Garry Glass explores the Realpolitik of geoengineering.
Recently (since the neolithic) there has been a period of relative stability in the earth’s climate system. Agricultural civilisation would not have been possible otherwise. This order has given rise to the eventual development of science and technology and also to the narrative that ‘nature’ is stable and even benevolent. This is something of an anthropic principle. If the climate was less benign we probably wouldn’t be here considering the matter, we might have even become extinct before now. Civilisation is a relatively recent phenomena in the human experience. For the better part of our evolutionary psychological development we clung to survival in a precarious negotiation with the wild. The cornucopia apparently offered by the union of human toil and nature’s life giving stability is a construct built upon a fluke. The taming of the harsh wilderness via control and the worship of the harmony it offers are two contradictory interpretations of the human encounter with their ecology. The tension between these is the cultural landscape variously interpreted throughout time as we struggle to understand our place in the universe. Indeed it is a question of the viability of certain philosophies and indeed material possibilities over others in geological time.
Whilst fossil fuels have liberated a great part of humanity from back breaking farm labour and arguably done more for the abolition of slavery than the principle of humanism, the consequences are a major part of the catastrophic perturbation of the Earth’s climate. The land base has been denuded and population has overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity. A convergence of crises in energy, water and food security underscore a civilisation living on borrowed time. The sustainable development debate has tragically failed to go deep enough to address these contradictions. Thresholds are being breached with each day that the fossil fuel madness of industrialism is perpetuated.
As we grapple with understanding the legacy of our evolutionary psychology and how this determines the trajectory of our socio-technical arrangements, we maintain or reject social Darwinism depending on our privilege and the proclivities it nurtures. We have empowered our most base instincts with the techniques of that can transform our environment from natural to synthetic design. Our journey is inscribed into the landscape and into the very geology of the planet. It dawns on us that our ideas have become a geological force. Our concepts have met with physics in a contest to write the earth. Industrial civilisation inscribes itself into the Earth’s geology.
Yet the anthropocene can be read as the collision of earth’s geological time with the historical time of civilisation. In our hubris we feel as though we write the Earth, neglecting the fact that the Earth is writing us as it may soon come to pass that we are written out of this planet. That human consciousness itself meets its demise by virtue not of an inherent depravity common to all our kin but to the dominance of the principle of domination itself over the entire social field. There will be no-one to look back to lament this cosmic tragedy that is unfolding, it can only be known from within, precisely as we can never know what death feels like.
One day an alien vessel of cosmic-archeologists may land here to pick through the fragments of glass and ceramic that remain. Looking for exotic compositions that suggest contrivance much as we today look at rocks on mars for the remnants of organic structures. A thin black line of unnatural isotopes or bubbles with anomalous chemical compositions may be all that speaks of the vastness of our experience in a briefest moment of self-realisation that faded eons ago.
Up until now we have largely been in denial about the far reaching consequences of our technological civilisation. In terms of theory, the acceptance of the Anthropocene thesis is likely in time to make the intellectual earthquake of postmodernism and poststructuralism seem trivial. The reason being that its articulation will signal the transition from inadvertent intervention in the Earth to an intervention that is managed. The pace at which we develop this reflexivity is now nothing less than imperative to the survival of intelligence in the universe as far as we know.
It can be asked however if the existence of other planets like Earth in the universe has any bearing on the ethical problem of our own extinction. Again this comes back to the concept of human exceptionalism which is deeply rooted in anthropocentric religion. This critique is the continuation of Copernican decentering. And yet perhaps we need to feel special in order to save ourselves.
Successive waves of decentering since Copernicus have sought to confront anthropocentrism. The anthropocene discourse promotes a radical recentering of the role of humans as principal determinants of our own survival. Meaning is constructed from a totalising vantage point where environmental security is a principle concern of state, corporate and military power.
The reliance of technocrats for ecological survival ushers in the epoch of eco-fascism.
Environmentalists can become unwitting advocates for fascist policy. Just as “development” has been seen as a trojan horse for neocolonialism the sustainable variant is business as usual with a green fig leaf. Engineers and technicians become increasingly central to the maintenance of life (human life in industrial capitalism). Earth’s systems are managed as green infrastructure.
In lieu of the timely abolition of fossil fuel combustion, geoengineers seek to spray the skies with aerosols to block out sunlight and offset the worst of global warming.
Fundamentally geoengineering is premised on the idea that we are not going to achieve a zero carbon world quickly enough, that we will fail and need a plan B. This premise does need to be challenged yet anyone who has ever considered climate justice must have sensed a certain fatalism. Climate justice was always about defiance of this fatalism, geoengineering takes fatalism as its point of departure. For its consequences like drought, flooding and crop yields water pollution, as well as its challenge to the mitigation agenda SRM is anathema yet also alluring in that it holds out a final hope if the worst fears of political inaction become as they are likely to be, a tragic reality. It is more a poisoned chalice than a holy grail. Less like a silver bullet and more like some gaffa tape. It could work, indeed people wouldn’t be talking about it seriously if not. The side effects and the power arrangements it establishes are less desirable. Ultimately the idea of technology rather than the Earth supporting us makes for a strange anthropology in future. Nature as mother will retreat from that world. The technicians become central to the survival of life in the cosmos.
They may claim that they answer only to mathematics and the laws of physics. This is eco-fascism appealing to a mathematical script for direction. It’s possible to make an analogy with the derivatives investors pre 2008. They had so much confidence in their models that they created an unfathomable debt. The lesson is the same, don’t risk everything you have thinking that the model perfectly describes reality. Behind these performances there is the maintenance of the facade of political neutrality. Power operates through these discursive practices acted out by networks of interests.
Each advance in our description of the Earth digitally comes a hubris in our capability to make interventions in physical reality. Ecosystems themselves are being co-constructed within the internet of things. Simplified linear systems are more amenable to the mechanistic models used in governance. Environmental decision support systems use data visualisation for interested parties to simulate a range of scenarios with these simplified models. The models cannot be said to be real, only a way of interpreting data which is itself a model. Geography is haunted by the inadequacy of its own positivist tradition. It is simply not possible even after chaos theory and cybernetics revolution in systems thinking to adequately understand the physics of complex systems. Unpredictability is difficult to manage so there is a tendency towards simplification of the landscape and river systems near urban populations for example.
The atmosphere is open and ubiquitous providing a medium which readily absorbs pollutants letting them be defused and carried away. It is invisible and provides this service despite our disregard. For a long time the atmosphere was polluted without considering its capacity to absorb these gases without consequence. The sky and oceans are synonymous with expansive almost never ending medium yet this sense of limitlessness has met its end by the expansionist operations of capital. The atmosphere is readily available to continue to dump pollutants into but also subject to intervention by any capable party.
The atmosphere is open to inadvertent and deliberate climate perturbation.
As a proposition on paper it merits further exploration. The problem is the experiment is live directly challenging the precautionary principle. This principle may be obsolete in a world where some decided something must be done.
The geoengineers take their appointment from a dubious mandate. They seek to mobilise our self realisation as a geological force into a large scale material practice via new institution premised on a retrospective will to managed intervention. This marks a difference from mitigation in that it goes beyond the CO2 metric to perturbing the system via different means than the primary cause. Radiative forcing will be effected through solar radiation management as well as concentrations of greenhouse gases.
The question is how legitimate is it to search for other levers when the main one seems to be jammed? It is not necessarily that a discussion on geoengineering be exclusive from CO2 mitigation but many people assume it precludes it. It perhaps doesn’t have to but this must be viewed at in the context of the decades of failure of the UNFCCC. Geoengineering could go ahead with the popular will or otherwise. The infallibility of these unaccountable, self appointed Earth protectorate is what the destiny of all life on Earth depends. Experts are already the ‘they’ that is credited with all that is good and bad about technology. It is an extension of the process of accommodating risks in the original tradition of expert led decision making. Can the public even be trusted with their own survival? It is one thing to limit the mess you’re making, it is quite another to accept its worst excesses and cover it up. Success will be thinly veiled as ocean acidification and perturbations in the hydrological cycle begin to occur.
Democracy is to be bypassed in the interests of Earth system management. Discourses around climate justice seek to contest the capture of the climate problematic by capitals crisis managers.
Political awareness of environmental concerns seeks to alter the trajectory of modernity by mitigating the emissions scenarios. Political elites have determined that geoengineering will likely be necessary under the projected emissions scenarios, so much so that trials are underway.
Mortality is the greatest human emotional concern. This age bears witness to evidence of mass extinction. Fear of mortality is projected upon our world in an existential torment that lies beneath our contemporary condition. In light of this our culture meets a settlement where we are resigned to have fun whilst it lasts. You only live once is a hashtag for a planet in terminal despair. Capitalism offers up a playground of sensual distractions to ease this burden only for the completion of this tragedy to result directly therein. Green Capitalism will never change anything and only conceals a cynicism at the heart of capitals’ engagement with the extinction of complex life on Earth.
It is the sheer enormity of scale, direct, unpredictable, a last resort that encourages resignation. Who is authorised to accept responsibility? Global agreement shall remain elusive. Better to unveil after the fact, as an ongoing experiment..
How we relate carbon to the struggles in our daily lives is crucial, we cannot be forgiven for finding this problem too abstract.
Every other week there is some news about how the estimated global warming is accelerating much faster than previously thought.
Nonlinear systems are only occasionally predictable. Uncertainty is the only certainty. Abnormal is the new normal. Our civilisation clings to a very shallow well of stability in an undulating terrain of less hospitable conditions. We value our own evolutionary heritage but not that of every other species. Our anthropocentrism is almost a terminal condition.
Who is this rogue geoengineer? Rich, well connected, probably a white male with an inferiority complex, saviour mentality and megalomanic propensities. Perhaps to some the technology offers a redemption from the horror of the industrialism they themselves benefited from. There must be enough fossil fuels culprits who are concerned. An appetite for techno fixes to politically intractable problems. As always costs and benefits are always unequally distributed. This is BAU+. The scale of the ethical challenge is profound.
The environment is that which is outside. The open sky is that great beyond that extends from our lungs capillary wall to the horizon in all directions and to outer space. We are at once unified in a global ecology the globes sphere its totalising totum. Yet down on Earth our ecological burden is carried away by the winds. Our predicament is unified by Earth or humanity and yet it functions because of climate injustice, which isn’t the side effect but the material and energetic outcome of capitalism’s modus operandi. Imperialism has finally reached all shores as its impacts reverberate around the planet. Rising tides to flood the metropoles. Canned air is being sold in Beijing. Part of the atmosphere’s circulation has become mechanised to facilitate the polluting industries that should be abolished.
The carbon market is an absurd theatre. It is crucially undermined by its own existence. The carbon commodity precludes more direct regulation and yet the price of carbon is unstable because it is not something whose scarcity is guaranteed.
Those in power understand the futility of these side shows, they might be trying to fool the public with greenwashing but they have very real interests in the securitisation of environmental concern, namely control of land and resources.
