Climate & Society Weekly Reflections

Taking advantage of my employee tuition benefits, I have been taking classes part-time in addition to my full-time job to complete the Master of Arts in Climate & Society program at The Climate School, Columbia University. This series is a weekly blog assignment for my Spring 2023 course, Applications in Climate & Society. The series captures my thoughts and reflections based on the provided prompts.

Week 11 - Apr 3

Prompt: Blog: Reflect on what you learned in class about geoengineering. How do you think the world should approach governance for geoengineering?

Although the session was advertised as focused on geoengineering, it was surprised to see there was no explicit mention or discussion of geoengineering science, recent advances, or advantages vs disadvantages. The speakers provided engaging activities on surveying public sentiment about any particular topic but overall I did not receive any useful information and remain unclear about the speakers’ intended messaging and key points.

One way to look at geoengineering governance after what I’ve seen in this week’s session, is perhaps the fact that most people are too much in the dark about geoengineering to have informed opinions about geoengineering science, much less how to approach aspects of governance and regulation. Since I did not gain any new insight on this topic, I remain skeptical about geoengineering in general. Firstly, how do we even define “geoengineering”? What are the different kinds of “geoengineering” and what exactly are proponents of geoengineering proposing in terms of relying on geoengineering to resolve our climate crisis? I’m not clear on what I should be responding to.

The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment defines geoengineering more precisely as “climate engineering,” which involves large-scale interventions in the Earth’s natural systems to directly combat climate change. Two common categories of climate engineering are carbon dioxide (CO2) removal from the air and solar radiation management (i.e. reflecting or blocking of sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface). In both of these categories, we have already seen many climate mitigation and adaptation strategies tackling these areas without requiring experimental methodology or expensive advanced technology, such as planting trees and shrubs to increase carbon removal through photosynthesis and provide cover over dark-colored soils that would otherwise absorb solar radiation and heat, and painting built surfaces white to increase albedo or the amount of solar radiation reflected. However, climate geoengineering approaches propose going much further in proactively interfering with Earth’s natural systems and processes, such as “seeding clouds” by spraying aerosols into the stratosphere or “marine cloud brightening” by spraying droplets of seawater into clouds that cover the oceans to increase solar reflectiveness. Less intrusive approaches, such as carbon capture and sequestration for storage, have not demonstrated cost-effectiveness and large-scale success.

From publicly available research literature and evidence, there is little to go by to support the widespread adoption of climate geoengineering technology and proposals. Perhaps the best evidence and technology are all kept private as proprietary info. Still, the lack of available information, clarity, and transparency makes it challenging to accept even a modest real-life trial or demo experiment. We just do not know the full scope of consequences that can come after, or even how to document and evaluate these consequences. The first image that comes to my mind is the iconic painting The Scream by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch that was inspired by the frightening skies and his own panic that followed Mount Krakatoa’s volcanic eruption all the way in Indonesia. One of the largest widespread famines in human history that occurred in the 6th Century was tied to two volcanic eruptions. There is something unsettling and irresponsible about a proposal to mimic the effect of volcanic ash by spraying sulphur dioxide particles directly into the stratosphere to create dark clouds that would cover large areas of Earth. I would love to review evidence of how this can work in a controlled manner without unintended and runaway effects.

Interfering with Earth’s natural processes and systems at a large scale is difficult to control and contain within geopolitical and physical boundaries, so is governance. We have learned this first hand with the governance of air pollution and emissions—a big failure, considering the current climate crisis we are facing. Besides the what and the how, we also have to emphasize the questions of who gets to benefit from the positive outcomes, who has to bear the negative outcomes, who can give and withdraw consent, who has the right to authorize and give permission, and who has the right to implement these initiatives. Many climate geoengineering proposals seem to neglect the aspect of inviting stakeholder input and co-development, putting the key roles largely in the hands of the for-profit tech developers and government administrators who don’t always have the scientific backgrounds and expertise to adequately evaluate and monitor the projects.

We have very limited resources and even more limited time. Maybe we can try different things concurrently, but we are already trying A LOT of different things concurrently that are competing for attention and funding in the mitigation vs adaptation debate. Maybe it’s better to target all the time, attention, and money we have towards strategies and solutions that we already would work at scale and allow for greater community buy-ins and inclusiveness.