Geoengineering? Nie Danke!

The Guardian has a terrifying update on the notion that technological means can be used to take control of our planet's climate -- to avoid some kind of catastrophe, or just to get the "designer" climate we might like for certain regions.

Apparently, Newt Gingrich and the American Heritage Foundation both are on record in favor.

Lovely.

What do I think about this?

Well, we're already in charge of the planet's climate, whether we like it or not. We're just not very good at running it yet.

But I think it frightens me that we're willing to seriously consider this instead of making what I tend to think of as easy choices that would make us capable of running the climate a little better: like the choice to stop burning coal for electricity and instead use natural gas, wind, and solar power, and possibly low-risk modern nuclear power systems such as thorium reactors; the choice to properly weatherize and super-insulate our homes and buildings, and when we need to build new, build passive solar; the choice to more forcefully begin the transition to better more coordinated mass transit and electric vehicles; and the choice to switch to a more local agriculture and forestry that can begin to manage the major nutrient cycles without large amounts of energy input.

The problem is that making such to-me obvious choices leaves whole political constituencies, primarily coal and oil, hung out to dry, and so politicians in hock to those constituencies must have an "out" that holds their clients harmless.

For fifteen years the big money has been on climate denialism. A whole industry of insufferable and moronic web monkeys has sprung up, bought and paid for, and somehow managed to go on to convince a large section of the public, mostly the angry white male demographic, that two hundred thousand climate scientists in fifty major countries all around the world have a secret conspiracy tighter than a pygmy shrew's wotsit to spin the data.

Well, that was always a non-starter. The legend of King Canute is instructive here.

This year is a La Nina aftermath year, and the summer is shaping up to be super-hot in the US, tornado ridden in the south central states, and almost catastrophic in the southwest, and never mind the fact that the next summer might be an El Nino and even worse!

Now that climate impacts are becoming undeniable, the Neocons are hoping for a technology to emerge that puts them in charge of the weather, not only in the 50 states of the United States, but in Canada, South and Central America too, and from Capetown to Cairo and from Marrakesh to Vladivostok.

Well, that's a non-starter too, isn't it? From geo-engineering to geopolitics in one swell foop.

Can anyone spell hubristic?

A great way to have even more billions of people all around the world mad at the United States. I can see that we might need an engineering solution to climate change, in the event that something like the clathrate gun hypothesis holds true.

But if we had one, will we then put Newt Gingrich, or Exxon, or Massey Energy, or indeed any American member of the industrial-military complex that can win a plurality of the electoral college in charge of it? I don't think so.

What would be the Chinese reaction? The European? The Islamic world's reaction? Currently climate change doesn't have a home address. There isn't one single culprit. We're all in it together, even if we haven't been able to convince ourselves to take a few simple steps to stop it.

And now we want to end that collective regime and instead put ourselves in charge?

To my mind, that sounds like the slippery slope to World War III.

Isn't it time we collectively called that contractor and insulated our own house instead? Literally and figuratively?

Wouldn't that be the more honorable, sensible, and reasonable move?

And better for the economy and American small business to boot.