I was surprised to learn that the White House science advisor, John Holdren, who I have lauded here, along with most of the other Obama appointees working on energy, the environment and climate change, has said that geoengineering should not be “off the table.” See Obama climate adviser open to geo-engineering to tackle global warming from “The Guardian.” John Holdren and his colleagues are a Murderer’s Row. They should keep their eye on the ball and smash out some solid singles and extra-base hits, run hard, and generally stay focused.
I am, you’ll excuse the expression, a skeptic when it comes to massive high-tech, high-cost ideas that may – or may not – counteract the dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system that we’ve been wreaking. First things first: mitigate the inputs by doing all the many things – at hand today! – that we can do to reverse our slide toward climate chaos. Next, adapt whenever feasible to the impacts that we’re experiencing now and are going to further experience. Get our house in order in the US and in Copenhagen in December. Spending hundreds of billions to launch sun-reflecting mirrors into space doesn’t seem like the proper focus at all. (Don’t get me started on hundreds of thousands of highly engineered, expensive little carbon sequestration devices. By the way, they have this thing called a tree……) As I tell my eight-year-old daughter: “No messing around, until you’re squared away.” Geoengineering really strikes me as sci-fi fun and frolic.
For more on this red herring, see the Terraforming Earth series and Geoengineering Megaprojects are Bad Planetary Management from “WorldChanging.”
