Know the enemy

Some people have said that we can save the world without economic sacrifice. You have to be either naïve or calculating to be able to make that claim with a straight face. Others, like Planktos Inc., go further by saying that we can actually get rich saving the world, and they want to show us how. The Planktos investor schpiel goes: “You should own global-warming stocks... At worst, you'll make a profit. At best, you'll make a profit and help save the world. That sound OK to you?” and “Go Green. Get Rich”, and so on. They are carbon sharks, and their game is indulgences.

Planktos is the company that recently set out on a geoengineering expedition to sprinkle iron hematite dust onto the open ocean not far from the Galapagos, in hopes of causing an algae bloom that will mop up lots of CO2, while also helping to feed the starving plankton which in turn feed the starving fishies. They will spin the escapade like this: We have mopped up lots of CO2, see? We’ll carry on doing it so that you can pay us money and take that flight/buy that SUV with a clear conscience. You emit, we remit.

Schemes like this are what all globally committed commercial greeners are wearing this season. Planktos has a PR blog, where you can read about all sorts of green sexiness, like the wonders of biodiesel and how the Holy See is now carbon neutral thanks to them.

Entities like Planktos have cut straight into a rich seam of pale green mainstream and the public is lapping it up, but it doesn’t help in any real way. It only helps to confuse people and encourage extra consumption. On the oxymoronic subject of ‘eco-consumerism’, from an article by George Monbiot:
“There is an inherent conflict between the aspirational lifestyle journalism which makes readers feel better about themselves and sells country kitchens and the central demand of environmentalism: that we should consume less.”

Other suggestions for geoengineering include artificially dimming the atmosphere by creating particulate (or mechanical) shields, to mimic the effects of things like volcanic eruptions which temporarily prevent some solar energy from reaching earth’s surface and cause cooling. Even if these hypothetical fixes were in fact more than just the scientific equivalent of throwing custard pies at the sky and yelling, “Ha! Take THAT, atmosphere!”, the thing is that unless emissions are drastically cut anyway then the more emissions build up the more “shields” we will have to create…

There can be no business as usual without serious consequences for life as we know it. That’s not the so-called good life as we privileged few know it, that’s the actual livingness of life for thousands of species including us (also including Bigosaurus full-tilt-growth-is-god-almighty Moneyrex, as immune as it thinks it is). Unless we do some joined up thinking immediately and get ready to take the economic sacrifices on the chin, then decades from now hindsight will miserably tell us that the only way we could have mitigated the effects of our greenhouse emissions would have been to have drastically cut the emissions themselves at whatever material costs, while we still had time to do so. Pity we can’t just catch a wake up right now, today, this minute. One very far off future day, of course, when we’re a puzzling layer in some future civilisation’s fossil record, it won’t matter at all.

Gavin Schmidt has a good analogy for all this:

“Think of the climate as a small boat on a rather choppy ocean. Under normal circumstances the boat will rock to and fro, and there is a finite risk that the boat could be overturned by a rogue wave. But now one of the passengers has decided to stand up and is deliberately rocking the boat ever more violently. Someone suggests that this is likely to increase the chances of the boat capsizing. Another passenger then proposes that with his knowledge of chaotic dynamics he can counterbalance the first passenger and indeed, counter the natural rocking caused by the waves. But to do so he needs a huge array of sensors and enormous computational resources to be ready to react efficiently but still wouldn't be able to guarantee absolute stability, and indeed, since the system is untested it might make things worse.

So is the answer to a known and increasing human influence on climate an ever more elaborate system to control the climate? Or should the person rocking the boat just sit down?”


George Monbiot on Eco Junk: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/07/24/eco-junk/

Gavin Schmidt bio http://www.giss.nasa.gov/~gavin/
Planktos Inc http://planktos.com/
Planktos Blog http://www.planktos.blogspot.com/

The original Fe experiment: http://www.rsnz.org/education/alpha/alpha106/alpha-106.htm
(Well, does it work or doesn’t it? Help or harm? No-one seems to have an answer. I have looked and looked, and there are as many fors as there are againsts)