Diplomacy aside, it's time to do more than agree to cut emissions. Some scientists say an engineered climate recovery must be taken seriously, with aggressive and deliberate management strategies put in place. We need to cultivate citizen interest and government support for research into the development of large-scale geoengineering projects.
As a media and communications scholar, I cannot argue that one science is superior to another. My research examines how Marshall McLuhan's thinking about technology relates to the current climate crisis. Drawing on the work of McLuhan and others, I believe there are emerging technological options of urgent interest to citizens committed to a sustainable future, and we need to pursue these rather than holding onto remnants of a new normal.
To counter criticisms opposing the cultivation of such artifice and programming, he observed that urban dwellers accept without question automatic adjustments to street lighting, and yet the electric light bulb was a landmark device establishing de-naturalized conditions.
While conceding that living in programmed surroundings was not what he wanted, McLuhan claimed that the time for debate had passed and that our task was to understand media and technologies, and to exert deliberate forms of control over nature.
While calling for more of the very thing that provoked disaster may seem counterintuitive, it may provide the best way forward. It's too late to return to more pristine pre-industrial conditions or to wish away the carbon already in our air. In her 2019 book, climate researcher Holly Jean Buck noted that our times urge us to make innovative and even risky repairs to restore the planet by building a tech-dependent future few of us want. It may be the surest way to hold onto "nature."
Designer world
We already depend on daily technologies to solve problems small and large, taking aspirins or vaccines for health or using electric lights and the internet to do work.
Once the stuff of solarpunk speculative fiction, "marine cloud brightening" is now being tested as a way to deflect solar energy and save corals in Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
Another emerging technology directly captures carbon from the air. Orca, the world's largest direct air carbon capture and storage plant, opened in Iceland in September. It removes 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, mixes it with water and injects it deep underground, where it is turned into stone.
Advocates for the exploration of geoengineering often court pushback: this science, still in early stages, is expensive, potentially dangerous and unpredictable, and may distract the world from reducing fossil fuel emissions. Such big science dreams may drive us further down the path of human-devised destruction.
Questions of funding and control are also critical: corporations may use such innovations as sideshows enabling them to maintain fossil fuel empires. Under current development models, the global north stands to continue advantaged.
This leads to the question of whether such technologies demand a new form of planetary politics and policy, a co-operative de-territorialized governance that exceeds the reach of the current United Nations model. Of course, no one can say what this might look like, although a speculative model is currently being explored in Planet City, a collaborative project by film director and architect, Liam Young.
Accepting deliberate management
With a nod to the complex interactivity of ecological systems, critical theorists of the Anthropocene—an era defined by human impact on geology, climate and ecosystems—have dedicated a decade to mapping how humans have damaged climate and ecosystems, sometimes unwittingly, often irretrievably. They argue against the continued elevation of the needs of humans over other species and discourage attempts to regulate intricate systems that instead deserve more reverent attitudes of empathy and understanding.
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Why we must embrace geoengineering and other technologies to stop the climate crisis (2021, October 20)
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