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*By Pete Irvine * *17 January 2023* In a recent article <https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/30/4/article-p3_1.xml> (*The Future Is the Termination Shock - On the Antinomies and Psychopathologies of Geoengineering. Part One."*), Andreas Malm, Author of "How to blow up a pipeline," <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Blow_Up_a_Pipeline#:~:text=How%20to%20Blow%20Up%20a%20Pipeline%3A%20Learning%20to%20Fight%20in,%22climate%20fatalism%22%20outside%20it.> criticises what he dubs the Rationalist-Optimist take on *Stratospheric Climate Intervention (SCI).* He identifies me and several others as Rationalist-Optimists: "David Keith, Gernot Wagner, Wake Smith, Jesse Reynolds, Douglas MacMartin, Ben Kravitz, Peter Irvine, Joshua Horton – all white men, all active in the US, circumstances that cannot be brushed off as trivial 1 . But to portray them as reactionary bigots fronting for fossil capital would ... be unfair 2 . Nor are they maniacs or Pollyannas." After this rather ungenerous introduction, the rest of the article describes the position of Rationalist-Optimists on climate intervention and then works to demonstrate its follies. Below, I've laid out roughly the Rationalist-Optimist position as Malm sees it: *SCI will be developed and deployed in the global public interest to reduce the impacts of climate change. While SCI will only treat the symptoms and not the underlying cause of climate change, it would not subtract (substantially) from efforts to cut emissions. It will be successfully deployed without interruption for decades to centuries until emissions cuts and carbon dioxide removal address the underlying cause and it is no longer needed.* Malm dubs this position, Rationalist-Optimist, in that it assumes that our international order would develop and deploy SCI *rationally* and in the global public interest and that it is unduly *optimistic* in doing so. In opposition to this Rationalist-Optimist position, I think it's fair to label Malm's position, Pessimist-Radical 3 . Below I've attempted to summarise his view as suggested by the article: *Our current (fossil-fueled, capitalist) international order is blindly corrupt and incapable of the radical cuts in emissions needed to address the climate crisis* 4 *. The contradictions within (fossil-fueled) capitalism will be exposed when the climate crisis reaches an unbearable crescendo in the near future* 5 *. SCI would only delay that inevitability and make things worse in the end. As SCI would undermine efforts to overhaul the system and achieve radical emissions cuts, the side-effects of SCI would grow until they became unbearable, resulting in SCI inevitably being abandoned. This will produce a sudden warming (termination shock) resulting in an even more terrible crescendo of climate impacts that without it.*Are you more Rationalist-Optimist or Pessimist-Radical? I'm an optimist by temperament, and I believe the world can and will be improved if we work on it. Describing my views as Rationalist-Optimist is reasonably accurate, but I am not 100% optimistic nor do I believe the world is 100% rational. Crucially though, I don't believe the world needs to be perfect to pull off the integration of SCI into climate policy in a way that substantially reduces the overall impacts of climate change. Malm claims that the need for SCI would not have arisen were the world more rationally organised: "If rationality had been a reasonable assumption about the way the world is run, the rationalist-optimists would have no quest to pursue: geoengineering (SCI) would be nowhere on the agenda. Only the most profoundly irrational forces could have placed the Earth in the trajectory it is currently in." If our world were more rationally organized, I still believe we'd have faced a serious climate problem and that SCI would still offer a way to greatly reduce the risks. Weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels is essential, but the challengof doing so is immense. They remain the foundational input to our energy-hungry civilization and after decades of incredible progress in renewables, fossil fuels still account for more than 80% <https://ourworldindata.org/energy-overview#:~:text=Production%20and%20Consumption.-,More%20than%2080%25%20of%20our%20energy%20still%20comes%20from%20fossil,them%20to%20low%2Dcarbon%20sources.> of our primary energy. Then there's the structural challenge: the costs of addressing the problem are borne locally and the benefits are global and distant in time. This means that it is perfectly rational for every nation to do less than their neighbours and free-ride on their work, though doing so produces a collectively irrational outcome. Given that the article was published in the journal "Historical Materialism" (named after Marx's theory that history is inevitably leading towards a global communist regime), it's not unreasonable to assume that the rational world that Malm imagines is a global communist regime with the power to dictate all aspects of life from the top down. While communism's environmental record <https://www.unhcr.org/uk/publications/refugeemag/3b5584c24/unhcr-publication-cis-conference-displacement-cis-ecological-disasters.html#:~:text=The%20three%20worst%20hit%20areas,concerns%20for%20those%20who%20remain.> is pretty spotty, it's certainly true that such a regime would find it much easier to address climate change. Your views may differ. You may think our world is rotten to the core and the whole edifice needs to be torn down and rebuilt, but I think most of you believe the current world order is not a lost cause. It's true that our world is governed somewhat irrationally, but rationality is clearly not wholly absent from policymaking. Our system is somewhat unjust, but appeals to justice are often effective in resolving disputes and driving change. Our leaders are somewhat corrupt and self-serving, but, at least in democratic countries, they are elected by the people and we turf them out when they perform poorly. Whether you are more of a Rationalist-Optimist or a Pessimist-Radical, let's dive in to Malm's arguments. *Is the future termination shock?* *Malm's article* is titled: "*The Future Is the Termination Shock - On the Antinomies and Psychopathologies of Geoengineering. Part One."* and in it he makes the argument that developing and deploying SCI would lead to the following. First, a (continued) failure to mitigate; Second, ever-rising side-effects from the ever-rising amounts of SCI required to offset our emissions; Third, a disastrous termination shock when the plug is inevitably pulled on SCI 6 . Let's deal with each of these in turn.A continued failure to mitigate? In Malm's view the attempt to cut emissions has failed and will continue to fail as the capitalist order will remain committed to fossil fuels. In his view: "there can be only two reasons for (giving up on fossil fuels): the manifestations of climate breakdown themselves, or the infliction of serious material costs on fossil capital." 7 . He believes that both the Rationalist-Optimists and the mainstream climate community are indulging in magical thinking if they believe our leaders will start taking emissions cuts seriously: "(they hold) that failing humanity can succeed when its failure is at its grossest and criminal dominant classes, their daggers dripping with blood, metamorphosise into paragons of virtue – moderate, modest, managing their newfound mission with the best of manners." It's simply unfair to frame efforts to cut emissions as a complete failure. While it's true that global CO2 emissions <https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/4811/2022/> have not quite stopped rising, many countries have decoupled <https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling> economic growth from CO2 emissions and are seeing both their national and trade-adjusted emissions falling. Furthermore, countries emitting more than 75% <https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/net-zero-coalition>of global CO2 emisison are now committed to net zero targets. Progress is being made and will continue to be made, though according to the UN <https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2022> it is far from sufficient to limit warming to 1.5 °C and even if countries follow through on their ambitious long-term pledges it seems unlikely that they will limit warming to 2.0 °C. The question then is to what extent will the development of SCI affect this progress? The potential for SCI and other developments to slow efforts to cut emissions is known as Mitigation Deterrence or Moral Hazard. As I pointed out in a previous post <https://peteirvine.substack.com/p/the-results-are-in-discussing-solar>, the public perception literature on this suggests that the moral hazard effect at the individual level is weak and may even be negative, i.e., hearing about SCI leads some people to take climate action more seriously and not less. However, it would be naive to presume that these individual-level results will translate to the societal level. While I hope that SCI will be treated as a complement to emissions cuts, I think it's reasonable to expect some delay to efforts to cut emissions. The question is how large would this Mitigation Deterrence effect be? Malm's position here is maximalist. As noted above he believes that without a climate catastrophe or a costly campaign of sabotage no significant progress will be made on emissions cuts, and by masking warming SCI would prevent that from changing. Personally, I believe we may see some delay in achieving net zero compared to a world where the thought of SCI never occurred. In rough terms, my hunch is that developing and deploying SCI might lead to changes in emissions policies that add something like 10 to 20% to the total amount of CO2 we emit. The views of reasonable people will differ on this. You may think it will be used a pure complement and change nothing or that it would add much more than my guess. However, I find the view that SCI would totally undermine emissions cuts hard to credit. I struggle to believe that my country, the UK, and others like it would completely abandon the commitments they've made to cut emissions and reach net-zero emissions if SCI were deployed. Ever-worsening side-effects? Malm has a long and impressively well-researched section on the imperfections and side-effects of SCI deployed to offset global warming. While there are some exaggerations and some rather flamboyant descriptions ("The climate system could come apart at the seams"), he does a reasonable job relating the results of the studies he cites. He is also right to note that the larger the amount of warming offset by SCI, the greater the residual climate impacts and side-effects would be. However, like many critics of SCI he paints a rather one-sided picture, as if he were laying out the ill-effects that come with chemotherapy while downplaying the fact it would help put the cancer into remission. The key question in my mind, however, is would SCI still lead to a reduction in overall environmental impacts, even after accounting for the fact that it may lead to addtional emissions? For the sake of argument, let's assume that SCI could halve the overall impacts of climate change from the date its deployed 8 . As global mean-termperature change is proportional to cumulative emissions of CO2, that would mean that the world would need to more than double cumulative emissions to result in an overall increase in impacts. I suspect that if SCI were deployed and worked this well then we would likely see some increase in emissions relative to what they would have been. However, I find it hard to believe that the world would completely squander this chance to reduce climate impacts.An inevitable termination shock? While Malm has a thoroughly well-researched, if biased, section on the side-effects and risks of SCI, his section on termination shock is pretty thin. While he dismisses several possible drivers of termination shock, he focuses in on one: "all that would be needed in the year 2130 would be for one actor, powerful enough to switch off injection, to perceive some number of side effects as more pressing than the prospect of global heating, the memory of which would by then have been suppressed for a century. Seen from this vantage point, the shock appears logically immanent to the set-up of the technology." As Andy Parker and I noted in our 2018 article <https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017EF000735> on termination shock, most critics of SCI only get this far. They present a "what if?" that seems plausible enough and conclude that termination shock is likely or inevitable, and then move on with their argument. In our article, we tried to go quite a lot deeper, asking "what could be done to prevent this?" and also "if that happened, then what?", questions that the world would have given quite a lot of thought to if SCI had been deployed for decades. We concluded that SCI could readily be made robust and resilient to most threats given the fact that it would be highly distributed, with deployment achieved by hundreds of jets launched from multiple airbases, and could easily be defended and provisioned with back-ups. For the scenario that Malm presents, we note that if the deployer were to forget the reasons they were deploying and stop, the rapid warming would soon remind them and they would likely restart operations. Furthermore, as this SCI deployment infrastructure would be providing a global, public good there would be strong incentives for the world to work together on the project or for other nations to develop their own systems if they don't trust the primary deployer to act in their interests (as China, Russia, and the EU did for GPS <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation#Global_navigation_satellite_systems> ). Towards a critical and thoughtful perspective on Climate Intervention In many ways SCI is a shocking proposal and it understandably elicits a strong, negative reaction in almost everyone who comes across it. But we can't always trust our gut instincts. All too often they point us away from things that are genuinely helpful, like the needle of strange fluid that your doctor insists will help protect your child from diseases you’ve never experienced. Whether you are optimistic or pessimistic by nature, whether you believe our world needs revolutionary change or evolutionary development; if you take the risks of climate change seriously, then you should take SCI seriously. That means, aiming to develop a balanced understanding of the state of the science, and thinking deeply about the ways in which your gut instincts may be shaping your thinking on this issue. I focused here on Malm's article as he picked me out by name, but also because it illustrates some of the black and white thinking that I've seen on this issue. The real world is not wholly black or white, but exhibits all shades of grey. Our world is not wholly rational and it is far from perfect, but it doesn’t need to be perfect for us to come to a reasonable decision on SCI and to make a success of it if we decide to develop it. At this stage it's too early to say with confidence whether the world can navigate this thorny issue wisely enough. However, if more of us take this issue seriously and develop a critical and thoughtful perspective on it, that would certainly improve the chances. *FIN* Share <https://peteirvine.substack.com/p/the-rationalist-optimist-and-pessimist?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMTgwNDMzNTUsInBvc3RfaWQiOjk3MjI5ODcwLCJpYXQiOjE2NzQ1NjQ0NTcsImV4cCI6MTY3NzE1NjQ1NywiaXNzIjoicHViLTM0ODg0OSIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.-hx1c_cSaNV3le5BG8F4DICYB6nlNJxmFhlqKMyfjWw> 1 <https://peteirvine.substack.com/p/the-rationalist-optimist-and-pessimist?utm_source=twitter&sd=pf#footnote-anchor-1-97229870> While he later also names Holly Buck (white, american woman) as part of the rationalist-optimist group, this listing ignores the substantial contribution that non-white, female, and non-american researchers are making to this field (tweet <https://twitter.com/peteirvine/status/1609172286917214208>). 2 <https://peteirvine.substack.com/p/the-rationalist-optimist-and-pessimist?utm_source=twitter&sd=pf#footnote-anchor-2-97229870> It would be more accurate to say untrue, and kinder not to make this non-accusation at all. 3 <https://peteirvine.substack.com/p/the-rationalist-optimist-and-pessimist?utm_source=twitter&sd=pf#footnote-anchor-3-97229870> Or perhaps, Irrationalist-Pessimist, in that it assumes our capitalist world order is highly irrational. 4 <https://peteirvine.substack.com/p/the-rationalist-optimist-and-pessimist?utm_source=twitter&sd=pf#footnote-anchor-4-97229870> For example on page 33 when discussing how both the climate mainstream, who hope for near-term successes in cutting emissions, and the Rationalist-Optimists are indulging in magical thinking when they believe our leaders will suddenly start taking emissions cuts seriously, he says: "(they hold) that failing humanity can succeed when its failure is at its grossest and criminal dominant classes, their daggers dripping with blood, metamorphosise into paragons of virtue – moderate, modest, managing their newfound mission with the best of manners." 5 <https://peteirvine.substack.com/p/the-rationalist-optimist-and-pessimist?utm_source=twitter&sd=pf#footnote-anchor-5-97229870> On page 10, he says: "(this climate crisis will) manifest the contradiction between capital accumulation based on fossil fuels ... and the climate system of the Earth. It would be the moment when the refusal of capitalist society to countenance the boundaries and thresholds of reality no longer works. The danger would have become unignorable." 6 <https://peteirvine.substack.com/p/the-rationalist-optimist-and-pessimist?utm_source=twitter&sd=pf#footnote-anchor-6-97229870> He also makes literary and psycho-analytical allusions but I'll leave those out for the sake of clarity. 7 <https://peteirvine.substack.com/p/the-rationalist-optimist-and-pessimist?utm_source=twitter&sd=pf#footnote-anchor-7-97229870> It is perhaps worth noting that Malm's proposal, a thorough-going campaign of sabotage that renders fossil fuel infrastructure unusable, would count as terrorism according to UK law <https://www.cps.gov.uk/crime-info/terrorism>. I.e., he recommends the use or threat of serious damage to property for the purpose of influencing government policy in service of advancing an ideological cause. 8 <https://peteirvine.substack.com/p/the-rationalist-optimist-and-pessimist?utm_source=twitter&sd=pf#footnote-anchor-8-97229870> Personally, I suspect this might be a serious under-estimate though it would take a lot more posts to explain why. I also suspect the side-effects of SCI, e.g., on stratospheric ozone, will be at least an order of magnitude less important than the total impacts of climate change, but I'm unaware of work that directly compares them on similar metrics, e.g., lives lost. *Source: Substack* -- 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]. 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