Geoengineering the Climate: Bad for You and Our Energy Future

Proposals to reduce global warming through giant engineering projects or so-called geoengineering abound. Almost all are in the idea stage. But even if they were ready to deploy today, they would be dangerous for the planet, counterproductive for our energy future and unfair to the public.

At the end of this year the world’s nations will meet in Copenhagen where they will attempt to hammer out a new agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions to replace the one negotiated in Kyoto, Japan in 1997, commonly referred to as the Kyoto Protocol. In the runup to the Copenhagen conference, the public will undoubtedly be treated to a barrage of information about how we might reduce global warming through audacious climate engineering schemes rather than limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

All of these schemes are still only that, schemes. But, the increasingly dire news about how fast the planet is warming has some serious scientists thinking we may need to do some kind of geoengineering . Even to these scientists, though, geoengineering ought to be a last resort for reasons I’ll detail below.

Not so with the fossil fuel industry boosters. Alex Stiffen at WorldChanging has provided a catalogue of their arguments which go something like this: Yes, the world is warming. (They’ve given up denying this fact.) But instead of limiting greenhouse gases, we could just put mirrors in space to reflect some of the sunlight and reduce the warming. Or we could spew millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to perform the reflection task closer to Earth. The Mt. Pinatubo eruption in 1991 proved that this will work. Or we could seed the oceans with iron which will create algal blooms that then die and carry the carbon dioxide trapped in them to the bottom of the ocean. Any of these would be cheaper than limits on greenhouse gas emissions which will probably be politically impossible to pass anyway. And, by the way, those who advocate carbon emission reductions are denying the poor of the world a chance to rise out of poverty which will require the burning of our remaining stocks of fossil fuels.

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