If geoengineering approaches successfully counteract climate change, and it’s cheaper to burn carbon and dim the sun than generate power a different way (or not use the power), then presumably civilization is better off burning carbon and dimming the sun.
AFAIK, the main arguments against solar radiation management (SRM) are:
1. High level of CO2 in the atmosphere creates other problems too (e.g. ocean acidification) but those problems are less urgent / impactful so we’ll end up not caring about them if we implement SRM. Reducing CO2 emissions allows us to “do the right thing” using already existing political momentum.
2. Having the climate depend on SRM gives a lot of power to those in control of SRM and makes the civilization dependent on SRM. We are bad at global cooperation as is and having SRM to manage will put additional stress on that. This is a more fragile solution than reducing emissions.
It’s certainly possible to argue against either of these points, especially introducing the assumption that humanity as a whole is close enough to a rational agent. My opinion is that geoengineering solutions lead to more fragility than reducing emissions and we would be better off avoiding them or at least doing something along the lines of carbon sequestration and not SRM. It also seems increasingly likely that we won’t have that option. Our emission reduction efforts are too slow and once we hit +5ºC and beyond the option to “turn this off tomorrow” will look too attractive.
My opinion is that geoengineering solutions lead to more fragility than reducing emissions and we would be better off avoiding them or at least doing something along the lines of carbon sequestration and not SRM.
Sure, I think carbon sequestration is a solid approach as well (especially given that it’s still net energy-producing to burn fossil fuels and sequester the resulting output as CO2 somewhere underground!), and am not familiar enough with the numbers to know if SRM is better or worse than sequestration. My core objection was that Russell’s opinion of the NAS meeting wasn’t “SRM has expected disasters or expected high costs that disqualify it”, and instead it looked like that the NAS thought it was more important to be adversarial to fossil fuel interests than make the best engineering decision.
AFAIK, the main arguments against solar radiation management (SRM) are:
1. High level of CO2 in the atmosphere creates other problems too (e.g. ocean acidification) but those problems are less urgent / impactful so we’ll end up not caring about them if we implement SRM. Reducing CO2 emissions allows us to “do the right thing” using already existing political momentum.
2. Having the climate depend on SRM gives a lot of power to those in control of SRM and makes the civilization dependent on SRM. We are bad at global cooperation as is and having SRM to manage will put additional stress on that. This is a more fragile solution than reducing emissions.
It’s certainly possible to argue against either of these points, especially introducing the assumption that humanity as a whole is close enough to a rational agent. My opinion is that geoengineering solutions lead to more fragility than reducing emissions and we would be better off avoiding them or at least doing something along the lines of carbon sequestration and not SRM. It also seems increasingly likely that we won’t have that option. Our emission reduction efforts are too slow and once we hit +5ºC and beyond the option to “turn this off tomorrow” will look too attractive.
Sure, I think carbon sequestration is a solid approach as well (especially given that it’s still net energy-producing to burn fossil fuels and sequester the resulting output as CO2 somewhere underground!), and am not familiar enough with the numbers to know if SRM is better or worse than sequestration. My core objection was that Russell’s opinion of the NAS meeting wasn’t “SRM has expected disasters or expected high costs that disqualify it”, and instead it looked like that the NAS thought it was more important to be adversarial to fossil fuel interests than make the best engineering decision.