By Corbin Hiar
The growing urgency of the climate problem, coupled with those legislative wins, are why there could be a new opening for environmental groups to engage more seriously on geoengineering, according to a former EDF official.
“We’re doing a lot on clean energy, renewables, efficiency, low-carbon steel and so on,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School who worked at the environmental group until 2016, when he left to help found Harvard University’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program. “Despite all of that … the need to consider solar engineering isn’t going away.”
EDF and its allies are discussing establishing a geoengineering program that could “lower transaction costs” for donors, according to Wagner, who wasn’t at the San Francisco meeting but said he knows many of the participants.
“There are lots of individual foundations that are interested in this topic. And what they then often do is invest a lot of time and money figuring out who to give the money to, and reinvent the wheel in many ways,” Wagner said. “This EDF-brokered effort is trying to funnel more than one foundation’s philanthropic giving in a similar direction and help guide that giving.”
Quoted in: “Inside EDF’s private meeting on geoengineering” by Corbin Hiar, ClimateWire/Politico (14 February 2024).