We Can’t Just Geoengineer Our Way Out of Climate Change

[unhappycamper]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/19-2



A view of Earth from the International Space Station.

We Can’t Just Geoengineer Our Way Out of Climate Change
by David Suzuki
Published on Wednesday, March 19, 2014 by Rabble.ca

Because nature doesn’t always behave the same in a lab, test tube or computer program as it does in the real world, scientists and engineers have come up with ideas that didn’t turn out as expected.

DDT was considered a panacea for a range of insect pest issues, from controlling disease to helping farmers. But we didn’t understand bioaccumulation back then -- toxins concentrating up the food chain, risking the health and survival of animals from birds to humans. Chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, seemed so terrific we put them in everything from aerosol cans to refrigerators. Then we learned they damage the ozone layer, which protects us from harmful solar radiation.

These unintended consequences come partly from our tendency to view things in isolation, without understanding how all nature is interconnected. We’re now facing the most serious unintended consequence ever: climate change from burning fossil fuels. Some proposed solutions may also result in unforeseen outcomes.

Oil, gas and coal are miraculous substances -- energy absorbed from the sun by plants and animals hundreds of millions of years ago, retained after they died and concentrated as the decaying life became buried deeper into the earth. Burning them to harness and release this energy opened up possibilities unimaginable to our ancestors. We could create machines and technologies to reduce our toil, heat and light our homes, build modern cities for growing populations and provide accessible transport for greater mobility and freedom. And because the stuff seemed so plentiful and easy to obtain, we could build vehicles and roads for everyone -- big cars that used lots of gas -- so that enormous profits would fuel prosperous, consumer-driven societies.

[MisterP]

1. technocratic thinking is, by definiton, unable to get out of the holes it makes

because its only answer is "more digging"
no matter how much you try to give it nuance, localism, or feedback it still remains incomplete: it hasn't changed since it was created by popular fin-de-siecle eccentrics, just erased its history

[cprise]

2. If the digger finally decides to climb out

...he is going to need the shovel (or something like it) to create footholds for his climb.

There is no romantic "drop all your tools and become Amish" solution when there are 7 billion people walking this Earth.

The worst problem with the technocracy is that it ostensibly values science, but peddles pseudo-science because Ecology is usually excluded from all cost/benefit analyses. So we have, for instance, "biotech" firms that cause antibiotics and endocrine disrupters to contaminate our water. Wall St. imperatives will never allow them to start from ecological principles first.

Our capacity for impact has become so large, that any biologist who doesn't weave ecological priorities through their work should be regarded as being, at best, a charlatan. Though I wouldn't limit that value judgement to biologists; they just seem like the most hypocritical ones to me.

[MisterP]

3. they're very good at painting everyone else into a corner, aren't they?

there's a lot of writing on the sheer scientific as well as political bankruptcy of Mexico's PRI (recall that they only "won" the '12 elections by giving voters gift cards--which turned out to be invalid ones)

(the Archdruid Report says that it's unfair to compare economists to astrolgoers, since no astrologer in history has ever said the sun'll rise in the west)

[Nihil]

4. And in digging into the sides to create footholds ...

... inadvertently causes a cave-in that buries him.

That wasn't seen as cause for concern as he had been paid in advance.

Still, everyone else lived happily ever after.

The End

[cprise]

5. The pessimists are out early today

And who would "everyone else" be? The cockroaches or the space aliens?

[Nihil]

6. It was such a jolly start to the day yesterday ...

... with all the evidence in E/E supporting an immediate rename of the species
to Homo anything-but-sapiens ...

"Everyone else" was whatever native - non-space-alien - species managed to
survive our suicidal/genocidal behaviour ... no, I was not in a particularly positive
mood by the time that I got to that post!