Maybe It's Time to Talk About Geoengineering, and Maybe We'll Do Something About CO2

I’ve only blogged about geoengineering once or twice. My feeling has been that it is an inevitability. Most folks know of and are concerned about global warming, yet we still keep electing politicians who make no promise of reducing our carbon output. We even elect politicians who are hostile to the idea that climate change is even real.

Senator James Inhofe calling Climate Change a hoax on the Senate Floor

We elect individuals like this to Congress. Who is to blame? 

So nothing gets done. In the meantime the world warms. I see things going from bad to worse until desperation sinks in somewhere, possibly India or another powerful country with a lot of land giving way to a rising sea, and that government will start shooting sulfate aerosols into the air to cool things down. We will then have crossed the threshold from inadvertently rearranging the dynamics of the atmosphere to intentionally manipulating the atmosphere.

Most folks, me included, have a very natural reaction to these ideas, that they remind us of the workings of some mad scientist. We see Vincent Price or Bella Lugosi in a black and white B movie crazily using his evil genius to despoil an innocent world.

Atomic supermen? Or sulphate aerosols. You decide. 

Lex Luthor, Superman won't let him geoengineer the world.

So are you scared now? Are you sufficiently freaked out by the idea of scientists taking a monkey wrench to the atmosphere to cool down the world that we’re warming with our power plants and automobiles? It seems that this is the real irony of geoengineering. Climate change freaks out some folks, but not all that many. And there are folks who aren’t freaked by it at all or deny that it’s happening. But geoengineering freaks the bejesus out of everybody.

At least that seems to be the conclusion of a study by Yale Law School’s Cultural Cognition Project, a group of scholars who looks into how people’s values influence how they process information and assess risk. I won’t go into the details of the study. You can find it here, published by the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and there is a Grist article about the study here. I’ll just sum up that the study found that if you have folks read about global warming and scientists advocating for stricter controls on carbon emissions, it only made folks more entrenched in the beliefs they had before, whether they thought of global warming as a threat or were skeptical or doubtful.

If folks read about global warming and scientists advocating for geoengineering, then skeptics were open to the reality of climate change. Also, those who believed in global warming were left more ambivalent after reading about geoengineering.

 

Pumping sea water into the atmosphere, one proposed geoengineeering idea 

Besides cluing us in, once again, to the reality that people are quirky and don’t behave predictably, what does this study tell us? I think we all feel that if we talk more about geoengineering, then it will normalize the idea, making all that much easier to consider and make us complacent about reducing our CO2 emissions. But maybe if we started to include the topic more in our discussions, it might be a way to loosen the skepticism of a good number of people. And it might get them to sign on to reducing our emissions and adequately dealing with global warming, instead of waiting for somebody to come along and start making atomic supermen to suck up carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

What do you think? Should we talk about geoengineering, even though we don’t want to do it?

Or we could throw these giant parasols into orbit Good idea, or scary?

The World Warms As Australia's New Government Promises to Drop National Carbon Tax

For global warming there are two competing truisms. The first truism is that the most efficient and effective means of reducing carbon emissions is through a carbon tax. The basic economic rule is that people buy less of something when it’s more expensive. And a tax on carbon would make all things reliant on carbon emissions—gasoline, electricity, etc.—more expensive. Folks would buy less of this stuff and there would be less carbon thrown into the air.

            The most common approach around carbon taxes is levying them on industries that are heavy users of fossil fuels, mostly the electric utilities, with the increased costs passed on to consumers. These taxes can be finessed, with rebates going to lower income individuals to mitigate their hardship from these taxes. A good thing about a carbon tax is that the revenue can be used to promote cleaner and greener energy options.

            The other truism is that people hate to pay taxes. It doesn’t matter what sort of tax it might be, an income tax, a carbon tax, a sales, tax, folks hate to pay taxes.

            We just saw the clash of these truisms play themselves out in Australia, where the recent elections delivered a whopping blow to the Labor Party that had been in power for the past six years. The new Prime Minister-elect, Tony Abbott, proclaimed in his acceptance speech that one of his prime objectives once he is in office is an end to Australia’s carbon tax.

            Down under the carbon tax has not been around a long time, only about a year. In its short life it proved to be, as with all taxes, unpopular. It was one of the issues that Abbott used to hammer the Labor Party in his campaigning.

            This was not a single-issue election. The Labor Party might have been voted out anyway. In power, the Labor Party was unstable and prone to internal bickering, although their popularity increased when Kevin Rudd, who had been Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, replaced Prime Minister Julia Gillard in something of an internal party coup in the past few months.

            The death of Australia’s carbon tax is nonetheless disconcerting. The planet, and humanity, will be in a lot better shape if human beings reduce their use of fossil fuels, but we’re not going to magically do that sort of thing without being prodded to do so. Despite the good that a carbon tax might be able to do for us, we just don’t like being prodded.