After Geoengineering

by Holly Jean Buck

  Creativity in the ruins

  When it comes to solar geoengineering, I think the best route forward is simply to go in and try to figure out as many of the unknowns as we can. For it is only in a few possible scenarios that I can see the specter of some of these ideas—stratospheric aerosol injection in particular—disappearing. One is a situation where mitigation is ramped up over the next decade and takes off in a wildly successful manner. A second is that a louder and more unified group of reputable climate scientists denounces solar geoengineering. This I find unlikely, because even though many mainstream climate scientists are terrified by the idea of geoengineering, they tend to support freedom to do research and find more things out. This is also a group that really grasps the risks of climate change, meaning that they may find further research warranted from the standpoint of climate risk management.

  There’s also a third possibility: that some other geoengineering, adaptation, or energy-related ideas come along that are seen as less risky, thus superceding the prospect of global stratospheric aerosol injections. For example, a high-engineering form of radical adaptation could be to engineer specific glaciers to keep them from melting. John Moore, glaciologist and leader of China’s geoengineering research program, has recently been looking into this, and he wrote a comment with colleagues in Nature on the idea.7 In Antarctica, there are two glaciers—Pine Island and Thwaites—that scientists have an especially nervous eye on. Warm ocean water flows in underneath them, something conventional wisdom says is unstoppable and irreversible due to the bedrock slope and geometry. But Moore suggests that building artificial islands to support the glacier ice shelf could act as an effective buttress.

  Another technique would be to extract water from below the glaciers, in order to keep them from sliding off into the ocean. (Extraction of the water wouldn’t work in Greenland, melting is on the surface—but Antarctica is different, with water coming in beneath the ice sheet and causing melting from below.) “You could actually remove a relatively small amount of water—like fifty cubic meters a second is what’s produced underneath Pine Island,” Moore tells me. One could make a tunnel in the bedrock that goes out into the ocean, thus draining this water and making the glacier sit harder on its bed. “You would slow the glacier actually by creating a few sticky spots. And, as the glacier slowed, it would reduce the [number] of icebergs going into the ocean.” The advantage of this technique is that these two glaciers are relatively small. “In the case of Pine Island, it’s forty kilometers across the mouth, and yet they will dominate Antarctica’s contribution to sea level over the next two centuries,” he says. “And, in a sense it’s a very democratic, egalitarian way of dealing with sea level rise. Instead of trying to build walls around all the world’s coastline, which actually means the rich countries will do it more than the poor countries of course, you can deal with the problem at the source where you have essentially something on the scale of a hundred kilometers to deal with instead of tens of thousands of kilometers of coastline to deal with.”

  I ask him if the engineering expertise exists to really do this.

  “Actually, there are precedents. In terms of doing things like constructing a berm or something like that in front of the glaciers, you could look at things such as the construction of the Suez Canal or the building of Hong Kong’s new airport. They needed on the order of a cubic kilometer of material to be moved. You can build a kind of artificial pinning point, like a little island. It doesn’t need to go all the way to the surface, but you can build one of those for about a tenth of a cubic kilometer.”

  Of course, in Antarctica, he explains, you have to come to terms with the remoteness of the location and the damage to the pristine ecosystem from a big construction project: “This not something we envisage starting next year. This is something that can be done over a fifty-year time period. We could still reverse it. That’s the thing. And, when we’ve talked about this with glaciologists, there’s a lot of horror at first.” Antarctica, he notes, is a pristine international environment. “Clearly you’re going to have to put some people there with a lot of stuff. That definitely will mess with the environment and the ecology, but if you compare the damage due to the collapse of the ice sheet, that’s kind of dwarfed.” The global sea level rise from these glaciers is staggering—on the order of meters per century. “You have to put that in perspective. A hundred million people moving from coastlines, compared with probably a few thousand people employed with building these devices.” During the twentieth century, about a third of sea level rise came from Greenland, and very little came from Antarctica, because it’s very cold there. But by 2100, Greenland is expected to contribute ten to twenty centimeters—and Antarctica could lend a meter.

  This is a classic example of a hope-inducing engineering idea. But it still doesn’t get around the need to cut emissions. As Moore points out, it targets only the sea level–rise piece of the problem: eventually, summer melting would occur on these glaciers, as it does in the Arctic. “All of these plans might come to nothing because of that. Essentially, we’re trying to stop the ocean from doing the melting, but if the atmosphere’s doing it as well, you’re stuck. So, there has to be an exit strategy from the fossil fuel business-as-usual thing. This is not an alternative to mitigation by any means. It’s just a kind of graceful way of trying to manage this unstable sea level rise. Depending on how we manage fossil fuels, that might end up with something where we could keep the ice sheets basically as they are now. Or if we don’t stop the greenhouse gases, then we would probably just be in a case of trying to manage the rates of sea level rise. A sort of managed collapse, rather than a totally natural one.”

  Managing collapse implies softening deep losses. Indeed, reckoning with geoengineering in all its forms means coming to terms with loss; to explore what it means to “live in the ruins,” in anthropologist Anna Tsing’s phrase. Solar geoengineering comes as a shock to people who are attached to the idea of wilderness, who don’t currently feel as if they are living in the ruins, and who haven’t yet come to terms with the losses being experienced. In Beijing, though, where Moore lives, it’s different—particularly with air pollution, the impacts of which people can see for themselves. “There’s no denial,” says Moore, “that somehow nature is out there, and it’s pristine and beautiful. The fact is that everyone can see what we’re doing. So, we’ve made this mess; we should clear it up. You can’t rely on nature to do it.”

  For much of the world, the catastrophe is already here. Many are already living in the ruins, in the majority of the world, as well as in pockets of downtown Los Angeles. Kyle Whyte writes:

  What I think is ironic about a lot of geoengineering discourse is that the current situation that geoengineering is trying to preserve or save is actually a dystopia for some people. Members of dominant populations are trying to avoid their dystopia by preserving our dystopia. And that oftentimes is a very uninviting way to engage in a conversation because, for indigenous people, we often want to talk about the fact that we’re still living in this situation where it’s almost impossible for us to consent or dissent to anything. The legal policy barriers, the continued discrimination, and the massive habitat changes that have already occurred thanks to colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization—that’s actually our starting point. Our starting point is not how do we maintain the current situation, but actually, how do we get out of it?8

  Some of the techniques I’ve discussed in this book could be appropriated for the ends of reparation ecology, or for making the Anthropocene shorter—if we fully acknowledge the current situation, beyond just climate. Call it carbon removal, drawdown, regeneration, replenishment—it could shorten this dark time. If solar geoengineering is used—though I hope we can retire both the term and the idea—it, too, should be put in the service of this larger aim. Far from being a quick or easy “fix,” climate restoration is an idea that is not just technologically optimistic, but also radically socially optimistic, for it implie
s that we could chart our way through this mess and reconstitute a climate that is safe for people to grow regenerative food and live healthy lives. The kind of lives many progressives imagine—where we are gardening, living in reasonably sized and energy-efficient homes, riding our bicycles, feeling healthy, and healing our relationships with each other and with other forms of life—are more likely to be possible at the end of the century, for our descendants, if we pursue multiple methods of carbon removal.

  We need more thought experiments into radical adaptation, as well as new ideas for carbon removal—whether that means engineering glaciers, putting biochar into roadways, robotically farming kelp, turning carbon into rock beneath the earth, or other approaches yet to be discovered. We need creativity, both technologically and socially; to think beyond the boxes of capitalist economics, on one hand, and binary formulations, on the other. What other bold ideas might be out there? What forms of social organization will help them blossom? People will accuse new ideas involving technology of planting false hopes. But the hope doesn’t inhere in the technology—it inheres in the people who would craft it: the workers, designers, collaborators, educators, engineers, cultural producers, farmers, and others. In the long term, they are the place to source hope—not in technology. Climate is a long game. The work of shaping these practices and technologies, and what comes after geoengineering, will also be long.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, my gratitude to everyone who spoke with me for this project for your time, creativity, and energy.

  I wouldn’t have even thought to write this book without the suggestion from Andreas Malm. Many thanks to Rosie Warren at Verso, and thanks also to CM for the thoughtful edits.

  At UCLA, Peter Kareiva is a phenomenal champion of books and writers: thank you. Daniel Swain’s communication of climate science is an inspiration.

  This book is the result of a decade of contemplating geoengineering, and it owes a debt to many people around the globe. My research collaborator Ilona Mettiäinen deserves special thanks for her curiosity, pragmatism, and generosity. I’m very grateful to Doug MacMartin as well as Charles Geisler, Sunny Power, and Steve Hilgartner at Cornell: thank you for your spirit of intellectual openness and inquiry.

  Thanks to the community of geoengineering researchers. Special thanks to Ted Parson for all the dynamic conversations, to Ben Kravitz and Pete Irvine for your continued willingness to explain scientific concepts, and to Michael Thompson for all the links. I’m grateful for the critical global discussions with Shinichiro Asayama, Katharina Beyerl, George Collins, Olaf Corry, Jane Flegal, Oliver Geden, Clare Heyward, Drew Jones, Jane Long, Sean Low, Nils Markusson, Nils Matzner, Duncan McLaren, Matt Kearnes, Juan Moreno-Cruz, David Morrow, Oliver Morton, Simon Nicholson, John Noel, Andy Parker, Christopher Preston, Jesse Reynolds, Kate Ricke, Dan Sanchez, Stefan Schäfer, Karolina Sobecka, Pablo Suarez, and Gernot Wagner: and my apologies to those whom I missed.

  I’m also grateful for my fellow travelers in the writing life: Wendy Saul, Elizabeth Guthrie, Ellie Andrews, J. P. Sapinksi, Elisabeth Olson, Florian Mosleh, and Mercury. Finally, deepest gratitude to Laura Watson for the timeless care work.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1.Vaclav Smil, Energies: An Illustrated Guide to the Biosphere and Civilization, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, 5.

  2.Ibid, 11.

  3.The figure cited for current radiative forcing since 1750 is from the 5th IPCC Assessment Report 2015, so it’s probably a bit higher by the time you read this.

  4.B. H. Samset et al., “Climate Impacts from a Removal of Anthropogenic Aerosol Emissions,” Geographical Research Letters 45, 2018.

  5.IPCC, “Summary for Policymakers,” in Global warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC Special Report, eds. V. Masson-Delmotte et al., Geneva: World Meteorological Organization, 2018, 16.

  6.Felix Creutzig et al., “Beyond Technology: Demand-Side Solutions for Climate Change Mitigation,” Annual Review of Environmental Resources 41, 2016, 173–98.

  7.IPCC, “Summary for Policymakers.”

  8.John Sterman and Linda Booth Sweeney, “Understanding Public Complacency about Climate Change: Adults’ Mental Models of Climate Change Violate Conservation of Matter, Climatic Change 80:3–4, 2007, 213–38.

  9.Pak-Hang Wong, “Maintenance Required: The Ethics of Geoengineering and Post-Implementation Scenarios,” Ethics, Policy and Environment 17:2, 2014, 186–91.

  10.Jeremy Scahill, “Leading Marxist Scholar David Harvey on Trump, Wall Street, and Debt Peonage,” Intercept, theintercept.com, Jan. 21, 2018.

  11.David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, New York: Melville House, 2015, 120.

  12.Ibid., 146.

  13.McKenzie Wark, “What if This Is Not Capitalism Any More, but Something Worse?,” NPS Plenary Lecture, APSA 2015, Philadelphia, PA, in New Political Science 391, 2017, 58–66.

  14.Claire Colebrook, “What is the Anthropo-Political?” In Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols, eds. Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, J. Hillis Miller, London: Open Humanities Press, 2016, 86.

  15.Andreas Malm, “For a Fallible and Lovable Marx: Some Thoughts on the Latest Book by Foster and Burkett,” Critical Historical Studies 42, 2017, 267–75.

  16.Matthew T. Huber, “Hidden Abodes: Industrializing Political Ecology,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 1071, 2017, 151–66.

  17.Jesse Goldstein, Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018, 14.

  18.Leigh Stanley Phillips, Austerity Ecology & The Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry, and Stuff, Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2015.

  19.Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work, London and New York: Verso, 2016, 146.

  20.Laboria Cuboniks, “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation,” laboriacuboniks.net.

  21.ETC, The New Biomasters: Synthetic Biology and the Next Assault on Biodiversity and Livelihoods, ETC Group Communiqué 104, 2010.

  22.Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

  23.Joshua Horton and David Keith, “Solar Geoengineering and Obligations to the Global Poor,” in Climate Justice and Geoengineering: Ethics and Policy in the Atmospheric Anthropocene, ed. Christopher J. Preston, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.

  24.Jane Flegal and Aarti Gupta, “Evoking Equity as a Rationale for Solar Geoengineering Research? Scrutinizing Emerging Expert Visions of Equity,” International Environmental Agreements 181, 2018, 45–61.

  25.Kyle Powys Whyte, “Indigeneity in Geoengineering Discourses: Some Considerations,” Ethics, Policy and Environment, 21:3, 2019.

  26.Charles Eisenstein, “We Need Regenerative Farming, not Goengineering, Guardian, Mar. 9, 2015, theguardian.com.

  27.ETC, The New Biomasters.

  28.Biofuelwatch, Smoke and Mirrors: Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage BECCS, biofuelwatch.org.uk, 2015.

  29.Jack Stilgoe, Experiment Earth: Responsible Innovation in Geoengineering, New York: Routledge, 2015, 8.

  30.Anne Pasek, “Provisioning Climate: An Infrastructural Approach to Geoengineering, in Has It Come to This? The Promise and Peril of Geoengineering on the Brink, eds. J. Sapinski, H. J. Buck, and A. Malm, Princeton, NJ: Rutgers University Press, forthcoming.

  31.Bent Flyvbjerg, Nils Bruzelius, and Werner Rothengatter, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

  32.Ben Marsh and Janet Jones, “Building the Next Seven Wonders: The Landscape Rhetoric of Large Engineering Projects,” in S. D. Brunn, ed., Engineering Earth, New York: Springer, 2011.

  33.Flyvbjerg et al., Megaprojects.

  34.David Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.

  35.Brad Allenby, “Infrastructure in the Anthropocene: E
xample of Information and Communication Technology,” Journal of Infrastructure Systems 10, 2004, 79–86.

  1 Cultivating Energy

  1.Christy Borth, Pioneers of Plenty: The Story of Chemurgy, Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1942.

  2.William Hale, Farmward March: Chemurgy Takes Command, New York: Coward McCann, 1939, 141.

  3.Randall Beeman, “‘Chemivisions’: The Forgotten Promises of the Chemurgy Movement.” Agricultural History 68:4, 1994, 26.

  4.Mark Finlay, “The Failure of Chemurgy in the Depression-Era South: The Case of Jesse F. Jackson and the Central of Georgia Railroad,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 81:1, 1997, 78–102.

  5.Beeman, “Chemivsions,” 32.

  6.Quentin R. Skrabec, The Green Vision of Henry Ford and George Washington Carver: Two Collaborators in the Cause of Clean Industry, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2013, 193.

  7.David Constable, “Green Chemistry and Sustainability.” In Quality Living Through Chemurgy and Green Chemistry, ed. Peter K. Lau. Berlin: Springer, 2016, 2.

  8.Tito Kuol, “Looking Downstream: The Future of Nile River Politics,” Harvard Political Review, April 3, 2018, harvardpolitics.com.

  9.Jon Abbink, “Dam Controversies: Contested Governance and Developmental Discourse on the Ethiopian Omo River Dam,” Social Anthropology 20:2, 2012, 125–44.

  10.See, for example, Oakland Institute, Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa, Country Report: Ethiopia, Oakland, CA, 2011.

  11.Jon Abbink “‘Land to the Foreigners’: Economic, Legal, and Socio-cultural Aspects of New Land Acquisition Schemes in Ethiopia, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 29:4, 2011, 526.