Rethinking Our World by Maja Göpel & David Shaw

Author:Maja Göpel & David Shaw [Göpel, Maja & Shaw, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC037000, BUS072000, SCI092000, BUS094000, POL028000, POL017000, SOC026040, POL033000, POL051000, POL003000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2023-04-03T22:00:00+00:00

One of the starkest examples of humanity’s problem with putting a stop to this expansion is so-called geoengineering — the term used to describe attempts to slow down climate change artificially. Large-scale reforestation projects or the rehydration of wetlands to bind carbon dioxide are often quoted as geoengineering measures. However, since the land that such projects would require in order to be of any significance to climate change is in competition with the land requirements of expanding human settlements, infrastructure, and agriculture, technological solutions are often invoked. Such suggestions include, for example, deploying huge folding mirrors in space to shade the Earth from the Sun’s heat, or using planes to dump tonnes of sulphur into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away, in an effect similar to that caused by some volcanic eruptions. Some scientists are also considering using fertiliser to deliberately trigger algal blooms in the oceans, or grinding down mountains and scattering the dust, since carbon dioxide is fixed when mountains are weathered.

You think all this sounds like something from a James Bond film? Then you should know that almost all climate models that show us as still being able to reduce global warming by more than two degrees are based on the assumption that geoengineering measures will be used in the foreseeable future. Without them, the models fail to produce that reduction in warming.

The only problem is, those technologies are not yet available in any workable form. Either they have not yet been adequately tested, or have proven to be dangerous, or they only work on a small scale, without any evidence that they can be scaled up unproblematically. In fact, the effects they are expected to have are already included in the prognoses as ‘negative emissions’.

And since we have such confidence in technology to solve these problems, geopolitical tussling has already begun over the raw materials and oil deposits freed up by the melting ice in the Arctic. However, the question is not how much coal, oil, and gas is still hidden underground, but how we deal with the problem that the Earth’s atmosphere cannot absorb the resultant carbon dioxide without it ruining our currently human-friendly climate.

Also, our appetite for more and more is growing so rapidly that we are unable to develop renewable sources quickly enough to satisfy it. The fact that renewables are now often cheaper (from a market-price perspective) than coal-based energy is great news. It will have a huge impact on long-term investment decisions when it comes to energy production. But this did not stop the oil giant Aramco from becoming the world’s most highly valued company shortly after its stock market floatation in 2019. The world’s hunger for energy is so great that renewables are not seen as a replacement for fossil fuels, but as a supplement to them. Just as oil was a supplement to coal a century ago.

In other words, if we continue to deploy technological advances as we have so far, without clearly affording them a function other than

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