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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4305-2 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4306-9 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wagner, Gernot, author.
Title: Geoengineering : the gamble / Gernot Wagner.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A bestselling climate economist asks ‘is geoengineering worth the gamble to tackle climate change?’”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021011283 (print) | LCCN 2021011284 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509543052 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509543069 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509543076 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Environmental geotechnology. | Climate change mitigation. | Carbon dioxide mitigation. | Pollution--Economic aspects. | Environmental policy.
Classification: LCC TD171.9 .W34 2021 (print) | LCC TD171.9 (ebook) | DDC 628--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011283
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011284
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For more on the author, visit: gwagner.com
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About the author
Gernot Wagner teaches climate economics at NYU, co-authored Climate Shock, and writes Bloomberg’s Risky Climate column. He was the founding executive director of Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program and served as lead senior economist at Environmental Defense Fund. His writings appear frequently in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, TIME, among many others. Follow his work at gwagner.com
Introduction Start here – But don’t start with geoengineering
The first time I heard about solar geoengineering, I considered the idea nuts. It is. Two decades later – after having worked on the topic at Environmental Defense Fund, helping launch Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program, and doing quite a bit of research and writing on the topic myself – I still think it is a rather healthy attitude to have toward the topic. The entire enterprise seems like a gamble, and a planetary one at that.
Of course, anyone who’s been paying attention to what’s happening with the rapidly changing climate will recognize that the world is currently playing a different kind of gamble with the planet, and arguably an even larger one.
Geoengineering – in particular, solar geoengineering, attempting to cool the planet by sending a small fraction of sunlight back into space, or by increasing the amount of solar radiation that escapes back into space – is no solution to climate change. That much is clear. It does not address the root cause of too much carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, nor the continuing inflow of CO2 emissions. Geoengineering is a technofix, and a highly imperfect one at that.
Of course, sanitation, too, is a technofix. Without it, cities would not be possible. Modern life is replete with such technofixes. It’s often a fine balance between decrying something as a technofix that simply serves to cement the status quo and celebrating an invention as a clear step forward. It is this constant back-and-forth, this constant internal debate, which characterizes many a geoengineering conversation. There is simply no easy answer, no clear line. Even the very idea of working on the topic comes with a number of judgment calls.
A long history of healthy skepticism
All of us having worked on solar geoengineering have stories on how we got to work on the topic. Most came to it hesitantly – some after a lifetime of work on cutting CO2 emissions.
Geochemist Wally Broecker left an indelible imprint on the climate science community. In 1975, he introduced the term “global warming” into the literature, after the phenomenon had previously been known by the slightly cumbersome moniker “inadvertent climate modification.”1 In a video message, recorded from his hospital bed, for a 2018 “Planetary Management Symposium” at Arizona State University, Broecker said: “If we are going to prevent the planet from warming up another couple of degrees, we’re going to have to go to geoengineering.” Broecker did not arrive at this conclusion lightly, in what would turn out to be his final address to his scientific colleagues before his passing.
Broecker was, in fact, highly skeptical of solar geoengineering as a possible climate intervention. I remember him having a number of probing questions, when, in 2013, David Keith came to give a talk on the importance of solar geoengineering research at a climate policy seminar at Columbia University’s Faculty House. Broecker’s main worry, like that of most others, was that mere talk of geoengineering – especially, once again, the “solar” variety – might detract from the need to cut CO2 in the first place, a concept often called “moral hazard.”
It was precisely this worry that had led to a long-standing, self-imposed, unspoken near-moratorium on solar geoengineering research within the scientific community. Broecker had been a key member of the high-powered group that authored a section on CO2 as part of a 1965 report by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee on “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment.”2 The report did not mention cutting CO2 emissions as a possible option for addressing climate change. Doing so apparently seemed inconceivable at the time. Instead, it mentioned one possible method of addressing the problem: brightening ocean surfaces in an attempt to reflect more sunlight back into space and cool the planet.
In hindsight, this singular focus on solar geoengineering in the 1965 report was a clear mistake, and one the scientific community has overcorrected for over the course of the coming decades. In 1974, Russian scientist
