Of course, actual conditions in a world with higher CO2 and lower temperatures are unknown, and no one would have any reason to model it, unless they’re thinking about geoengineering. For example, Trisos points to the possibility of a high-CO2 world where woody vegetation encroaches on grasslands: Could the Serengeti be turned into a shrubby landscape that thickens into a forest under geoengineering? “In a lot of Southern Africa, where I’m from, savannas are really beautiful landscapes. They’re important for ecotourism. They’re important for a lot of livelihoods around grazing and livestock. They have a lot of endemic species. They’re ancient grasslands; fire has been a large part of the maintenance of those grasslands for hundreds of thousands of years. And if we turn down the temperature and have increased atmospheric CO2, the extent to which that increases the invasion of these grassland and savanna areas by woody shrubs, I think, is important to know. It’s potentially really concerning if you lose large swaths of grassland as a result of geoengineering. You could get bald patches. I mean, we haven’t run the models yet. We don’t know.”
I understand the reluctance of ecologists to spend their time on the speculative imaginary of solar geoengineering when there’s so much other essential research to do. Yet I worry about the idea of solar geoengineering moving into political discourse without these ecological aspects being investigated—for it is not only risks that could be ignored, but potential uses, too.
For Kelly Wanser of the Marine Cloud Brightening Project, the purpose of solar geoengineering is to keep ecosystems stable and intact, so that they don’t start to break down in an unrecoverable way while the world gets its act together on climate change. I ask her about the best-case scenario for this. “A good scenario would be you use just the amount of solar geoengineering you need to keep all the coral reefs from disappearing,” she answers. “To keep the ice sheets stable. To keep the methane trapped in the ground and things like that, for as long a period as you need in order to safely keep those systems stable, while you’re bringing down the greenhouse gas concentration and you determine that you have a safe situation to proceed … The best-case scenario is, nothing really bad happens. You use enough solar geoengineering to prevent the really devastating changes in the system, and you take as many measures as you can as quickly as you can to restore the underlying balance of forces in the atmosphere.” She returns to the medical metaphor: “If you do it sooner and you keep heat levels from rising higher, you need less, and it would therefore be safer. Like any intervention. If we let temperatures continue to rise, then the counterforcing we’re going to need is going to be pretty strong, and at that point you may also have other changes in the system going on.”
Indeed, waiting a long time to do solar geoengineering, and then suddenly deciding to do it in the wake of an “emergency” like a massive drought, would not be the best-case program—because during that waiting period, the world is breezing past some irreversible tipping points, like species being senselessly lost forever. On the other hand, it is difficult to understate just how preliminary the idea of solar geoengineering is—basic crucial questions around how ecosystems may respond have scarcely been explored.
10
Reckoning
Downtown Los Angeles, January 2019, 27°C / 80°F
Empty playgrounds have a certain feeling. There is one in Pershing Square: a brand-new swing set with no children in sight, like a good intention fallen flat. Pershing Square is a public plaza in downtown Los Angeles whose abstract shapes, color scheme, and concrete modernism evoke both totalitarianism and the year 1992, like stepping into an MTV version of a public square in Turkmenistan. The square is mostly paved, overseen by a dark-purple tower.
It’s high noon, and I feel like I’ve dropped into an alternate universe, or into some science fiction dystopia. There are bodies in the square, despite the metal bars on the benches cruelly designed to repel them. Everywhere, bodies are lying: in the shade of the dusty-orange metal spheres, or slumped around the perimeter of the fountain, perhaps sick, perhaps just sleeping in the noon heat.
To describe these people as bodies is reductive. The people here have lives and emotions and stories. For them, the plaza may not be as strange as I’m experiencing it to be: it may be a haven, an open space where they can stay peacefully during the daytime hours. Yet I don’t want to normalize how these souls have come to inhabit this public space. Many of them are visibly in pain, and these streets are not a safe space for them. Los Angeles has about 59,000 homeless people, and 1,200 died on the streets in 2017 and 2018. To walk across the plaza at midday is to confront a society in which this is completely ordinary, in which the world moves around these bodies and the souls they contain, editing out any pain. It is like climate change: everyday and terrifying at the same time. My three-year-old is uncommonly quiet, and tugs on me, wanting to be carried through the square. I pick her up, thinking that whatever psychological mechanism allows most of us to walk through plazas like these is the same mechanism that allows us to walk past the signs of climate change.
Perhaps another reason I’m thinking about bodies in the streets in the park today is that there’s a small group of people attempting disrupt this psychic mechanism, to de-normalize climate change, by placing their bodies in the street. About fifty people crowd around a black coffin in the far corner of the park, away from the other bodies. A woman with curly gray hair, who reminds me of my first-grade teacher, hands me a neon-green flier. It reads: “Sorry to bother you, but did you know that you are living during the sixth mass extinction?” They are like time travelers from a possible future, who have come back to warn us. Two people standing near the stoplight hold up a wide black banner with the words “Climate Emergency.” The few passing pedestrians hardly look: the small gathering probably appears to be a religious organization, one of those quirky sects you see on street corners in big cities shouting about something arcane.
The protest has been organized by Extinction Rebellion, a direct-action movement that started in the UK. In cities all around the world on this day, Extinction Rebellion groups are staging die-ins. Here in Los Angeles, people are holding signs: “Where do you see yourself in twelve years?” The idea is that there are only twelve years left to stop climate change. The movement is “rebelling for life.” My daughter climbs onto a bench and I give her some bunny-shaped crackers. She munches them morosely, gazing into traffic, apparently envigorated by protesting every aspect of daily life besides extinction. It’s a diverse yet familiar group: black bandanas, young women with rosé-pink hair, silver-haired grandfathers, a guy in a black cowboy hat with a vaping device shaped like a bottle of Jack Daniels. “Biodiversity is being annihilated around the world,” they say. “Our seas are rising. Flooding and desertification will leave vast tracts of land uninhabitable. …The breakdown of our climate has begun. …There will be more wildfires, unpredictable storms.”
After the rally on the corner, they hoist up the coffin and carry it down the block, into a crowded food market. The procession marches past stalls of grass-fed beef, currywurst, wood-fired pizza, pupusas, a shop called “eggslut” where they sell fancy egg sandwiches, a ramen stall, and PBJ.LA, a restaurant dedicated to “elevated” peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Through the crowds, they call: “We refuse to bequeath a dying planet to future generations by failing to act now!” A few diners pause their eating to pull out their phones and take pictures of the coffin.
The thing is, some of the climate impacts they are chanting about may well have come from IPCC reports. None of the information they cite is out of step with the countless PhD-filled meetings I’ve been to on climate impacts. Their flier has citations on it, including figures to two decimal places. It mentions ice sheets, ocean acidification, and kelp forest death. “California started the water year with 44.3 percent of its area affected by drought.” Et cetera. They’re basically right. It’s not ignorable. And yet there is a capacity to ignore it, just like there’s a capacity to ignore all the people in t
he plaza with bare feet and nowhere else to go.
I wrote this book because, like the people who showed up with their bodies to rebel for life, I’m gravely concerned about what the scientific evidence indicates for the future of life on earth. I’m worried that climate change will become so severe that even more people will suffer, and that in the midst of that suffering, people will grasp for solar geoengineering without adequate caution. I am worried that geoengineering will be used to protect material assets at the request of those who own those assets, without regard to vulnerable communities who lack any assets. This is what keeps me up at night. One seed of hope, though, is that many of these climate action groups didn’t even exist when I started writing this book.
People often ask me, “What do you really think about solar geoengineering?” I think it should be avoided, and at the very minimum be treated with great care. It’s not yet a “thing”; it’s still a notion, and we understand so little about it. There is a lot more research to be done. I think this research should be done, because the risks of climate change are so great. But I’m concerned that this research will be taken from the hands of the scientists who conduct it, and used or implemented by incompetent politicians or malicious regimes.
I also think that carbon removal technology should be pursued vigorously—and that without it, the push for solar geoengineering may be stronger. But I think carbon removal requires strong public advocacy and demand if it is to succeed at scale. This public support implies a tremendous shift in perception, and in values. It’s not simply an engineering or infrastructure issue. Many of the new climate action groups, including Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise Movement, and the Climate Mobilization, among others, have expressed support for carbon drawdown. For instance, the Sunrise Movement currently calls for “funding massive investment in the drawdown of greenhouse gases” as part of its Green New Deal platform. Drawdown was part of Extinction Rebellion’s demands, too, if sporadically. It is my hope that activist groups who grasp the climate situation can advocate for drawdown and help carbon removal become a reality, shaping it in ways that benefit rather than hurt communities around the world.
Taking account
We are just now beginning to reckon with climate change itself. The cognitive dissonance created by the coffin in the hipster food market, or the crowd in the park appearing like fanatics while reciting lines from scientific assessment reports, illustrates what it’s like to be living at the moment of the shift. Here we are again, at the same point where we began this book: the shift, desperation point, where a critical mass of people realizes just how bad climate change will be, and how late we are to address it.
The desperation point could be used as a moment of exploitation, as in the logic of the “shock doctrine” that Naomi Klein traces in her work; it could take form as a crisis that consolidates power elsewhere. But it could also be a moment of reckoning, of taking account. “Accountability” first meant taking account, counting—it’s linked with reckoning, etymologically. Writer and organizer Clare O’Connor writes about how at first, “accountability” had overtones of reckoning with God.1 But during the eighteenth century, the term took on more positivist tones around sharing and evaluating; giving an account of something. Even today, though, “accountability” still conveys a moral sense.
Many critical thinkers perceive geoengineering as something that avoids accountability—a workaround for reckoning with not only the thermodynamics of climate change, but also their deeper implications and causes. As Kyle Whyte explains, colonial domination continues to be the problem that generates climate risks, to a large but not exclusive extent. Yet, Whyte observes, “geoengineering discourses isolate geoengineering as a topic and only add in colonialism, capitalist exploitation, imperialism and other forms of domination later as governance challenges or stakeholders’ values or views that must be understood and weighed.”2 When it comes to geoengineering, scholars have thought about compensation for loss and damage; about transparency in research and decision making. But it’s this narrative of giving an account, and moral sense of accountability for climate change itself, that are still missing, censored out, regarded as someone else’s job.
Can there be a way of approaching geoengineering that considers the root causes of ecological degradation, and that weaves in accountability, reckoning, and reparation?
“Climate restoration” is an emergent language, though its limitations are immediately apparent. It is relationships that must be repaired and restored, not just the climate. As writer and social justice advocate Raj Patel and world historian Jason Moore explain:
The rise of capitalism gave us the idea not only that society was relatively independent of the web of life but also that most women, indigenous peoples, slaves, and colonized peoples everywhere were not fully human and thus not full members of society. These were people who were not – or were only barely – human. They were part of Nature, treated as social outcasts – they were cheapened.3
Patel and Moore point to a host of re-words in their vision of “reparation ecology,” whose “great promise is that humans – and what humans become – can thrive with the rest of the planet after the Capitolocene”; they discuss recognition, reparation, redistribution, reimagination, and recreation.4 But not restoration: they caution that restoration of the environment after humans have damaged it is a flawed and backward-looking path. Rather, reparation ecology is a way to see both history and the future: “Redistributing care, land, and work so that everyone has a chance to contribute to the improvement of their lives and to that of the ecology around them can undo the violence of abstraction that capitalism makes us perform every day.” With a similar focus on re-words, feminist science and technology theorist Donna Haraway suggests that our job “is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge.”5 She writes about replenishing refuges, about recuperation and recomposition—but describes these as partial, and stipulates that they “must include mourning irreversible losses.”
In this talk of recognition, reparation, and replenishment, it’s important to understand that a narrative account of reckoning or an apology for the present climate peril and all the processes of inequality and exploitation that led to it is not a closure, not a moving-on, but the beginning of long work ahead. Processes of reconciliation with indigenous groups around the world may be one place to look for inspiration, as well as for lessons about what is not helpful. Indigenous geographer Michelle Daigle has written about how Truth and Reconciliation Commission events in Canada become “confessional spaces of white guilt that were shaped by an ask-the-Indian dynamics where white people take up the majority of the space by asking Indigenous peoples what they could do to ‘achieve’ reconciliation and be a reconciled settler”—a dynamic that ends up putting the emotional labor on indigenous peoples.6 She argues that this is “an era marked by the spectacle of reconciliation—a public, large-scale and visually striking performance of Indigenous suffering and trauma alongside white settler mourning and recognition—which secures, legitimates, and effectively reproduces white supremacy and settler futurity in Canada.” Daigle points out that indigenous self-determination lies in the autonomy to remain unreconciled.
When it comes to climate justice, global reckoning, and repair of the climate as well as our relationships with each other and nonhumans, I don’t know the contours of that road, the steps and missteps. I’m concerned that it will be easy for some to see this reckoning as threatening to the material success of carbon removal. In the US context, discussion of the violence that is often implicated in land use change or infrastructure, not to mention the question of whose lands these were and who took them, could appear to risk dismantling the coalitions that might be needed to get things started. I’m reminded of what Noah Deich of Carbon180 said about coalition building: there’s the global Paris Agreement community, as well as energy, mining, and agriculture, all of whom
need to embrace carbon removal, “not as a scary transformation for their business, but really the natural evolution for where they need to go to increase prosperity. To serve their customers, employees, shareholders, all of these key stakeholders better. It needs to come from the top down.” Deich asks: How do business leaders hear the story? “How do they understand what the issues are, and who do they take the cues from? How do we get those people really putting carbon removal as the end zone, as the goal that we’re in for collectively?” There won’t be a single messenger, he intuits, but many people who will hear the story and message, and translate it into language that’s resonant.
You can see a bipartisan vision here. In creating that discourse coalition of actors with disparate viewpoints and material interests, it’s easy to see how things like reckoning, accountability, and acknowledgment of structural and physical violence could fall by the wayside (though I hope some of those top-down messengers will embrace these, too). People will say it’s easier to generate momentum for carbon removal without going into this difficult terrain. But at the same time, just glossing over this fundamental need makes the end result less robust. It would be possible to continue with that cottage-level carbon removal, what we discussed as Level 1. But taking it net negative, to Level 2, will require such a dramatic social and political transformation that’s hard to see it happening without this kind of deep social dialogue about injustice (both historical and contemporary). Embracing reckoning and accountability is not just a matter of doing what’s morally right. It’s also a pragmatic necessity for actually drawing down carbon.
After Geoengineering Page 26