Geo-Engineering – a pound of technocrats or an ounce of Gore?
[update: see additional links at bottom – including to discussions of Austrian concerns]
[update2: at bottom]
Climate change skeptic Benny Peiser of the Liverpool John Moores University recently circulated these links and excerpts via his “CCNet” mailing list ([email protected] (“subscribe cambridge-conference”)):
CCNet 167/2007 – 8 October 2007
GEO-ENGINEERING: HOW FEASIBLE ARE HIGH-TECH SOLUTIONS?
—————————————————–– CAN SCIENCE REALLY SAVE THE WORLD?
Robin McKie and Juliette Jowit, The Observer, 7 October 2007They are the ultimate technological fixes: schemes that will span our planet and involve scientists in reshaping our world to save it from global warming. Yet only a few years ago, such projects were dismissed as the stuff of science fiction. Today many engineers and researchers – fearful of the rate at which our planet is warming – say geo-engineering projects are now mankind’s only hope of saving itself from the impact of climate change.
Geo-engineering is one of the types of thing that are worth investigating. If we can generate 100 ideas, and 97 are bad and we land up with three good ones, then the whole thing will have been worthwhile.
Ken Caldeira, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 7 October 2007http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,,2185343,00.html
– HIGH-TECH SOLUTIONS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE
Sue Carter, The Daily Telegraph, 8 October 2007Scientists desperate to combat climate change have drawn up high-tech plans which include firing giant mirrors into space and covering the earth in a cloud of sulphur. In the past, such advanced schemes, known as geo-engineering projects, were considered too outrageous to be put into action – but now some scientists believe they may be our last chance to reverse the impact of climate change.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/10/08/sciclimate108.xml
– Benny Peiser, National Museum Cardiff, 6 October 2007
Space-based geoengineering is controllable and reversible at any stage. Solar power generation will overcome the high cost of space-based climate control schemes
http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Cardiff-Peiser.ppt– OPINION: THE LAST GREEN TABOO: ENGINEERING THE PLANET
Johann Hari, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 5 October 2007http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/334444_hari07.html
“Geo-engineering” sounds like a bland and technical term but it is actually a Messianic movement to save the world from global warming, through dust and iron and thousands of tiny mirrors in space. It is also the last green taboo. Environmentalists instinctively do not want to discuss it. The wider public instinctively thinks it is mad. But now, the taboo has been breached. James Lovelock, one of the founding fathers of modern environmentalism, proposed a way to slash global warming without cutting back on a single fossil fuel.
[update:]Finally, I note that Dr. Reisman also broached this subject earlier this year, with a thoughtful suggestion that we proceed with a program of open air testing of atom bombs in the Arctic, to confirm possible efficacy in creating a mild “nuclear winter” – just in case:
– March 16, 2007 – Global Warming: Environmentalism’s Threat of Hell on Earth
George Reisman
http://blog.mises.org/archives/006389.asp
– May 30, 2007 – Global Warming Is Not a Threat but the Environmentalist Response to It Is (Full Version)
http://blog.mises.org/archives/006700.asp
There is much further discussion of geo-engineering on these two posts. One commenter (Roger M, now “Fundamentalist”) made the following interesting remark: “”During the 3 days that the 9/11 disaster grounded all air travel in the US, a California scientist measured temperatures across the country and found them 3 degrees warmer than normal. He thinks airline contrails block 3% of the sun’s energy and cool the earth. In India, pollution reduces the average temp by 10 degrees. So all we need to do to reduce the effects of global warming is fly more and pollute more.”
http://blog.mises.org/archives/006389.asp“
I attach here a few further links that I noted there:
– GEOENGINEERING: A CLIMATE CHANGE MANHATTAN PROJECT, Jay Michaelson (Yale JD), Stanford Environmental Law Journal January, 1998; http://www.metatronics.net/lit/geo2.html.
There have of course been many discussions of geoengineering over the past two decades. The topic is gaining interest, espcially after an article by Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen last year. More here, if you are interested:
Climate change: Is this what it takes to save the world? Long marginalized as a dubious idea, altering the climate through ‘geoengineering’ has staged something of a comeback. http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070508/full/447132a.html#B2
– ALBEDO ENHANCEMENT BY STRATOSPHERIC SULFUR INJECTIONS: A CONTRIBUTION TO RESOLVE A POLICY DILEMMA? Paul Crutzen; http://downloads.heartland.org/19632.pdf
– A Combined Mitigation/Geoengineering Approach to Climate Stabilization, T. M. L. Wigley; http://www.atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca/~jclub/journalclub_files/Wigley_Science_2006.pdf
– Geoengineering Earth’s Radiation Balance to Mitigate CO2 Induced Climate Change, Bala Govindasamy and Ken Caldeira Climate and Carbon Cycle Group, Lawerence Livermore National Laboratory; http://geocrisis.com/Geoenigineering%20Earth%20Radiative%20Balance.pdf
– Feasibility of cooling the Earth with a cloud of small spacecraft near the inner Lagrange point (L1), Roger Angel; http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/103/46/17184
– Only mother nature knows how to fertilize the ocean; Natural input of nutrients works ten times better than manmade injections; http://planktonforums.org/viewtopic.php?t=5059
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-2.1/huyghe.htm
http://geocrisis.com/cpe_geoengineering_menu.htm
– “Climate change: Is this what it takes to save the world? Long marginalized as a dubious idea, altering the climate through ‘geoengineering’ has staged something of a comeback.” http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070508/full/447132a.html#B2
[update2:]
– Global warming fix in can? By Andrew Richards
October 11, 2007; http://washingtontimes.com/article/20071011/CULTURE/110110077/1015
http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0814-gw.html
There are just a few small problems – even within the developed world (and very clearly outside of it), there are many important resources that are unowned and thus not fully priced in the “market” economy.
Unowned resources include almost all of Nature. Primary productivity (the amount of vegetation produced from photosynthesis) has changed little, so as we use technology and our organizational abilities to divert more and more of it to feed us, this is an inevitable cost to other species, either directly or in the form of altered environments that support less life (and less diversity of life).
In altering our environments to suit us, we are of course no different from other life forms that compete for resources to live and propagate, but with our technical and organizational abilities, mankind has clearly triumphed over the rest of nature (except perhaps evolving microbes, to whom we represent an increasingly large and relatively untapped food source). But at what cost?
Through the centuries we have wiped out many wild systems of food and other resources – because they were never owned, and because our improving technology enabled us to race each other to take the resources before others (or from others, in the case of many native peoples). Not only Jared Diamond`s “guns, germs and steel”, but also forms of social organization have played deciding roles in the competition between human societies for survival, growth and dominance. In this regard, societies that recognize and protect property rights internally and utilize free markets have proven clearly superior in the competition with other societies to obtain and utilize available resources.
But our struggle has been not only to capture resources and to use them before others do, but also to manage and protect them effectively. Evolving ownership systems have been a key means of limiting wasteful “tragedy of the commons” struggles (see Yandle; von Mises), but even where ownership systems have been implemented, we have generally replaced complex natural systems with simpler systems designed solely to feed us (and particularly so where, due to higher consumptive demand, we have replaced common property systems with private property systems (Ostrom)).
Meanwhile, virtually all of the natural world – the world’s oceans, atmosphere, tropical reefs, tropical forests and other great commons – remain unowned and thus unmanaged and unregulated (or indigenous occupants have been forced aside). For example, the great cod fishery off of the Grand Banks that fed Europe for centuries has now disappeared, and other fishery stocks worldwide are crashing – to be “replaced” by “farmed” fish that are fed to a substantial degree by catching and grinding up fish stocks that humans prefer not to consume directly, and in part by fish firms that are established by destroying the mangroves that are estuaries to various fisheries. The same is true of the replacement of vast tracts of tropical forests with soybeans or oil palm plantations, with the rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 (and attendant risks to climate) and with the correspondly geolologically rapid increases in ocean acidification (and threats to plankton, corals and shellfish).
While populations in the developed economies are now relatively stable, demand from our markets (as well as the burgeoning developing markets) continues to strip out unowned (or mismanaged “public”) resources from the oceans or undeveloped countries, aided by kleptocratic elites who are happy to steal from the peoples they supposedly represent in order to line their own pockets.
As Dan points out, property rights failures in poorer nations contribute to population growth there by delaying the demographic transitions that we have experienced. Developed economies face similar problems with respect to “public”, state-owned lands, for which rent-seeking by and sweet deals to insiders are enduring problems and sources of politcal conflict (as markets cannot work to allocate resources).
Dan states that the stunningly rapid growth of human populations from the Renaissance to the present (6+ billion now expected to nearly double again soon) “actually represents the rise of capitalism and capital development … [and] shows … the stunning capacity of freedom to provide for the whole world.” While partly correct, this misses completely the question of our massive impact, within a very short period of geological time, on the environment in which we evolved over millions of years, the fact this has occurred because clear and enforceable property rights have not been created in many of the resources that have been consumed, and the corollary fact that we continue to lack the ability to manage our impact on our endowment of natural resources.
The market clearly does NOT send accurate pricing signals with respect to goods that are unowned or ineffectively owned; these goods are either unpriced or underpriced, so the effect is overconsumption until the point that the resource is greatly degraded, at which point attention is turned to the next unowned resource. Thus, human populations are responding to rather imperfect market signals. And where resources are unowned, individuals and groups with differing values and desires cannot adjust or realize those desires by means of private, market transactions. As a result, we are seeing a recourse to the public and political arenas – and the inevitable discordant debates – as various parties seek to use either moral suasion or the levers of government (locally, nationally and internationally) to advance what they consider to be their own interests. (Of course, in a “tragedy of the commons” situation, all resource users share an interest is the future availability of a resource; the difficulty is in the prisoners’ dilemma negotiations at the primary user level about how to allocate short-term pain in the interest of long-term gains, compounded in the case of multinational resources by rent-seeking with each national participant.)
A cynic may say that our ongoing assault on nature is only “natural”, presents no moral or philosophical issues and that we hardly owe any responsibilities to “nature” or even “future generations” – so let’s just all keep on partying, consuming for today, and patting ourselves on the back at how marvelous our market systems are. And that we should keep on hurling invective at those evil “enviros” who want to crash the party and drag us all back to the Stone Age.
Perhaps I suffer from a want of sufficient cynicism.
TT