The Transition Movement discussion

For comments on chapter 29.

Simon Nicholson, assistant professor in the School of International Service at American University in Washington D.C..

This chapter is a rather frightening one. It didn’t help that it took me a while to figure out just what the author’s stance was on geoengineering. In a quite irritating way he says so many positive things about geoengineering “possibilities” that the negative, or circumspect, or cautionary statements don’t come through as clear as (in my opinion) they should.

But perhaps I am just so dead set against geoengineering schemes that I didn’t give him a fair hearing. I will admit that by the end of the article I was somewhat more attuned to his views than earlier.

In the context of climate change “geoengineering” refers to attempts, using technological means, to “fix” the problem of climate change without paying any costs (other than monetary costs, generally envisaged as being paid by governments to the private tech firms that will fix things for us.)

Nicholson mentions as an example of this viewpoint that of Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways, who has offered a $25 million prize in the Virgin Earth Challenge for a quick fix to the problem of global warming. Branson is quoted in the chapter as saying “If we could come up with a geoengineering answer to this problem, [climate change meetings] wouldn’t be necessary … We could carry on flying our planes and driving our cars.” (view spoiler)[ ( … and I could go on having fun and making money!) (hide spoiler)]


A LOOK AT THE GEOENGINEERING LANDSCAPE

At any rate … The author describes the two main types of geoengineering which have been talked about. Solar Radiation Management (SRM) technologies attempt to shield the earth’s atmosphere from a portion of the sun’s rays which would otherwise enter; or alternatively to reflect (in a massive way) a large portion of those rays back out of the atmosphere and into space. The other approach is Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). These schemes are designed to remove massive amounts of carbon dioxide (the most prevalent greenhouse gas other than water vapor) from the atmosphere and store it “in some benign, long term fashion.”

Scientists and technologists who have thought about these approaches have, not surprisingly, come up rather easily with a number of ways of doing both these types of geoengineering, ways which should work … but ways which have both theoretical and practical drawbacks. A serious issue with SRM is that, although it supposedly allows humanity to continue to put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to any extent desired, the SRM would need to keep more and more solar radiation out of the atmosphere, and would need to be continued indefinitely. If the SRM were stopped, all the accumulated greenhouse gases would immediately start causing massive warming.

Thus CDR would appear to be a strategy that would need to be pursued in addition to SRM, if the SRM is ever to be discontinued. But CDR is a two step process. Not only does the carbon need to be removed from the air (or captured at the source, say a power plant), but it needs to be stored somewhere and in some form. All the methods that have been proposed share one or more of the disadvantages of high cost, field trials which have given mixed results, challenges associated with successful deployment, serious questions about how successfully and for how long the carbon can be sequestered, and practical difficulties associated with the scale of the undertaking. To says nothing at all of unintended consequences.

The author concludes this section by noting that “Affixing a thermostat to the planet’s climate system should be considered no small task for a species that struggles to control the temperatures” in its offices and homes.


PARSING GEOENGINEERING’S COSTS

In this section the author talks about three types of geoengineering “costs” that must be acknowledged and assessed: material, political, and “existential”. Unfortunately he stops using almost immediately the word cost (which as far as I can tell is what he continues to refer to) and starts using “sacrifice” – as in “material sacrifices” as a sub-section heading.

This is totally inappropriate. A sacrifice is something that a person or group makes voluntarily, even though they may not be happy about it – they make the sacrifice because they know it must be done. A cost is something that needs to be paid, and is often paid reluctantly by whoever has to pay it. He is talking about “costs”, not “sacrifices”.

For example, Nicholson begins the Material Sacrifices sub-section by saying, “Perhaps the most obvious cause for concern is that geoengineering interventions could go catastrophically wrong,” and goes on to mention a view that “failure is in the very nature of technological design”. Well, this is a cost that would need to be paid if the geoengineering venture went wrong. Assuming a rational procedure had been followed in deciding to embark on the venture, then that procedure would have entailed the assumption of a risk that the cost would have to be paid. None of this has anything to do with “sacrifice”. What is really at issue are two questions. First, how is the decision made to go ahead? And second, who will be forced to pay the cost if the venture fails? Nicholson is very cognizant of the first question, and makes appropriate comments about democratic decisions, at least in the best case. But he only tangentially, if at all, addresses the second question; unless I’m missing something.

In the Political Sacrifices sub-section, he says the following, referring to a call to wait for many decades of verification to assure that we know what we’re doing in tinkering with the climate, before we put a full scale geoengineering program into effect:

Waiting (many) years for greater levels of scientific certainty certainly is sage advice, but it is unlikely to be followed … the political pressure to rapidly deploy geoengineering technologies may become overwhelming as the effects of climate change grow more pronounced. Mustering the political will to generate large-scale social change in response to climate change is proving … difficult. Should melting ice drive sea level rise … or should some fast moving climate calamity force the hand of rich-country elites, then swift technology-based action may suddenly be demanded.

Again, without disagreeing with what’s being said, the context is all wrong. What does this have to do with what might called “political sacrifice” (whatever that means), or even “political cost”. Who would a “cost” be being levied on? Politicians? Elites? I just don’t understand.

As for the last subsection, Existential Sacrifices, I have not the slightest idea what’s he’s talking about by putting what he says under a heading like this.

I’m afraid I have to say that for me anyway, most of this section is pretty much filler. I’m sure the author could have said the useful things he says in 1/3 the words, without using any sub-section headings at all.


THE FUTURE OF PLANETARY ENGINEERING

The author gets back on track (mostly) in the article’s summary section. He states that

Scientists need the freedom to propose and test geoengineering options without their work being used as an excuse to delay real mitigation actions. The public and the planet need to be protected from rogue geoengineering efforts and well-intentioned efforts run amok. There is a desperate need for transparency and openness in the development of geoengineering technologies, even as the deployment of those technologies is tightly managed. (my emphasis)

Although my own view on this is that the possible unauthorized deployment by the “rich elites” that Nicholson mentions, is a sufficiently scary dystopian vision that the outright banning of research on these technologies also has to be on the table.

Nicholson also mentions (Boxes 29-2 and 29-3) “The Oxford Principles: A Code of Conduct for Geoengineering Research” and “Criteria for 'Soft Geoengineering' Technologies.” The former were the outcome of a 2011 effort by scholars in the U.K. to echo the efforts of the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA – “trying to self-regulate by way of the establishment of clear guidelines for safe and ethical conduct.” For the most part these five principles are reasonable and reassuring (Geoengineering to be regulated as a public good; Public participation in geoengineering decisionmaking; etc.)

I am more circumspect about the latter “criteria”. Some of them seem to be somewhat self-serving, and open to too much expansion into full blown global efforts to be scaled “soft”, that word being used to denote “those (technologies) that can actually make a difference … but have relatively few risks attached to their development. (These are from a futurist named Robert L. Olson.)


A final comment

Nicholson had obviously not read the paper that is presented as the preceding chapter in the book, “Resistance: Do the Ends Justify the Means?” If he had, he would probably have realized that some of the dystopian scenarios that he mentions in his own paper are precisely the sorts of situations that would very possibly ignite a world-wide flash fire of not only “resistance”, but possibly armed protest, insurrection and revolution. If “elites” or rich nations were ever perceived as about to deploy on their own initiative geoengineering schemes that they would then have complete control over, and the rest of the world be damned – that’s a real nightmare scenario.