Poster's note: Relates to what I was saying the other day, about
right-wing attitudes to GE as an excuse for BAU
Strange Bedfellows? Climate Change Denial and Support for Geoengineering
David Appell — October 30, 2013
Potential benefits of geoengineering, despite attendant risks, appeal
to some interests showing little concern for the seriousness of the
climate change issue generally. What goes here?
These days, an article headlined “Geo-Engineering Seen as a Practical,
Cost-Effective Global Warming Strategy” would hardly be surprising.
But what is surprising is that the headline came from a group denying
global warming exists: the Heartland Institute in Chicago.
Well-known for its aggressive contrarian position on manmade global
warming, and widely lambasted for its “I still believe in Global
Warming. Do you?” billboard featuring a picture of Ted Kaczynski, the
Unabomber, the Heartland Institute might seem unlikely to propose a
solution to a problem it doubts exists. So why did the group run an
article on geoengineering in the December 2007 issue of its newsletter
Environment & Climate News?
Written by David Schnare, at the time an EPA staff scientist and now a
director at the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, in the
Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., the article is based ontestimony
Schnare gave to the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public
Works earlier that same year. Schnare mentions the ease, speed, and
relative low cost of geoengineering schemes like injecting
sunlight-reflecting aerosols into the stratosphere, called solar
radiation management (SRM). In particular, Schnare in that article
cited research by scientist Ken Caldiera of Stanford University
(andnow also the Carnegie Institute) and concludes “reducing
greenhouse gases will cost around 2 percent of the gross domestic
product, while geo-engineering (by putting reflective aerosols into
the upper atmosphere) will cost about one-thousandth of that.”
But Schnare’s article, written just a year after Nobel Laureate Paul
Crutzen’s seminal and controversial 2006 article calling for serious
active research into solar radiation management, ignores the many
complications, side effects, and unintended consequences of SRM that
worry many. Crutzen had specifically mentioned undesirable destruction
of protective stratospheric ozone. And SRM does nothing to stop ocean
acidification, instead creating a world never before seen, high in
carbon dioxide while relatively low in temperature.
Only in the last sentence of his article did Schnare casually advocate
a vigorous development away from carbon-based energy sources,
writing“the most sensible approach would be a mixed strategy of
geo-engineering…and vigorously developing a transition from
carbon-based energy, to include research on scrubbing greenhouse gases
from the atmosphere.”
Despite this article and others, and at least one presentation at its
annual conferences, “Heartland doesn’t have a position on
geoengineering,” according to Joseph Bast, the Institute’s president
and CEO.
The Heartland Institute is hardly alone in considering geoengineering
as a solution to a problem it basically doesn’t see as a problem in
the first place.
In recent years, Bjorn Lomborg has often downplayed the threats from
climate change while pushing geoengineering as a short-term solution.
So too have Newt Gingrich, the former EPA staff economist Alan Carlin,
and the American Enterprise Institute, which earlier this year posted
a seminarcalling solar radiation management “an evolving climate
policy option” on its website…a site chock-full of climate
contrarianism.
One environmental group has taken to calling this straddle the
“Lomborg maneuver” — “switching from opposing real-world action on
climate change to supporting the most extreme possible action on
climate change.”
How might one reconcile such seemingly contradictory positions? and
why do they often come from politically conservative individuals and
organizations? In his recent book, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age
of Climate Engineering, Clive Hamilton argues that this pair of
positions maintains the dominant power structures of society,
especially the roles of the energy mega-corporations that have a great
deal to lose from any shift away from fossil fuels.
Hamilton, a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in
Canberra, Australia, writes “…these results are consistent with the
more general argument that conservatives tend to take a more
hierarchical view of society, as a natural order in which some groups
are dominant and some subservient.” He continues:
Like a patient who will accept the doctor’s diagnosis only if the
illness is treatable, a solution to global warming that does not
destabilize a person’s worldview — but in fact validates it — makes
recognizing the problem palatable….As the identity of conservative
white males tends to be more strongly bound to the prevailing social
structure, geoengineering is the kind of solution to climate change
that is less threatening to their values and sense of self….they are
consistent with the ideas of control over the environment and the
personal liberties associated with free market capitalism. Just as the
need to defend a cultural worldview makes conservative white males
prone to repudiate climate science, so that worldview will make them
prone to support geoengineering solutions.
Hamilton cites research by Dan Kahan of the Yale Law School and others
showing that facts must accommodate one’s cultural values if they are
to be accepted. Kahan calls this the cultural cognition thesis — that
cognitively, cultural values come before facts in assessing many
public risk conflicts, and to be accepted, facts must accommodate
those values. Kahan concludes “as a result of a complex of
interrelated psychological mechanisms, groups of individuals will
credit and dismiss evidence of risk in patterns that reflect and
reinforce their distinctive understandings of how society should be
organized.”
Australian professor Clive Hamilton sees geoengineering as less
threatening to conservatives’ ‘values and sense of self.’
This thesis helps explain many of the current sharp divisions over
public policies, especially those with scientific origins such as
climate change, vaccinations, and genetically modified foods. Those
with values that place more emphasis on the individual would be
expected to dismiss environmental and technological risks if solving
them requires restricting industry and commerce. Those who more highly
value egalitarianism and community are generally suspicious of
capitalism’s disparities and its emphasis on individual initiative,
and they therefore are more likely to advocate top-down regulation of
commercial activity.
In the context of climate change and geoengineering, Kahan and his
colleagues found that making their study participants aware of
geoengineering’s potential to address climate change, while making
them aware also of restrictions of carbon dioxide emissions, helped to
overcome the cultural polarizations that dog the climate change issue.
The researchers found too that their study subjects exposed to
geoengineering ideas — in particular those who more highly value
individualism — were slightly more concerned about the risks of
climate change than those who were not exposed.
All people are prone to the cultural cognition thesis, especially
those at the more extreme ends of the spectrum. But not all realize
that the thesis goes both ways. For instance, the conservative writer
Jonah Goldberg — who often downplays the risks from climate change (he
recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “OK, things have gotten a wee
bit warmer outside”) while advocating a geoengineeringapproach —
accused “global warming alarmists” of advancing solutions that appeal
to their core cultural values. In an interview last year with
RightWing News.com, Goldberg said, “One of the reasons why
conservatives are right to be suspicious of global warming is that it
confirms the exact same suite of policy approaches that these people
were arguing for when they were worried about a population bomb. You
know, managed scarcity, throw a wet blanket on capitalism, manage the
economy.” But Goldberg did not acknowledge that his own beliefs and
ideology might influence his attitude and approach to the climate
problem no less than those he was criticizing.
The reality is that geoengineering itself carries risks, raises
difficult ethical considerations, and poses the possibility of
unintended consequences, so it is not the slam-dunk first choice
solution to problems posed by a warming planet.
Ironically, some of those who say climate is too complex to be
forecast, or who criticize models used in climate science as being
incomplete or inaccurate, seem to have no trouble advocating
geoengineering quick fixes which themselves carry climate and
environmental complexities, or which would require extensive modeling
to understand implementation and implications.
All geoengineering schemes have unwanted side effects, and some can be
significant. Solar radiation management by aerosol injection into the
upper atmosphere, for instance, mimics large volcanic explosions, like
the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption that caused about one degree Celsius of
global surface cooling for a year or two (returning to normal over the
succeeding three years).
But that eruption also caused a 10 percent drop in worldwide
precipitation, because it reduced evapotranspiration rates over land,
and that situation didn’t return to normal for about three years.
There are concerns too that solar radiation management would reduce
the essential Asian monsoon orcause drought in Africa. A recent
modeling experiment by Simone Tilmes, of the National Center for
Atmospheric Research, and colleagues found regional rainfall
reductions of up to 7 percent when geoengineering reduced incoming
solar energy so that climate forcings were at a pre-industrial level
even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels quadrupled.
There is another large cost to geoengineering by solar radiation
management: once undertaken to reduce temperatures, it must be kept up
essentially forever or warming will resume in a very rapid and
dangerous fashion (see figure). Andrew Ross and H. Damon Matthews, in
a study published inEnvironmental Research Letters, found that
temperature would rise by up to 0.76°C in the first year after
termination of a 40-year (2020 to 2059) SRM project, with up to
another degree in the next two decades.
Such abrupt climate change can shock ecosystems, especially affecting
marine biodiversity by giving advantage to mobile or opportunistic
species. It would be even more abrupt and dangerous if atmospheric
carbon dioxide levels were to rise ever higher. Such threats would
hang heavy over future generations, obligated to pay billions of
dollars every year to continue to manage solar radiation for an
increasingly out-of-kilter planet they did not create, having to carry
the burdens of rapid and abrupt climate change were war, revolution,
or economic distress to force a halt to the risk management effort.
And these are hardly the only reasons that geoengineering, though
tempting, may not be the best solution to climate change, as scientist
Alan Robock of Rutgers University wrote in his “20 reasons why
geoengineering may be a bad idea.”
Of course, not everyone sees a problem with favoring a certain
solution because it aligns with their cultural values. “I think it’s
laudably honest,” says Eli Lehrer, president and co-founder of the R
Street Institute, a Washington-based thinktank that, in its words,
“supports free markets; limited, effective government; and responsible
environmental stewardship.”
“Many want to use climate change to talk about a pre-existing agenda,”
says Lehrer, who accepts the scientific evidence of manmade climate
change and favors a carbon tax. “They may well be right. I’d like to
do it too.”
Lehrer sees geoengineering as a common sense approach deserving of
research, but to be undertaken only if the problem proves severe
enough. “It’s probably the best solution to an extreme situation,” he
says, adding that a goal of zero carbon emissions is not achievable or
“worthwhile.” He disagrees with actually doing geoengineering any time
soon, calling the potential adverse impacts “extreme and potentially
dangerous.”
Since Crutzen’s 2006 paper, geoengineering is no longer a taboo
subject, feared even for polite discussion, because it can offer an
alternative way out of a nagging carbon problem — bariatric surgery
instead of strict dieting.
Many scientists now are seriously exploring solar radiation management
and ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, philosophers
are weighing the moral and ethical dimensions of geoengineering, and
even a few environmental groups have opened their minds to concepts
once considered anathema. The newly released IPCC Working Group I
Fifth Assessment Report mentionedgeoengineering for the first time
ever.
Geoengineering solutions retain the idea of human’s technical mastery
over nature. Instead of human societies changing to accommodate the
natural world they rely on, climate engineering — consciously or not —
is the view that nature can be fundamentally bent and manipulated to
accommodate humanity. Wresting with nature is, in a very real way, the
story of human development, and taming the wild world has brought some
(but by no means all) wealth, relative comfort and ease, and freedom
from basic wants. At the same time, that insistence on control now
poses risks to the planet as the most fundamental stage on which that
existence plays out.
“There is something increasingly desperate about placing more faith in
technological cleverness when it is the unrelenting desire to command
the natural world that has brought us to their point,” Hamilton writes
in the last chapter of his book. “Unless we understand why a certain
kind of rationality seems to have failed, appeals to more reason are
quixotic. After all, the separation of natural and human history and
the dominance of a certain form of calculative rationality were each
products of the same Enlightenment process.”
AUTHOR
David Appell is a science writer living in Salem, Oregon.
