The authors seem to be missing the real point here. In distinguishing between "the art of the possible" and the "activist agenda," they accurately enough finger the proverbial rock and hard place of the climate dilemma. Unfortunately, their position reduces to, "Lets get stuck on the rock rather than the hard place." I think this is a da…
The authors seem to be missing the real point here. In distinguishing between "the art of the possible" and the "activist agenda," they accurately enough finger the proverbial rock and hard place of the climate dilemma. Unfortunately, their position reduces to, "Lets get stuck on the rock rather than the hard place." I think this is a dangerous formulation at a very fraught time.
There's no either/or rationale that solves this dilemma. The immediate emission reductions that are loudly insisted on by... less critical-thinkers are totally warranted, and in fact necessary to avert a cascade breakdown of the modern world. They're also impossible to deliver -- no society, democratic or otherwise, will voluntarily subject itself to what's coming for Europe this winter. Let alone year-after-year for the next 20 years. That's an abject lesson in cures not being worse than the disease.
For going on 10 years I've read cheerful headlines about the imminent prospects for the solar revolution and the wind utopia. We're now witnessing how much those belied the complexity of the green energy transition. Anyone with half a brain could tell solar and wind were not ready to make up 30%, let alone 80-100% of grid scale power generation. Yet on the eve of the most head-spinning energy shocks in modern history you still have feckless EU bureaucrats effectively saying, "Wind, baby, wind."
And yet, we're out of time. It turns out linear projections of GDP loss on 80 year time horizons didn't do justice to how messy ecological shocks would be in the near term. Who would have guessed a hurricane making landfall in Louisiana could have a death toll in NYC? The cost of disaster management is going to quickly become the consuming focus of developed societies everywhere. To say nothing of the fact warming is set to -accelerate- for at least the next 10 years, but realistically beyond. It's more or less correct to say, "Climate change is here, and it's here in a big way."
Green activists, having spent a generation denying a role for nuclear energy in this fight, have stripped us of any possible absolution except one, and it's one nobody is talking about -- solar geo-engineering. We don't have the bandwidth to do what we need to do today and we don't have the time to do it tomorrow. The only play we have left is to give ourselves more time. But it is pure fantasy to think anything like that would come out of a UN summit. Maybe that makes it as impractical as shutting down all the coal plants tomorrow and, being similarly unlikely, not a good solution after all.
But someone should take up the cause of distinguishing between tangible obstacles (energy shocks with too much energy transition, mounting ecological catastrophe with too little) and psychological ones ("it feels wrong"). Geoengineering entails significant but manageable risk and carries the baggage of "man was not made to meddle" optics. Anyone who gets hung up on those compared to the real and mounting costs of the alternatives should be lit up by anyone who understands how truly dire this moment is. Not for nothing, either. Geoengineering is the only thing that could pause warming immediately, and spare us a host of impending shocks that will scale disproportionately in cost.
Or maybe we could just watch the forces of entropy take back the billions of lives humanity has managed to nourish into being over the past century.
Mt Tambora 1815 did this with horrific famine and disease consequences. So, you would trade a predicted doom for another? Humans are ingenious at adapting from the ground up if given a chance and solar geoengineering is about as top down fascist as it gets. And I presume you have the right to inflict this on humanity?!! It is the human ego’s fatal flaw to weight it’s own solutions in such a biased way as to marginalize all other contributions. When imposed on others it takes a form of violence whose ultimate end can be seen in genocide. A solar geoengineered genocide would not be ethically superior to an evolving one of natural shocks that would give humanity time to creatively adapt.
Your response is riddled with fallacy, inaccuracy, and reductivism. It took you less than 100 words to conflate intervention in atmospheric physics with the systematic murder of a human subgroup. I could not have found a clearer portrait of the ignorance at play in climate policy if I'd tried.
Name calling is the resort of those with losing arguments. I am in accord with article’s opinion. God save us all from your presumptions, solutions and hubris. If Nostradamus had your solar geoengineering technology he might have committed genocide to avoid certain doom too. Luckily, he only had the ear of an elite lacking in common sense, which now I think of it, is a good parallel.
The authors seem to be missing the real point here. In distinguishing between "the art of the possible" and the "activist agenda," they accurately enough finger the proverbial rock and hard place of the climate dilemma. Unfortunately, their position reduces to, "Lets get stuck on the rock rather than the hard place." I think this is a dangerous formulation at a very fraught time.
There's no either/or rationale that solves this dilemma. The immediate emission reductions that are loudly insisted on by... less critical-thinkers are totally warranted, and in fact necessary to avert a cascade breakdown of the modern world. They're also impossible to deliver -- no society, democratic or otherwise, will voluntarily subject itself to what's coming for Europe this winter. Let alone year-after-year for the next 20 years. That's an abject lesson in cures not being worse than the disease.
For going on 10 years I've read cheerful headlines about the imminent prospects for the solar revolution and the wind utopia. We're now witnessing how much those belied the complexity of the green energy transition. Anyone with half a brain could tell solar and wind were not ready to make up 30%, let alone 80-100% of grid scale power generation. Yet on the eve of the most head-spinning energy shocks in modern history you still have feckless EU bureaucrats effectively saying, "Wind, baby, wind."
And yet, we're out of time. It turns out linear projections of GDP loss on 80 year time horizons didn't do justice to how messy ecological shocks would be in the near term. Who would have guessed a hurricane making landfall in Louisiana could have a death toll in NYC? The cost of disaster management is going to quickly become the consuming focus of developed societies everywhere. To say nothing of the fact warming is set to -accelerate- for at least the next 10 years, but realistically beyond. It's more or less correct to say, "Climate change is here, and it's here in a big way."
Green activists, having spent a generation denying a role for nuclear energy in this fight, have stripped us of any possible absolution except one, and it's one nobody is talking about -- solar geo-engineering. We don't have the bandwidth to do what we need to do today and we don't have the time to do it tomorrow. The only play we have left is to give ourselves more time. But it is pure fantasy to think anything like that would come out of a UN summit. Maybe that makes it as impractical as shutting down all the coal plants tomorrow and, being similarly unlikely, not a good solution after all.
But someone should take up the cause of distinguishing between tangible obstacles (energy shocks with too much energy transition, mounting ecological catastrophe with too little) and psychological ones ("it feels wrong"). Geoengineering entails significant but manageable risk and carries the baggage of "man was not made to meddle" optics. Anyone who gets hung up on those compared to the real and mounting costs of the alternatives should be lit up by anyone who understands how truly dire this moment is. Not for nothing, either. Geoengineering is the only thing that could pause warming immediately, and spare us a host of impending shocks that will scale disproportionately in cost.
Or maybe we could just watch the forces of entropy take back the billions of lives humanity has managed to nourish into being over the past century.
Mt Tambora 1815 did this with horrific famine and disease consequences. So, you would trade a predicted doom for another? Humans are ingenious at adapting from the ground up if given a chance and solar geoengineering is about as top down fascist as it gets. And I presume you have the right to inflict this on humanity?!! It is the human ego’s fatal flaw to weight it’s own solutions in such a biased way as to marginalize all other contributions. When imposed on others it takes a form of violence whose ultimate end can be seen in genocide. A solar geoengineered genocide would not be ethically superior to an evolving one of natural shocks that would give humanity time to creatively adapt.
Your response is riddled with fallacy, inaccuracy, and reductivism. It took you less than 100 words to conflate intervention in atmospheric physics with the systematic murder of a human subgroup. I could not have found a clearer portrait of the ignorance at play in climate policy if I'd tried.
Name calling is the resort of those with losing arguments. I am in accord with article’s opinion. God save us all from your presumptions, solutions and hubris. If Nostradamus had your solar geoengineering technology he might have committed genocide to avoid certain doom too. Luckily, he only had the ear of an elite lacking in common sense, which now I think of it, is a good parallel.