Sisyphus, Science & Carbon Removal
The choice to back CDR is conditioned by a desire in society at large to meet net-zero whilst maintaining an economic paradigm and way of life.
geoengineering
Climate scientists: Ban solar geoengineering
With the normalization of solar geoengineering research moving on with rapid speed, a strong political message to block these technologies is needed. And this message must come soon.
Lessons for the Climate Conflict from the Afghanistan Withdrawal
I’d like to use this withdrawal as a foil to one of the many fronts in the climate war we’re waging (if you’ll forgive the militarized metaphor)—specifically geoengineering.
Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap
Collectively we three authors of this article must have spent more than 80 years thinking about climate change. Why has it taken us so long to speak out about the obvious dangers of the concept of net zero?
Can Big Tech Save the World? A Review of Gates and Kolbert
Today our situation calls to mind the myth of Icarus as much as that of Prometheus. When will the cycle end? Will it be when we finally get the technology right? Or when nature says, ‘Enough’?
Under a White Sky: Review
In Under a White Sky Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction, examines the future world we are engineering.
False Solutions to Climate Change: Geoengineering
Geoengineering refers to proposals for solving the problem of climate change, not by mitigation—that is, reducing emissions and deforestation, the causes of global heating—but instead by the use of new technologies.
Questions as Big as the Atmosphere
What is the best-case scenario for solar geoengineering? For author Holly Jean Buck and the scientists she interviews, the best-case scenario is that we manage to keep global warming below catastrophic levels, and the idea of geoengineering quietly fades away.
Climate Change Mitigation: Is it a Good Idea to Sweep the Carbon Under the Carpet?
But fossil fuels are doomed by depletion in any case, so what sense does it make investing the few resouces we still have in a technology that doesn’t have a future? In the end, CCS is mainly a failure of the imagination: we can and we should do much better than sweeping the carbon underground.
The World Needs Less from Us (and More)
Insisting on more and shaping the world to suit our designs is a Faustian bargain. What we face is not so much a problem to be solved, but a crisis of culture stemming from the hidden conflict between Lotka’s principle and the boundaries of a finite world.
Devil’s Bargain
When most people hear “climate change,” they think of greenhouse gases overheating the planet. But there’s another product of industry changing the climate that has received scant public attention: aerosols.
False Solutions? 3 Ways To Evaluate Grand Climate Proposals
We’re going to be hearing a lot about grand solutions to our climate emergency in the coming years. Here are 3 valuable ways to distinguish real pathways to a better world from false solutions.