"If the world doesn’t get its act together on climate change, this could be our last resort."
Excerpt of Vox’s Dylan Matthews and Byrd Pinkerton on solar geoengineering:
In the latest episode of Future Perfect, we explain solar geoengineering, as experts call this idea. If it sounds scary to you, it should! It has for years been a somewhat taboo subject among scientists. Spraying chemicals into the atmosphere sounded outlandish and reckless, and, worst of all, like a distraction from the key task of reducing carbon emissions. And to be clear, we absolutely need to reduce climate emissions, no matter what.
And we need to be talking about it in case one country decides to go it alone and geoengineer without international cooperation. Given that any government could conceivably engage in this project for only about $10 billion a year (a pittance for a number of large or rich countries affected by climate change, like India, China, or the whole developed world), it will become very tempting for a country looking to avoid displacing citizens due to sea level rise, or trying to prevent catastrophic weather events, to spray aerosols into the atmosphere unilaterally.
“I don’t know whether that’ll happen in five or 10 or 50 years,” Gernot Wagner, a Harvard economist and expert on geoengineering, told us, “but somebody somewhere will attempt to pull the trigger on this. And even if you think it’s nuts that anyone would consider this to be part of a semi-rational climate policy portfolio … wouldn’t it be good to know more about this technology, about the impact, about the efficacy, about the risks, if and when somebody is compelled to pull the trigger?”
For more: Vox Future Perfect (31 October 2018).