The most important thing for the climate right now that most of us can do anything about is for anyone with Democratic senators to call their senators and express to them how important it is that climate provisions in budget reconciliation aren't watered down.

https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm

Yes, I know the Democratic party is struggling to get its act together. But we have to make sure that come what may, the deal that gets struck is serious about addressing climate change. It may be a long while before the next time the US political system is even slightly in a state to develop meaningful climate policy.

The interesting thing about aerosols is they aren't particularly expensive. Estimates are $2B-$8B a year. Not pocket change, but not a major expense for a wealthy country. Also there's no technical need for global consensus. It seems quite possible to me that a country, say China, will decide to just go do it. That's terrible politically, and could be dangerous. But it may happen.

Here's a good book on the state of geoengineering, at least as of 2015: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26189312-the-planet-rema...

Counter-geoengineering represents the final step towards climate militarization and borrows directly from Cold War deterrence thinking. The authors are unfazed by this explicitly militaristic dimension: “Military action to stop SRM deployment by a powerful state would likely only be launched by another powerful state or states, potentially triggering a systemic war.”14

It is no coincidence that in the United States, geoengineering is supported by individuals and think tanks with ties to the military.15 At the end of 2017, a bill was introduced into Congress, which, if approved, would develop a strategic research agenda for Solar Radiation Management.16

The upshot of the US officially pursuing a geoengineering research agenda while simultaneously withdrawing from the Paris Agreement might be a strategic intensification of existing geoengineering research elsewhere, such as the government-led research programs in China and Russia.17 It is not only the deployment of geoengineering that has high-stakes geopolitical and security implications, but also the current pursuit of strategic technology development."

https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/geoengineering/geoe...

I think right now, any country willing to invest resources to fix our shared mess would at worst be met with some grumbling about unknown risks, but otherwise mostly with a "sure, knock yourself out", and possibly a silently muttered "thanks".

Counter-geoengineering is an interesting concept and long-term problem, but I don't think there are many powerful countries that don't want the planet to cool.

it's not Chinese billionaires who are pushing their scary technofixes on talk shows.

https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-techn...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening

It's a diversion. They're all stopgap measures with no real long term application. You can paint all the road white and add artificial clouds, if you continue to live like resources are unlimited and pollution isn't an issue you'll sooner or later hit another problem.

If we don't take care of the root cause we're bound to fail. Unlimited growth and exponential energy usage isn't possible in a closed system. All these new "green" economy, "green" growth, &c. are perpetuating the idea that we're going down the right path and simply have to tweak a few variables to go from "catastrophic failure" to "idyllic paradise"

I don't think people truly understand how fucked we are and how deep the problem runs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA

That's just not being creative enough. Terraforming other planets to be more Earth-like is the most obvious long-term application, but there are certainly much more near-term applications for advances in energy, heat management, transportation, agriculture, ecology, weather control, etc.

> Unlimited growth and exponential energy usage isn't possible in a closed system.

Absolutely. Thank goodness we're not in a closed system!

If we had access to an unlimited zero-emission power source and as much matter as we wanted, I wager that some people would still say growth is unsustainable. That reveals in their hearts they're about controlling behavior, not fixing a problem.

If you live in a sci-fi book maybe. Colonizing other planets isn't a silver bullet, we can barely maintain a space station for 10 dudes, we're faaaar away from anything remotely close to terraformation. We can't even maintain earth even though it's been terraformed for us during billions of years, what makes you think we'd be able to transform a dead planet into something as good as earth

> Absolutely. Thank goodness we're not in a closed system!

Right, in the meantime 90% of every object you own is made of petrol derivative and we won't find that on Mars. Earth is 100% a closed system and we're not anywhere close to escape from it. After 200 years of industrialization we used most of the easy to get energy sources and fucked up the environment to a point of no return.

> If you live in a sci-fi book maybe… we can barely maintain a space station… We can't even maintain earth

In 100 years, people will be complaining to their representative that the solar shade is causing their petunias to grow sideway, having forgotten that said shade was science fiction back in 2021.

Also it's kind of unfair to say "barely" for the ISS—it's only the 9th space station ever and it's intended to be a giant experiment.

I hope your solar shade will take care of ocean acidification, deforestation, the end of petrol, CO2 levels, decline of soil quality, &c. Once again, you're fixing one of many symptoms and not the root cause. Closing your kitchen door because the stove is on fire will save you a few minutes but if you don't call the firefighters your house will still burn down.

I don't think the "tech will automagically save us in a future I won't live to see" works anymore to be honest, it's just too easy and morally dishonest, especially when the solution is not even remotely close to be technically feasible

Again, we're back to this being less about fixing the problem and more about controlling behavior.

These things only work if we make drastic changes in all aspect of our lives and economy, they're necessary but not sufficient.

https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/geoengineering/geoe...

This is where the problem gets even more complex than a pure energy/resources/pollution equation, now you have a world wide humanitarian issue. Add climate change and environmental refugees to the mix and you're in for a very bad time.

This wouldn't work with a simple mask (blocking sunlight) and Jevon's paradox would be something to watch for.

If the blocker reflects all insolation, how large does it need to be today to get us back to 1990 levels?

I also kind of love the ridiculous idea of this regular artificial eclipse that creeps around the planet’s surface and becomes part of our normal lives.

However this solves only the warming itself, it does nothing about things like ocean acidification.

0: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11993-solar-shield-co...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit

The word 'dystopian' rings a bell quite often when it comes to so-called 'climate change' saving methods...

Industrial energy consumption feedback loops will occur in any system we attempt to build to curb the issue

Any machines, chemicals, processes, vehicles, etc, that need producing to “improve things” will all come along with chewing up resources at scale to provide the industrial pipeline

The only scientifically acceptable path is LESS industrial scale economic activity: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210312-covid-19-paused-...

The entire set of Western values as cemented by the Cold War seems incompatible with "less economic activity". And even if we somehow shake consumerism, modern agriculture is essential to feeding more than 1B humans and requires a significant amount of industrial scale economic activity.

The majority of the time "buy/make this thing to reduce climate change" is a mere distraction. But there are a lot of resources that we can afford to spend, some of which are near-limitless if you consider predictable advances like asteroid mining. If we find ways to spend those resources to get us at least part way out of this mess, or to buy us time for societal change, then those are paths worth pursuing.

Besides, they already tear gas and mass arrest protests if the cops don’t like the protestors, that’s already pretty dystopian.

That is permanently between Earth and the sun, and you'd see it as a black dot at the center of the Sun.

Downside is it needs to be real big. 2000 km, according to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade

I think they were targetting "stop warming" more than "1990 levels", but they estimated 20 million tons/a few million square kilometers.

This issue will NOT be solved without substantial costs.

The efficient (and probably only viable) way to do this is a solar shade at lagrange point 1 (directly between the sun and earth). There's an unstable equillibrium point there were things can sit permanently with some (but minimal) station keeping. But you don't get to pick which part you're shading, you're always directly between the earth and the sun (or really the center of the earth-moon systems gravity, and the sun).

Could something be placed at such a point that then only blocked sun on the far north/south of the planet, near the poles?

> ... Cooling the planet to reduce human suffering in this century will require carbon removal or solar geoengineering or both...

It's good that he discloses this in the article, but I guess I'd prefer if he had no financial interest whatsoever. It complicates his position, which I happen to fully agree with. What he's really saying, the cynical media consumer who has metastasized in me says, is that you should continue investing in his industry, and also invest in a related industry that will raise the tide he's floating on.

The total amount of captured carbon (since people started doing that) is measured in tiny fractions of a percent of what we dump in the atmosphere every year. The best form of carbon capture is leaving it in the ground and not removing it from there to begin with. It would be cheaper to pay these companies to simply shut down their business than to allow them to keep making things worse and then funding the cleanup of their mess.

Before we start hacking our planet, we need to pull the plug on doing the things that are actively making things worse to a far larger extent than we can feasibly clean things up. Why spent billions re-capturing a fraction of what we actually still put out every year? Much cheaper to stop doing that. That's carbon we won't have to put back into the ground.

Even better: instead of spending money on that, we could simply stop spending public money on enabling the active adding of carbon to our atmosphere. I'm talking about the collective tax benefits, subsidies, government sponsored 'research', the odd bit of war fare in the middle east, etc. that the oil and gas industry continues to benefit from. That adds up to being way more than we're spending on renewable energy or indeed carbon capture. The amounts are measured in trillions.

These people tend to not exist.

[...]

Geoengineering comprises of large-scale controversial schemes to intervene in the earth’s oceans, soils, and atmosphere in attempts to manage the effects of climate change.

Many of these schemes are extraordinary—such as blocking the sun to stop temperature increases, increasing the whiteness of clouds to reflect sunlight back into space, and sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere with industrial-scale fans.

In order to have any impact on the climate, they would have to be done on a planetary scale so the potential risks are many: they range from destabilizing weather patterns, creating droughts and floods in Africa and South America, and acidifying the ocean, to polluting the atmosphere and locking the world into unstoppable management of the atmosphere.

Many proposals for removing CO2 from the skies require huge amounts of energy, chemicals, infrastructure, and land in size equivalent to several countries. Yet crazy, inequitable, and dangerous as geoengineering may seem, it is currently been embraced by polluting industries and increasingly some governments as a supposed “solution” to an off-kilter warming world.

[...]

Gates’ approach to climate change is to champion the technofixes that will enable the fossil fuel machine to continue pumping more oil. He is after all personally invested in the infrastructure that relies on their success.

It is also unsurprising given the pervasive technophilia of our time, that even influential personalities like Trevor Noah whom many look to for critical analysis on global issues, would so willingly engage with Gates, offering him a platform for his climate solutionism.

It would do well for us to remember that Gates is not a scientist, or a public health expert. He is a mega-billionaire who made his fortune avoiding government regulations and dominating competitors with monopolistic practices. His money is now being channeled toward a wide range of projects that are deeply unpopular among many in the global South.

Beyond climate technologies, Gates is investing in controversial “extinction” technologies of gene drives, a biotechnology tool to re-engineer natural populations. This is ostensibly being developed for malaria prevention, but is being vehemently resisted by social movements in West Africa where a Gates funded project wants to test out their tools.

He has also been the principal funder of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, an agricultural program started in 2006 which claims to be working for small-scale farmers but, in fact, promotes high-tech market-based industrial agriculture in Africa. A report in 2020 revealed that the program had failed in a number of ways. Rather than improving farmer’s livelihoods, many went into debt in order to pay for the high costs of commercial seeds and synthetic fertilizer.

[...]

Mainstream media has been all too willing to uncritically engage Bill Gates’ preferred image as a well-meaning nerdy philanthropist in a cuddly sweater—offering him countless opportunities to share his “expertise” and promote his technofixes. It’s time to look beyond the rhetoric of this billionaire philanthrocapitalist and listen to those who realize that climate change will only be “solved” when we begin by identifying its primary cause: capitalism." [1]

[1] Bill Gates and his technofix dream for the planet, https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-techn...

Or we accept the death of millions or worse, even billions.