Large projects behave similarly regardless of whether we are talking civil infrastructure, oil & gas, energy, mining, aerospace...
The industrial aspect of MCB seems to be “numerous, autonomous boats spraying water”. Building a lot of adequately-reliable boats doesn’t sound like your typical megaproject, but more of an assembly-line job, something like liberty ships. Adequately developing the process of managing large numbers of drone ships might be a pre-requisite, and doubtless has other military and civil applications.
(Of course, whether MCB affects the climate as hoped is another question altogether).
As it happens, coordinating a large assembly-line project is fairly standard megaproject material. Ships, aircraft, and semiconductors are good examples.
The hitch is your example assumes a WWII-grade of funding and coordination. Do you think that can be achieved quickly enough, cheaply enough, and reliably enough to be ignored when proposing such a project?
I think a very significant (probably even dominant) fraction of this geoengineering project would not be the industrial aspect but the organisational and political aspects. Building some ships sounds very doable (although I don’t know to what extend “spraying water” and “autonomous” are assembly-line projects, do we already have industries that make ships like this?) , coordinating around letting them sail around and alter the atmosphere less so.
The industrial aspect of MCB seems to be “numerous, autonomous boats spraying water”. Building a lot of adequately-reliable boats doesn’t sound like your typical megaproject, but more of an assembly-line job, something like liberty ships. Adequately developing the process of managing large numbers of drone ships might be a pre-requisite, and doubtless has other military and civil applications.
(Of course, whether MCB affects the climate as hoped is another question altogether).
As it happens, coordinating a large assembly-line project is fairly standard megaproject material. Ships, aircraft, and semiconductors are good examples.
The hitch is your example assumes a WWII-grade of funding and coordination. Do you think that can be achieved quickly enough, cheaply enough, and reliably enough to be ignored when proposing such a project?
I think a very significant (probably even dominant) fraction of this geoengineering project would not be the industrial aspect but the organisational and political aspects. Building some ships sounds very doable (although I don’t know to what extend “spraying water” and “autonomous” are assembly-line projects, do we already have industries that make ships like this?) , coordinating around letting them sail around and alter the atmosphere less so.