Geoengineering, the Anthropocene and the End of Nature

Jeremy Baskin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030173586
• eBook ISBN: 9783030173593
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

This book takes a critical look at solar geoengineering as an acceptable means for addressing climate change. Baskin explores the assumptions and imaginaries which animate 'engineering the climate' and discusses why this climate solution is so controversial. The book explains geoengineering's past, its revival in the mid-2000s, and its future prospects including its shadow presence in the Paris climate accord. The main focus however is on dissecting solar geoengineering today – its rationales, underpinning knowledge, relationship to power, and the stance towards nature which accompanies it. Baskin explores three competing imaginaries associated with geoengineering: an Imperial imaginary, an oppositional Un-Natural imaginary, and a conspiratorial Chemtrail imaginary. He seeks to explain why solar geoengineering has struggled to gain approval and why resistance to it persists, despite the support of several powerful actors. He provocatively suggests that reconceptualising our present as the Anthropocene might unwittingly facilitate the normalisation of geoengineering by providing a sustaining socio-technical imaginary. This book is essential reading for those interested in climate policy, political ecology, and science & technology studies.

© The Author(s) 2019

Jeremy BaskinGeoengineering, the Anthropocene and the End of Naturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17359-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jeremy Baskin¹

(1)

Melbourne School of Government, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

Jeremy Baskin

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Can global warming be reversed or kept within ‘safe’ limits? Since at least the late 1980s the standard answer is that it can be … but only if greenhouse gas emissions are cut significantly, and soon. This approach informed the Kyoto treaty. And it is now enshrined in the Paris climate agreement. In reality though, climate action to date has been underwhelming. National emissions targets are insufficiently ambitious. The United States (and now Brazil) are no longer committed to the Paris agreement and its goals. Average global surface temperatures are currently about 1°C above pre-industrial levels and rising. So are greenhouse gas emissions. In the face of this gloomy outlook there is a different kind of solution circulating in climate policymaking circles, but still largely out of public view: that it is the earth, not human behaviour which should be modified. Specifically, the argument is being put forth by some that a cooler climate could be engineered.

One specific proposal, solar geoengineering (SGE),¹ has attracted substantial policy and research attention. The idea of SGE, simply put, is to inject sulphate particles into the stratosphere, perhaps a million or more tonnes per annum depending on the cooling effect being aimed for. The sulphate particles would circulate rapidly and envelop most of the globe. They would oxidise over a period of weeks to form a sulphuric acid aerosol which would reduce incoming sunlight by a small amount.² The idea is that by reflecting a portion of incoming sunlight before it enters the Earth system, global warming would be reduced or reversed, although to varying degrees in different locations. Apart from cooling, other physical climatic effects could include reduced rainfall, droughts and monsoon disruption, as well as damage to the ozone layer. But the extent of these likely effects, not to mention the associated social effects, is both contested and not reliably known.³ Further, embarking on SGE is a long-term commitment, a multi-decadal commitment (at minimum) requiring stable and dependable global policy settings. Depending on the dosage, it is not easily terminated without serious climatic ‘bounce-back’ risk.

SGE is a radical and, on the face of it, thoroughly bad idea. It is regarded with incredulity and something approaching disgust by broad swathes of the public who have been asked their views (Buck 2018). In my assessment it is currently opposed by most climate scientists. Even the most prominent scientific proponent⁴ of the idea, David Keith, acknowledges: “You are repulsed? Good. No one should like it. It’s a terrible option” (quoted in Wagner and Weitzman 2012: n.p.). But he is not alone in arguing that, nevertheless, solar geoengineering is sadly necessary given the state of climate change. It might avert increasingly serious, perhaps even catastrophic, climate change, so the argument goes … or at least it might buy more time to adjust human behaviour and pursue a radically less emissions-intensive path. Other climate scientists, no less authoritative, argue that “the idea of ‘fixing’ the climate by hacking the Earth’s reflection of sunlight is wildly, utterly, howlingly barking mad” (Pierrehumbert 2015: n.p.). And yet it is increasingly being taken seriously in high level policy circles, albeit in a dystopian register, presented as a ‘lesser evil’ or ‘bad idea whose time has come’.

SGE entails shifting the boundaries at which human interventions in the more-than-human world are acceptable. But is also relates centrally to the question of who is authorised to shape this new world. Any adoption of SGE will mark a major step-change in climate policy and our climate future. Because SGE is not (yet) a deployed technology, how it is imagined and what stories accompany it are critical. Indeed, these will shape whether it becomes a deployed technology at all, because whilst SGE has entered into the mix of mainstream climate policy considerations, it is not yet officially embraced, and remains highly contentious.

The question then of why SGE is struggling to move from mainstream policy consideration to being fully embraced—or what is holding it back—is of interest to both proponents and opponents of SGE. This book is a critical exploration of this radical and highly contested idea. Given its magnitude, if it happens then it should happen with open eyes and with high levels of consent. It is my contention, and the focus of this book, that understanding how SGE is imagined and how it is socially located is key to understanding its social positioning at the threshold of acceptability, and what may become of it.

Drawing on Jasanoff’s concept of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff 2015) I identify three competing imaginaries of SGE—which I label an Imperial imaginary, an Un-Natural imaginary and a Chemtrail imaginary. None is hegemonic although the Imperial imaginary is preponderant amongst proponents. I analyse these imaginaries closely and explore their assumptions about science, expertise and what knowledge matters, about what values are important including the proper human relationship to ‘nature’, and about current relations of social and economic power in the world today. To simplify the argument, I suggest that if SGE is adopted with any legitimacy, it will be in large measure because its proponents have succeeded in presenting it as a mundane and unremarkable technology in our post-natural ‘Anthropocene’ world, and a facilitator of continuing development—in short, as a sociotechnical imaginary of the Anthropocene. Conversely, if SGE comes to be widely understood as a fundamentally elite project, and a highly risky and ‘un-natural’ one which exceeds the bounds of what humans are entitled to do, then it is less likely to be deployed. Another possibility is that powerful interests impose it regardless, but that course would have a very different valency to one which gains any kind of democratic imprimatur.

I will argue, contrary to the dominant view expressed in major assessments of SGE, that whether SGE is ‘officially’ embraced and deployed as a climate change solution, or indeed whether it is rejected and marginalised, has very little to do with conducting more scientific research aimed at reducing the many risks already identified and clarifying uncertainties. Even how global warming unfolds, whilst relevant, is of secondary importance.

Any examination of SGE soon makes it apparent that SGE is a ‘troubling’ technology in all senses of the word. It troubles, of course, the existing verities of climate policy—mitigation as primary solution to the warming problem—even when it is offered up as merely a supplement to mitigation. But it also troubles by bringing to the fore existential questions grounded in competing social values such as what it means to be human, as well as questions about the place of science in thinking about climate change, about ‘progress’ and about the human-nature relationship, and the geopolitics of global North and South. It impels reflection on environmentalism, democracy, how expertise is engaged in the shaping of policy, and much else besides. It shines a light on the dystopic dimensions of contemporary life in the West, and on the dark side of ‘man’s mastery of nature’. A focus on sociotechnical imaginaries allows us to pay more attention to such aspects than is common in ‘scientific’ analyses of SGE as technology.

The Basic Idea of Solar Geoengineering

For those less familiar with SGE it is worth getting a few basic facts onto the table, although as the book progresses it will become clear that even the most basic observations are not always straightforward.

Firstly, placing significant quantities of sulphate aerosols in the stratosphere is likely to induce planetary cooling, and rapidly. How reliably and predictably it would do so is far from clear.⁵ Other physical effects SGE might have are contested. The highly influential US National Research Council (NRC) assessment of geoengineering lists some “consequences of concern” including ozone depletion, a “reduction in global precipitation”, or rainfall, and that the climatic effects “will not be uniformly distributed around the globe” (2015: 7). This is not an exhaustive list (Robock 2008).

Secondly, the argument that SGE is relatively cheap (with costs purported to be in the low billions of dollars per annum), whilst contested, is plausible at least in comparison to the Paris solution and the associated cost of steep emissions cuts, major energy transitions and adaptations to a warming world. Of course ‘cheap’ can be a weasel word in the sense that a Bangladesh-made t-shirt is cheap only if one leaves out the social and environmental costs of its production. SGE’s cheapness refers mainly to the direct costs of injecting the sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere using a fleet of aircraft.

Thirdly, SGE is being taken seriously but has not yet been officially embraced. Since the mid-2000s SGE has become part of mainstream climate policy discussions—not secretly, although largely out of the public eye. It has been proposed by a number of prominent climate scientists (see for example Crutzen 2006; Schneider 2001). It has been the object of analysis and assessment by leading scientific institutions in the USA, the UK, Germany an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Geoengineering’s Past: From Mastery to Taboo
• 3. The Re-emergence of Solar Geoengineering
• 4. Competing Imaginaries of Solar Geoengineering
• 5. Knowledge-Power-Values
• 6. Future Imaginings
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter