames: development interventions, humanitarian interventions, and infrastructure. None of these is sufficient on its own to understand geoengineering, but each of them can illuminate something about what geoengineering could be.
Development-speak is filled with the language of intervention, from community-level health or nutrition interventions to macro-level economic interventions. Climate-related development interventions have included things like education in climate-smart agricultural practices for farmers, or the institution of clean cook-stoves. Interventions like these are usually designed to have multiple social and climate benefits. These programs are also monitored and evaluated, an aspect that makes them a useful analog to solar geoengineering. For solar geoengineering, too, would require implementation and management across years and years, and continual monitoring and evaluation. When it comes to carbon removal, there are some ways in which it is already conceived of as a development intervention—something that is apparent, for instance, in community forestry or biochar projects.
“Intervention” also comes up in humanitarian work, where it implies intervening in some disastrous situation, either through military force or humanitarian aid and relief, and often in an international or nongovernment partnership. There’s generally no direct profit motive, although private contractors do profit from humanitarian work. Humanitarian interventions constitute a relevant parallel because of the emergency rationale; like for solar geoengineering, the interventions aim to “save” or “stabilize” something. Humanitarian interventions tend to borrow heavily from military language, describing their projects in terms of missions or deployment. The same is true for the language typically used to speak about solar geoengineering.
Much of the earliest work on geoengineering used the term “climate intervention.” Take, for instance, the 2010 “Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies”; the 2015 National Academies reports on climate intervention also adopted this term. It is used synonymously with both “climate engineering” and “geoengineering.” So why isn’t “intervention” a go-to frame for understanding climate engineering? One reason is that intervention in the development or humanitarian context focuses on the action; but with geoengineering, focusing on the action seems “premature.” Researchers are careful to specify that right now we’re only talking about research, and not thinking about deployment. There’s a carefully constructed gap: On one side is an idealized world where we can run models, and where solar geoengineering is abstract, and therefore safe. On the other side is the world of imagined deployment, which leads one down the path of imagining particular deployment scenarios; using analogies like intervention pushes the conversation from research talk into deployment talk. Another reason not to employ these analogues concerns optics: the “humanitarian intervention” comparison sounds like greenwashing, an Orwellian euphemism. I don’t necessarily find these terms euphemistic, though, since neither the term “development” nor “humanitarian” connotes goodness to me. Rather, they refer to specific goals and projects. The development project has worked out quite terribly in many places, extending Western colonialism, trapping poor nations in debt, and transforming communal social relations into exploitative ones. Similarly, when it comes to humanitarian intervention, we’ve seen plenty of disastrous results. The fact that many of these social interventions have gone so terribly wrong, in fact, is precisely the reason why it is important to think about geoengineering with reference to these examples.
While part of climate engineering resembles a programmatic intervention—something constructed, through time, with specific goals and management superstr
ucture—another part of is more like infrastructure—fixed, heavy, material. It is natural to talk about infrastructure when considering carbon dioxide removal, since industrial forms of carbon removal require large-scale pipelines and facilities. Similarly, reforestation and soil carbon sequestration can be seen through the lens of “ecological infrastructure.” Solar geoengineering, by contrast, appears more intangible, ethereal. But its infrastructure is simply flexible, and approaches like stratospheric aerosols are reliant on existing fixed infrastructure such as runways, factories, and mines. The moment of infrastructural development is a flash point for contestation; the concrete image, whether it be a diagram or architectural rendering, makes it real enough to fight against. Until the infrastructure is imagined, we’re still in the sci-fi fantasy space of floating cities. It’s also helpful to think of geoengineering as infrastructure, as environmental humanities scholar Anne Pasek points out in her in-depth analysis, because doing so evokes the care and maintenance required.30
By thinking of geoengineering as infrastructure, we position ourselves to heed the lessons of past megaprojects. The most familiar megaprojects are multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects: the Channel Tunnel, the Øresund Bridge, the Three Gorges Dam, the Hong Kong International Airport, and so on. Megaprojects can involve infrastructure (dams, ports, and railroads); extraction (minerals, fossil fuels); production (fighter aircraft, chemical plants, and manufacturing parks); and consumption (tourist installations, malls, and theme parks), notes Bent Flyvbjerg, a megaprojects expert. He writes that megaprojects are part of a remarkably coherent story, what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has called the “Great War of Independence from Space.” They imply mobility, liberation. He talks about the end of geography, the death of distance, and so on.31 Perhaps you remember this zeitgeist from the early 2000s, when the internet was new and transformative, before we knew it would give us so many cat videos and listicles and trolls. When “globalization” was still a buzzword, before the financial crisis and the failed interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Critics of geoengineering tend to locate the psychological roots of climate engineering in postwar, big science techno-optimism, in 1950s thinking. But it is equally useful to regard it as a phenomenon born of the early 2000s, a more globalist moment.
The paradox of megaprojects, Flyvbjerg writes, is that even as more and larger infrastructure projects are proposed and built, they evidence strikingly poor performance records in terms of economy, environment, and public support. Geographers Ben Marsh and Janet Jones point out, however, that when you take into account symbolism, this is only an apparent paradox—economic performance is not the only measure of success, as megaprojects are planned and executed for a symbolic value that can be more stunning than their fiscal value.32 Infrastructure inscribes cultural messages in the landscape; it expresses both authorship and authority. Mega-engineering projects are hyperlegible; scale becomes a design factor. And so, Marsh and Jones observe, while power is the “foremost statement” of large landscape projects, the actual messages are diverse, ranging from abundance (the Hanging Gardens of Babylon) to security (levees on floodplains). But if infrastructure is about messaging, it begs the question: Could climate engineering projects be more effective as a symbolic strategy than as a material one?
The shortcomings of large infrastructure projects have generated suspicion about megaprojects, suspicion which may be transferred to solar geoengineering. Flyvbjerg points out that the documents of megaproject preparation—cost–benefit analyses, financial analyses, impact statements—are called into question and denounced more often than analyses in any other professional field. It’s common to have cost overruns of 50 to 100 percent or more, and demand forecasts that are wrong by 20 to 70 percent.33 As Flyvbjerg writes, the key problem is lack of accountability, not lack of technical skills or data. Forecasts are manipulated, special interest groups promote projects at no cost or risk to themselves, contractors underestimate costs and risks—meaning the real costs and risks don’t surface until construction is underway. This happens drastically in defense contracts, for example, with taxpayers footing the bill. “Appraisal optimism” is a generous way to put all of this, and the collective experience with megaprojects is a cautionary tale for climate engineering.
But solar geoengineering has another perceived relationship to infrastructure: rightly or wrongly, it is seen as a blanket infrastructure preserver. There are quite reasonable concerns that solar geoengineering is a way to avoid changing this other $13 trillion infrastructure of fossil fuels, implying a workaround for the phaseout of new fossil fuel plants “prematurely,” and saving assets from being stranded. But infrastructure always changes; as science historian David Nye writes, “Even the largest and most successful technological systems eventually lose momentum.”34 He offers examples from the coal distribution infrastructure of the last century: abandoned coal yards, wagons, bins, and chutes. Think of the rapid build-out of communications infrastructure, or of the structures left behind in the wake of the exodus from agriculture. History shows infrastructure’s impermanence and offers lessons on how people in particular places react to the changes.
Understanding geoengineering as a program, practice, project, intervention, infrastructure, and so on might make the concept seem sprawling. But consider what environmental scientist Brad Allenby writes about jet technology: a traditional life cycle analysis counts the use phase of the jet itself, but really, the jet enabled a global tourism industry to spring up, which, as Allenby points out, has probably had more impact on the biosphere than anything since European colonialism—in terms of knitting together population centers but also creating new disease and invasive species vectors. “So, should these profoundly systemic effects be considered as one contemplates design of a jet aircraft?” Allenby asks.35 The complexity becomes staggering. Nevertheless, a systemic perspective is necessary. We need to understand the indirect effects of interventions, the parts of the system that behave differently at different scales, and so on. We don’t currently have the institutions, training, and methods to adequately look at something like climate engineering from a systemic perspective. Even in the halls of the world’s most vaunted universities, the discussion and framing of both solar geoengineering and carbon removal is extraordinarily thin, stripping out the social complexity.
Looking at the history of megaprojects and failed interventions, the question looms: How do we prevent failed attempts at geoengineering? Solar geoengineering isn’t a regular project: the damage of an aborted or poorly executed project isn’t measured in costs or missed opportunities to invest in other things, but in ecological dangers. In fact, the fiscal cost is the least significant aspect of the failure. The worst-case scenario here might not even be extreme climate change, or that solar geoengineering is done, but that solar geoengineering is attempted poorly.
In short, rather than simply being emerging technologies, both solar geoengineering and carbon removal would be practices that have aspects of infrastructure and social intervention. They must be wrested from the realm of technology—where only experts are permitted—and seen through the prism of projects, programs, and practices if civil society is going to attempt to shape them in a meaningfully democratic way.
What would a better-case geoengineering look like?
Swift and deep decarbonization is the best-case climate future. But again, the specter rears its head that this won’t happen in time to avoid extreme climate impacts. There’s a genuine possibility that only clear and significant climate impacts will motivate real action, and by then, a significant level of warming will be locked in and looming.
Many forms of geoengineering may be dangerous or unworkable. Even the basic idea of drawing down greenhouse gas concentrations has its unknowns. When carbon dioxide is emitted, about a quarter goes into the oceans, about a quarter of it is stored in ecosystems, and about half of it remains in the atmosphere. So removing 100 Gt from the earth system would roughly mean reducing the total amount in the
atmosphere by only 50 Gt. If carbon removal reduced carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, CO2 in the oceans would gradually transfer back to the atmosphere, a flow that is complicated to model because of how the layers of the ocean mix. Carbon cycle feedbacks could reduce the effectiveness of carbon removal, or perhaps enhance it.
Yet the possibility of climate catastrophe makes thinking through the best-case use of all these approaches a valuable thought experiment. For if their best-case use, under close examination, is unattainable, perhaps the idea had better be removed from discussion—which may not be an easy feat.
Is there a synthesis to be had between geoengineering and sustainable agriculture (and earth care)—a better “geoengineering”? Or, perhaps not a collapsing or synthesis of these two practices, but a new term and framework of understanding to be created? Indeed, “climate restoration” advocates and other groups may create the ground for this. This book profiles a handful of people who are articulating visions that transcend this binary. In the following chapters, we’ll explore possible contours of a world during and after geoengineering, through the voices of some of the scientists, entrepreneurs, and activists that could have a role in shaping this world.
After Geoengineering Page 5