Hi List, I published a comparative book revue of Hulme’s book and Keith’s book in Carbon & Climate Law Review (CCLR) vol 9/1 (2015) which hasn’t been circulated yet. Maybe interesting in this context. Cheers, Ina.
2015 Carbon and Climate Law Review, Vol. 9 (1) Book Review Essay: Making the Case for and against Climate Engineering Ina Möller, Lund University A Case for Climate Engineering, by David Keith, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. 194 pp., $16.95, hardback. Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case Against Climate Engineering, by Mike Hulme Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. 158 pp., £9.99, paperback. In the face of increasing urgency and exasperation with the politics of climate change, an unsettling idea has started to make the rounds. In his recent book, the Harvard physicist and environmental scientist David Keith attempts to make a case for engineering the Earth’s climate as a way to decelerate the rise in global average temperature. More precisely, he advocates for more research on solar geoengineering – the injection of tiny particles into the Earth’s stratosphere to scatter some of the incoming sunlight back into Space and thereby cool the planet. Opposing him in the ring of advocacy is Mike Hulme of King’s College in London. Hulme counters Keith in his efforts to justify a technological fix by putting climate change into a cultural context and questioning the emergency narrative commonly used by climate engineering advocates. David Keith presents himself as an environmentalist. Based on deep concerns about the impacts that rising global temperatures will have on the climate, and disillusioned with society’s progress towards a low-carbon economy, he explains why solar geoengineering is the only way to save us from the worst effects of climate change. His main arguments circle around the facts that (i) reducing emissions will do nothing to reduce the impacts of climate change for our generation, (ii) the poor will suffer the most from this development, and (iii) solar geoengineering is cheap and easy to do, and could be deployed within a few decades. If responsibly used, he argues, geoengineering could reduce the rate at which the planet is warming and buy time to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. It would act as a band-aid solution to mitigate the worst impacts of global warming – a kind of headache pill for the planet and its poorest inhabitants. Keith fully recognizes the side effects that are commonly pointed out: the risk of altering local weather patterns, similarities to nuclear proliferation, and reduced incentives for cutting down carbon emissions. Nevertheless, he maintains that a gradual implementation could give us enough warning to abort the experiment in time. Further, he argues that a lack of serious research provides fertile ground for controversy, extremism and uninformed debate. Picking up on the ‘need for more research’ argument, Mike Hulme criticizes that any decision to invest in solar geoengineering research also necessitates a decision on how to deal with potential implementation and all the complications of multilateral governance. These are, in his opinion, impossible to solve. Therefore any investment in research is misplaced. He structures his arguments around the judgements that solar geoengineering is (i) undesirable because regulating the global temperature will not help us regulate local weather conditions, (ii) that it is democratically ungovernable as the only feasible scenarios of implementation would be through an unstable consortium of willing states or unilateral action by a single rogue state, and (iii) that it is unreliable because the unintended consequences would multiply rather than reduce humanitarian, political, legal and security troubles. Hulme challenges the commonly used frame of ‘global warming’ constructed around climate change, arguing that this kind of narrative leads to misguided efforts to regulate a non-existent figure: the mathematically constructed average of global temperature. He argues for a re-thinking of the climate problem in the form of “climate pragmatism”. According to this perspective, there are too many issues linked together in the concept of climate change, making it impossible to find and apply viable solutions. Climate pragmatists argue that the issues commonly linked to climate change such as energy, food security and agriculture need to be untangled from each other and treated as separate problems, independent of the motivation to save the climate. Both authors are obviously representing a strong view on a controversial topic. Keith openly states this in his preface, while Hulme employs a more academic style and occasionally weaves in his personal view. Although Keith aims to make a case for climate engineering, his acknowledgement of the very serious risks in combination with a maintained advocacy on the basis of ‘responsible use’ acts more deterring than encouraging. For a reader with any understanding of politics and human history, the precondition of responsible use when it comes to powerful technologies is a major risk factor in itself that Keith does not openly address. His belief in the technological capacity of humankind is quite unfazed, and the unquestioning reliance on the use of climate models to accurately predict what would happen if solar geoengineering were deployed is worrying. He laments the loss of humanity’s connection to nature while offering geoengineering as a way of rediscovering that connection. In many similar points, the arguments he makes do not intuitively match the implications he derives from them. Hulme on the other hand points to the problems of governance and the consequences of focusing too much on the global dimension of climate change without differentiating between sources, drivers and solutions. However, he himself does not refrain from taking the common approach of lumping together very different climate engineering technologies and placing biochar (charcoal), urban whitewashing and carbon capture and storage into the same box as solar geoengineering. While first defining them all as climate engineering technologies and raising a general scepticism towards these in the inexperienced reader, he later advocates for research on “negative emissions” technologies (p. 129) without mentioning that these are precisely some of the technologies that he defined as climate engineering earlier on. In his call for climate pragmatism, he argues that global energy use is expected to increase by nearly fifty per cent in the next two decades, and that this requires a transition to cheap, reliable and clean energy – therefore reigning in carbon emissions from the energy sector. How he draws this conclusion on the precondition that the energy question needs to be decoupled from the climate question remains a mystery. Personally, I would have liked to see more respect from both authors for the reader’s capacity to recognize errors in logic and spelling. Nevertheless, both books in conjunction offer a compelling read for an educated, but not necessarily scientific audience interested in the double-edged nature of tinkering with the Earth’s atmosphere. Their dichotomy accurately reflects the general polarisation of scientists when it comes to the topic of solar geoengineering and the battle for the title of who is the better environmentalist. They also give an insight to the interesting phenomenon of personalization and people-politics in the discussion of climate engineering. There seems to be no consensus of who is actually supporting climate engineering, and the traditional differentiation between left-wing and right-wing world views does not hold. Rather, analysts may be better advised to look for alternative ways of categorizing supporters and opponents. ________________________________ Ina Möller | PhD candidate Department of Political Science | Lund University Paradisgatan 5H, Box 52 SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden Office: +46 46 222 89 73 | Mobile: +46 73 904 09 54 [email protected] Från: <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> on behalf of "Hulme, Mike" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Svara till: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Datum: Wednesday 27 January 2016 21:44 Till: Greg Rau <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>, geoengineering <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Ämne: RE: [geo] Book Review: General Politics: Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case against Climate Engineering Answer = ‘no’ Mike From: Greg Rau [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 27 January 2016 20:18 To: geoengineering Cc: Hulme, Mike Subject: Re: [geo] Book Review: General Politics: Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case against Climate Engineering I'd say that a more salient question is: Can Humans Fix Climate Change? Without Science and Engineering? Greg ________________________________ From: Andrew Lockley <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> To: geoengineering <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2016 12:56 AM Subject: [geo] Book Review: General Politics: Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case against Climate Engineering http://psw.sagepub.com/content/13/4/600.full Doi: 10.1111/1478-9302.12101_62 Political Studies Review November 2015 vol. 13 no. 4 600 Book Review: General Politics: Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case against Climate Engineering Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case against Climate Engineering by Hulme Mike. Cambridge: Polity Press,2014. 158pp., £9.99, ISBN 978 0 7456 8206 8 Ross GillardUniversity of Leeds Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is the flagship geoengineering technology, often touted as a direct solution to climate change, whereby solar radiation is reflected back into space to prevent further warming of the planet. In this short and punchy book, Mike Hulme presents three clear lines of argument to suggest that such a global-scale techno-fix is precisely not what is needed. After describing SAI as undesirable, ungovernable and unreliable, Hulme concludes with a call for more pragmatic approaches to dealing with the hazards of a changing climate and a degree of pluralism and reflexivity in the way we frame the problem(s)/solution(s). This sensitivity to the power of problem framings and the fuzziness between research and practice will be familiar to anyone who has read Hulme's other publications or who comes from a critical social sciences background. However, even those new to the geoengineering debate, or to climate change more generally, will have no problem with the content or prose. Key details are helpfully boxed into case study vignettes so the overall narrative flows from beginning to end. The approach of (re)framing a complex issue to make somebody else's framing and arguments seem ridiculous is nothing new in the world of social science. However, that is not to say it is not a valuable exercise. Hulme does not change the terms of reference (that climate change is caused by, and threatens, current human way(s) of life), but he does interpret them differently to proponents of geoengineering and SAI in particular. Viewing climate change as a ‘super-wicked problem’ (undefinable and unsolvable) (p. 138) makes the notion of a single, silver-bullet solution such as a controlling the Earth's temperature seem laughable. Put simply, SAI cannot control regional climates, it doesn't solve the ongoing international deadlock in the climate governance regime and its unforeseeable side-effects are irreversible. If you accept Hulme's (and many others’) insistence that climate change is about more than just Earth's temperature, then his arguments for abandoning SAI and hubristic geoengineering in favour of ‘climate pragmatism’ (pp. 122–30) will certainly appeal. According to this broad characterisation, a social and political response to climate change would focus on fostering social resilience, reducing all harmful emissions and pursuing sustainable energy production and provision, while a scientific response would be merely to control the climate. Deciding which is most appropriate, or ‘rational’, depends on your rationale, but this book makes a convincing argument for the former. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
