future clean tech

Stephen Dubner just won’t give up. He and his co-author, Steven Levitt, advocate geoengineering – shooting “huge quantities of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere” in their new, trendily counter-intuitive book, Superfreakonomics. Today in Greeninc he’s published yet another column railing against the ubiquitous critics of geoengineering.

Most of which I want to say about this has been adequately covered in the latest New Yorker article that demolishes Dubner and Levitt and their “fix” for our environmental woes. The Guardian’s piece is also great, and David Roberts at Grist writes that “the problems humanity faces are systemic and interrelated. The idea that sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere will save us is akin to the hope that a math equation can be solved by erasing one of the numbers.” I couldn’t put it better.

Levitt and Dubner (and Richard Branson) disingenuously, I think, argue for a technocratic “fix” for a huge systemic problem. It is exceptionally arrogant; it presumes that we can continue with business as usual if humans just do what they usually do and concrete over the problem. This arrogance is typified by Branson’s breathtaking comment last month, as reported by Dot Earth:

“If we could come up with a geoengineering answer to this problem, then Copenhagen wouldn’t be necessary,” he said. “We could carry on flying our planes and driving our cars.”

It won’t work, and it presents tremendous risks: it multiplies the risks of our already precarious experiment with our planet’s climate by the risks of a massive new one, the results of which we can’t begin to predict. As Al Gore has written in Our Choice, ““We are already involved in a massive, unplanned planetary experiment. We should not begin yet another planetary experiment in the hope that it will somehow magically cancel out the effects of the one we already have.”