Geoengineering

IT DOESN’T WORK: None of the technologies have a track record, all of them come with major risks and unknowns, and in some cases the effects would be obviously catastrophic.

WEAPONIZATION: Computer models show that geoengineering interventions can have regional winners and losers; to the extent that geoengineering successfully changes climate patterns in a predictable way, it will inevitably be weaponized.

DETRACTS FROM REAL SOLUTIONS: By promising a quick fix, geoengineering threatens to delay the implementation of a transition away from fossil fuels, and could redirect funding and investments away from real climate solutions. Some geoengineering proposals require vast amounts of energy, which means less climate-friendly energy for everyone else.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND BIODIVERSITY: Many geoengineering proposals require the intensive exploitation of vast amounts of land (in the case of BECCS, twice the size of India!). Those projects would inevitably displace millions of people and potentially wipe out entire ecosystems.

So you see, I’m not quite sanguine about our ability to engineer solutions to the many-headed hydra of a problem that is biophysical breakdown on this planet. Humans barely understand how nature works in many fundamental ways, including our own biology. We can’t engineer what we can’t understand. We probably can’t engineer biological systems at all. No, I have more confidence in nature fixing itself than in humans fixing nature.

The International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering should commit governments to five core prohibitions and measures:

1. The commitment to prohibit their national funding agencies from supporting the development of technologies for solar geoengineering, domestically and through international institutions.
2. The commitment to ban outdoor experiments of solar geoengineering technologies in areas under their jurisdiction.
3. The commitment to not grant patent rights for technologies for solar geoengineering, including supporting technologies such as for the retrofitting of airplanes for aerosol injections.
4. The commitment to not deploy technologies for solar geoengineering if developed by third parties.
5. The commitment to object to future institutionalization of planetary solar geoengineering as a policy option in relevant international institutions, including assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.