By Chelsea Harvey
Manipulating the Earth’s natural systems to counter global warming has long been viewed as a last-ditch option by many in the climate fight.
But advocates for geoengineering have grown more outspoken in recent years about the need to at least research the controversial climate fix, which includes methods such as spraying aerosols directly into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.
Supporters say rapidly warming temperatures — and insufficient progress in reducing planet-warming emissions — has created new space to talk about geoengineering. And while many readily acknowledge the risks, they say there’s peril too in allowing climate change to continue at its current pace.
“There is a serious risk that we will not get it together to mitigate and adapt [to climate change] sufficiently,” said Jessica Seddon, director of Yale University’s Deitz Family Initiative on Environment and Global Affairs.
Seddon said critics’ fears about the misuse of geoengineering have historical precedent. But she added they also constitute “a failure of imagination” and “very lopsided pessimism about humans.”
Pushback from local communities
The growing attention to geoengineering has led to public outcry in some cases.
Harvard University officially ended a high-profile solar geoengineering experiment in March after suffering years of setbacks.
Known as the stratospheric-controlled perturbation experiment, or SCoPEx, the project focused on a geoengineering strategy that would spray reflective aerosols directly into the atmosphere.
Organizers planned to carry out one of its first field tests in the Arctic city of Kiruna, Sweden, in 2021, a small-scale experiment they said would carry no safety concerns for local communities. But opposition from environmental groups and Indigenous communities in the region eventually led to the project’s suspension.
David Keith, founding director of the Climate Systems Engineering Initiative at the University of Chicago and former co-lead of the shuttered Harvard experiment, added that recent studies suggest the benefits of geoengineering are likely to outweigh any potential negative side effects — he recently co-authored a paper concluding as much.
“The issue is: What are the benefits of [solar radiation management]? And how are they distributed? And what are the costs or harms?” he said in an interview with E&E News. “Comparison suggests that the benefits are much larger than the risks, and the benefits go much more to poorer people in the world. That is just as true at 1.4 [degrees] as it is at 1.7 as it is at 2.3.”