Solar engineering: a techno-dystopian response to climate change
Climate doomerism is allowing the climate power bloc to normalise increasingly extreme ideas, such as spewing sun-dimming aerosols into the atmosphere to lower global temperatures
In Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 blockbuster Snowpiercer, scientists release aerosols into the sky in a last-ditch attempt to stop global warming. However, the plan catastrophically backfires, plunging Earth into a new ice age and killing most life on the planet. When I first saw the film, I remember thinking: “Thank God no one would be crazy enough to try something like that in real life”.
I was wrong. Over the past six months, several governments and international organisations — including the White House, the EU, the UK’s DARPA-inspired research agency ARIA, the Climate Overshoot Commission, and various UN bodies — have all produced reports that cautiously open the door to that very same idea: releasing aerosols into the atmosphere in order to block sunlight from hitting Earth’s surface. The concept is known as solar engineering, or solar radiation modification (SRM), and it’s a specific type of geoengineering aimed at offsetting climate change by reflecting sunlight (“solar radiation”) back into space.
The idea of solar engineering is not new, but for a long time it was relegated to the fringes of the scientific community — and the realms of science fiction. However, as the very existence of these reports makes clear, that is no longer the case. The concept has been attracting more and more attention in recent years, largely due to the fact that the growing panic over climate change is allowing what what I call the climate power bloc — encompassing liberal-technocratic politicians, climate scientists, environmental NGOs, “green” philanthropists, and Silicon Valley “climate capitalists” — to normalise increasingly extreme techno-dystopian ideas.
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Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
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Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)
It reminded me of Philip Mirowski’s thesis - if market does not work, try market again 😎 and his claim that neoliberals have three steps how to make more money from the environmental catastrophe- first is carbocredits, which everybody knows that they do not work…..then is this techno-science-fiction while they hope that the technology will actually develop….etc….. I suppose, making money while financialising everything is simply proceeding uninterrupted into the future. Thank you, Thomas.
To say that with any plausibility means you really should address the data and impacts. The catastrophe is the reality of planetary system changes flowing from our industrial civilisation, our numbers, our consumption, our waste, our patent refusal to adopt old Greek virtues like moderation and rationality. So, the impact on people's psyches is one of the consequences. Poverty's never been good for most people's psyches either. Mass death will be another consequence with the Four Horsemen playing their part. You are kicking one of the effects, not the causes, and rail though you might, it will change nothing. Doomers laugh quite a lot btw. Life was always contingent and extinction is every species' fate sooner or later. Wisdom beckons but outrage seems to appeal to so many, so futilely.