Worldchanging: Geoengineering and the New Climate Denialism

[LongTomH]

There's an interesting article over at the Worldchanging.com website. The author is Alex Steffen, one of the founders of the Worldchanging site and the person who originated the name and concept of Bright Green Environmentalism.

It seems the "Carbon Lobby," those industries, like big coal, big oil and automobile companies (Believe it or not, they're still big!) are beginning to realize they're losing ground in the effort to convince us that global warming is (take your pick): a) not happening, b) all natural anyway, or c) really good for everyone, or d) all the above.

It looks like the next chapter in their effort to prevent the carbon reductions that could threaten their profits is to push the idea of geoengineering: big, planetwide projects to control climate. These can take the form of seeding oceans with iron to increase algal growth, seeding the atmosphere with aerosols to reduce solar insolation, or putting large mirrors in space to reflect sunlight away from the planet. So far, most of these are untested, theoretical proposals; we don't know which will work, or worse, what the side effects might be. That's not stopping the Carbon Lobby from seizing on geoengineering as an alternative to real carbon reductions. Quoting from the Worldchanging article:

None of this has stopped geoengineering from becoming part of a new attempt to stall those very reductions, though. The same network of think tanks, pundits and lobbying groups that denied climate change for the last 30 years has seized on geoengineering as a chance to undermine new climate regulations and the U.N. climate negotiations to be held at the end of the year in Copenhagen. They're still using scare tactics about the economic costs of change, but now, instead of just denying the greenhouse effect, they've begun trying to convince the rest of us that hacking the planet with giant space-mirrors or artificial volcanoes is so easy that burning a lot more coal and oil really won't be a problem.

It's a central, yet often forgotten, fact in the climate debate that pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere is incredibly profitable. For a small group of giant corporations (the coal, oil and car companies which we can collectively call the Carbon Lobby), business as usual is big bank. The difficulties of addressing climate change have much more to do with the political power of these corporations than with the technical challenges of building a carbon-neutral economy (a carbon-neutral economy being an engineering and design challenge that we already have the capacity to meet).

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Their new justifications for delay are simple. Taking advantage of the economic crisis, they call climate action a job killer. If the Right's anger and vehemence against the very idea of green jobs has shocked and confused you, well, understand that it's important that climate change be framed as a threat to the economy, and never an opportunity: the growing importance of clean tech industries and jobs to the American economy must be downplayed in order for this strategy to work (never mind that wind power already employs more Americans than coal mining). Look for this argument to increase in volume as Copenhagen draws near.

The list of think tanks engaged in this effort are the usual suspects in climate denialism: the faux-libertarian Reason Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, The Cato Institute, The Heartland Institute, The Hudson Institute, and the Hoover Institute (Why any organization would call itself the Hoover Institute is beyond me; I would think enough people still remember the great depression to make that name poison!).

It would be easy to go on. But the point is obvious: the Carbon Lobby, no longer able to deny the reality of climate change, is hoping to use the idea of geoengineering to undermine political progress towards reducing climate emissions through sensible, intelligent regulations and international treaties. Big Oil, Big Coal and the auto companies want you to believe that reducing emissions is too expensive to work, climate negotiations are too unrealistic to succeed, but we can keep burning fossil fuels anyways because geoengineering gives us a plan B. If you think that, you've been spun.

Steffen isn't opposed to any discussion of geoengineering as a 'last-resort' measure; he just wants a smart discussion, without political spin, and without the discussion being conducted by the Carbon Lobby that got us into this mess in in the first place.

More at: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009784.html